One of them is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, who is building a competing sub-orbital spaceship at a ranch in Texas.
Luke had read enough at the loop-de-loop hole to realize that orbiting spaceships are still affected by gravity, and that the ships and their weightless inhabitants are actually falling continuously but moving fast enough to stay in an orbital arc, like the golf ball going round the loop.
This manoeuvre should have separated the landing capsule, containing Leonov and Belyayev, from the spaceship's orbital module.
Miners drill asteroids and sell their ore to industrialists who construct spaceships and weapons at orbital factories.
The launch of China's fourth human spaceflight this weekend kicked off a major docking test flight, and there's a chance you can see the two spaceships involved in the orbital rendezvous in tonight's night sky.
There are two sister companies as well, Virgin Orbit, which focuses on launching small satellites into space using its LauncherOne orbital launch, and its manufacturing arm, The Spaceship Company.
At a news briefing yesterday, Al Sofge, assistant launching director at the Kennedy center, tried to be philosophical about having one of the $2 billion spaceships, built to withstand the rigors of orbital flight, from blastoff to fiery re-entry, driven off its launching pad by a flock of birds with mating on their minds.
He reported that one story, "Jupiter Five," about the discovery that a moon of Jupiter is actually an alien spaceship, had required 20 to 30 pages of orbital calculations.
Moreover, the business plan that he and his partner Burt Rutan are working on sounds perfectly, er, down to earth.Mr Rutan is the brain behind SpaceShipOne, which in June became the first privately funded spaceship, reaching the edge of space on a sub-orbital hop.
"Billions of dollars are flowing into all kinds of new commercial spaceships, which will carry all kinds of people into space," says Rick Tumlinson, president of Orbital Outfitters.
