Stars in his eyes

Empire-building isn’t out of fashion. At least not for Jim Benson, founder of SpaceDev, the world’s first private company dedicated to exploring space. Benson is a retired IT millionaire. With the help of senior ex-NASA staff, he plans to send missions to near-Earth objects and then claim them as his own. The idea is to clarify laws on property rights in space and get some publicity. But there’s a catch, or three: the launch date for his first mission has been put back, the target asteroid has been abandoned, and Benson has only managed to sell one payload out of eight. But, as …