Astronomy

Sergey Brin – Google’s co-founder – has made plans to do something that many people can only dream about. He is going into the wide vastness of space. Brin is an investor in Space Adventures – which is a space tourist outfit in Virginia. He will most likely be taking a ride on a Russian Soyuz on the way to the International Space Station in 2011.

Now we’ve all seen adventuresome tech titans before. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can often be found racing on the high seas. Virgin’s Richard Branson also is fascinated with space tourism. But Brin’s trip to space may be a different deal entirely because there are shareholders involved. What happens to Google if Brin’s space flight doesn’t go well?

It’s something that we don’t like to think about, but the question is worth asking. And Google puts the following in its SEC risk factor statements:

Our future success depends in a large part upon the continued service of key members of our senior management team. In particular, our CEO, Eric Schmidt, and our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are critical to the overall management of Google as well as the development of our technology, our culture and our strategic direction. All of our executive officers and key employees are at-will employees, and we do not maintain any key-person life insurance policies. The loss of any of our management or key personnel could seriously harm our business.