Clark Lindsay's HobbySpace (which is also the base site for RLV News, an excellent space blog) has pretty much exactly the information you're looking for, a listing of various millionaires and billionaires who've devoted money to spaceflight efforts. It's in the "Space Angels" section of this page:
<br><br><a href="http://www.hobbyspace.com/Active/index.html#Angels">http://www.hobbyspace.com/Active/index.html#Angels</a><br><br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/8/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Amara Graps</b>
<<a href="mailto:amara@amara.com">amara@amara.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">>Jeff Bezos and Mark Shuttleworth are two. Then there is the hotel
<br>>guy in Vegas (and now Houston I think). There are at least 3, maybe<br>>4 companies working on cheap access to space.<br>[...]<br>>One place to start would be the Forbes lists of the richest people<br>>in the
U.S. and the World (they are two distinct lists). They<br>>publish the reshuffled lists every year I think.<br><br>>Obviously a company could get some great press by launching a<br>>satellite that "NASA left behind..."
<br><br><br>Thanks Robert for your information.<br><br>This news item from a friend on the wta list is helpful too:<br><br>Geeks in space<br><a href="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5399507.html">http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5399507.html
</a><br><br>Potentially useful info above in that Jim Benson, (founding chairman and<br>chief executive of SpaceDev) really wants to send a small space<br>miner that can land onto the surface of (water/ice-rich) asteroids
<br>and drill a meter into the surface to extract the ice reserves.<br><br>The planetary scientists would be horrified to think of their<br>beloved Ceres with its potential subsurface ocean/life to be treated<br>roughly, but perhaps an agreement could be made to take good care of
<br>'her'. Moreover, Benson successfully knows how to encourage investors.<br><br>So if he really wants to go to the asteroid belt to find water, there<br>exists an almost-built spacecraft exactly designed to go there,<br>
and, moreover, to a water-rich asteroid, all for the sum of 40 million<br>dollars. What more could one want ? :-)<br><br>Amara<br>--<br><br>********************************************************************<br>Amara Graps, PhD email:
<a href="mailto:amara@amara.com">amara@amara.com</a><br>Computational Physics vita: <a href="ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt">ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt</a><br>Multiplex Answers URL: <a href="http://www.amara.com/">
http://www.amara.com/</a><br>********************************************************************<br>"For a girl, she's remarkably perceptive." --Calvin<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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</a><br></blockquote></div><br>