Billionaires, costume designers, and beer: I spent a day at the Space Symposium and learned about how the tech elite will conquer the final frontier

• The 34th annual Space Symposium recently took place in Colorado.
• It was full of excitement and included a visit from Vice President Mike Pence and rockets being built by tech billionaires such as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

There were four themes at this year's Space Symposium conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado:

1. The rising influence of tech billionaires such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos, SpaceX's Elon Musk, and Virgin Group's Richard Branson.

2. The fact that between trade shows and the space industry, augmented reality and virtual reality have found their business use case — especially both together.

3. Everyone is working on putting humans on Mars.

4. Space-based businesses are booming, with billions of dollars of venture funding pouring in annually.

Here's a look at my trip to the Space Symposium, and what I learned:

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The annual Space Symposium took place in April in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Colorado Springs is the home of the Air Force Academy and the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD Complex, an underground nuclear bunker.

While Colorado is famous for its high country (in more ways than one), it has become the nation's second-largest space economy after California. Colorado is home to more than 400 aerospace companies, which employ 25,000 private aerospace workers, according to the Colorado Space Coalition.

The industry group the Colorado Space Coalition has the cute tagline "One mile closer to space."

In fact, a small airport in Colorado is expected to achieve FAA approval in August to become a space-launch port. There are only 10 other space ports in the US.

Virgin Galactic, the space company owned by billionaire Richard Branson, is expected to use it as a launch point.