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The Sky Is the Limit1
IT的繁榮造就了一批科技大亨，他們免不了為如何花錢犯愁。心情欠佳的時候，不妨往遠處、大處使勁想想……因為點子和財富是可以相互兌換的。
Owning a yacht is passe2. For those in the information-technology industry lucky enough to have made a fortune during the boom years3, there is now a far sexier alternative: owning a rocket.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon4, is financing an attempt to build a low-cost reusable spacecraft that can carry people into space. John Carmack, the programming genius behind such computer games as "Doom" and "Quake"5, is paying for a similar venture. But most ambitious of all is Elon Musk, who founded two dotcoms6 and sold them for $307 million and $1.5 billion respectively. His goal is Mars.
Mr Musk's original plan was to launch a small unmanned probe7, that would have landed on Mars and sent back pictures of a few plants growing inside a sealed environment. By capitalising on the ensuing media coverage,8 he hoped to win support and money for America's space agency, NASA, to mount a manned mission to Mars. But he soon discovered that launching his probe would cost a minimum of $30 million, and that started him thinking.
