Turns out the true color of space is green. The commercial space race has given rise to a burgeoning industry of over 800 companies. Venture capitalists have invested well over $2 billion in them since 2015.
 

SpaceX, probably the best-known, faced a serious setback in its plan to make humans a “multiplanetary species” when its Falcon 9 rocket exploded earlier this month. But founder Elon Musk still sounded optimistic when outlining his plan for colonizing Mars earlier this week at a conference in Mexico. Musk claims his proposed reusable transport system could bring travel costs down to $200,000 per person and put humans on Mars by 2022. He was rather less serious about how to fund this adventure.
 

Congress, on the other hand, just coughed up $19.5 billion for NASA with a mandate to put astronauts on Mars within 25 years.
 

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is pushing forward with his own space project, Blue Origin. During a Q&A at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, he outlined his vision of humans colonizing the solar system. He also recently unveiled the plans to a massive orbital rocket, the New Glenn, which he says will fly by 2020. His longer-term goal? Enable heavy industry to be moved into space to protect the future health of planet Earth.
 

Virgin Galactic, owned by Richard Branson, is back in the game after its first spacecraft crashed back in 2014. SpaceShipTwo took flight earlier this month.
 

One thing enabling the rapid growth of these private space companies is the hole left by the defunct Space Shuttle program. Since retiring the shuttles in 2011, NASA has been contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to transport cargo and crew to the International Space Station.
 

Private space firms have their own agenda, too. Musk, Branson and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, are all vying to put satellites in orbit for the next generation of communications technology: space-based internet.
 

There’s also still some good old-fashioned international space-race rivalry. This time around it’s the U.S. vs. China, and according to some commentators,China is winning. The People’s Republic recently turned on the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope to map the formation of the universe and listen for signs of extraterrestrial life.
 

They might start by eavesdropping on the recently discovered Proxima B. This small planet is orbiting the star closest to our solar system, and scientists believe it might be capable of sustaining life just 4.2 light years away.