Some people would say it’s the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or perhaps the Prado in Spain… but they would be wrong.
The world’s greatest museum sits 30 miles west of Washington, D.C. It is a cathedral of worship to mankind’s greatest achievement with a vast white architecture that would make Howard Roark proud.
I am talking, of course, about the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia. The museum is a gift from Steve Hazy, a Hungarian-American businessman who was ranked 409 on the Forbes list with a net worth of $3.2 billion.
The giant hanger is home to most of the greatest and noteworthy air and space machines that propelled mankind into the stars.
There is just something awe inspiring about looking down the nose of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Besides Discovery, you will see the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb, an SR-71 Blackbird, an Air France Concorde, the only surviving German jet bomber, Soviet MiGs, and some fabric from the Hindenburg, among many other stepping-stones on our path from pedestrians to astronauts.
The Udvar-Hazy family came to the United States after fleeing the Soviet occupation in 1958. Hazy went to the University of California and got into jets when they were first coming on in the ’60s.
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He formed a jet leasing company called ILFC in 1973 starting with a single used Douglas DC-8. He now runs Air Lease Corporation (NYSE: AL), a company with annual revenue of $1.49 billion and margins of 59.93%. It is up 21.32% over the last year.
New Space Race
Hazy made his fortune by filling a demand at a time when it was needed: when the first space race was hitting its stride. Right now, there is a new space race going on. Billionaires from around the globe are setting their sights on the moon, Mars, and asteroids.
Google has offered up a $20 million prize to put a lander on the moon by early next year. It’s called the Lunar X Prize.
Other companies including Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, SpaceX, and Boeing are spending billions of dollars to colonize Mars, ferry tourists, and mine asteroids with robots. And it’s not just the U.S. and Europe; India, China, and Israel all have space dreams. And in the process, they will create new billionaires.
Over the next few weeks, I will be putting out a special report detailing how you can make money in the new space race. It’s an opportunity that is here now, and it is as big as it gets.
Until then,
Christian DeHaemer
Check us out on YouTube!Christian is the founder of Bull and Bust Report and an editor at Energy and Capital. For more on Christian, see his editor’s page.
