At 2:03 a.m. Thursday, the new space race began in earnest.
This time, it's not America versus the Soviet Union, but billionaires versus billionaires from their own countries.
Jeff Bezos, the world's second-richest man, successfully launched a 320-foot-tall rocket ship built by Blue Origin from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the early morning hours. This made the company the first company to successfully reach orbit on its first launch of an orbital-class rocket.
The unmanned New Glenn rocket ship is designed to carry objects such as satellites into space, with some of them returning to Earth for reuse.
Not to be outdone, his rival, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, launched his Starship rocket from the Starbase factory and launch site in Texas just after 5:30 p.m.
Things are said to be heating up between the two men, both of whom have been described as “ego-fueled”, but Mr Musk currently holds a significant lead in the race and will be in line for 2024. SpaceX launched 138 times in 2019, and Blue Origin launched 4 times.
“It's going to take a very long time for Blue Origin to catch up to SpaceX in annual launches,” Ashley Vance, author of “When the Heavens Got on Sale,” told the Post.
“But this is a huge accomplishment and a milestone. It's an incredibly difficult and expensive business. Blue Origin has now certainly emerged as a legitimate contender.”
Although both launches were successful, they did not achieve all of their objectives. Blue Origin attempted to land a rocket booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, but lost it instead.
Meanwhile, SpaceX successfully returned its superheavy rocket booster to its launch site, but lost the Starship spacecraft it launched into space.
Both rockets are designed to transport heavy payloads, such as satellites, into space. With thousands of satellites being held up to send to Earth, work like this is incredibly lucrative, but the cost of doing business is also incredibly high.
For New Glenn, the project has cost more than $2.5 billion to date, with each launch costing about $68 million. It costs about $90 million per launch to launch Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket into space.
“They're in the game now,” Brad Stone, author of “Amazon Unbound,” told the Post. “SpaceX had a dominant market share, and now Blue Origin is in a position to compete. That's an amazing accomplishment.”
Despite the competition, there doesn't seem to be much bad blood. Musk once predicted that Bezos would find “unicorns dancing in the flame ducts” of his rocket before launching it into space, but Blue Origin's launch I recognized the greatness of what I had achieved.
“Congratulations on reaching orbit for the first time,” Musk wrote to Bezos on his X account.
Musk, who first rose to fame through his electric car company Tesla and is worth $428 billion, has been working closely with the incoming Trump administration in recent months, including his appointment as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency. Ta.
Mr. Bezos, the $235 billion founder of shopping site Amazon, has since teamed up with Mr. Trump, but his newspaper, The Washington Post, is rescinding its endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential election. I took it. They have also been spotted dining at Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks.
There is speculation that Musk and Bezos, along with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans, will be in attendance at Monday's inauguration.
“Interestingly, Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos seemed to have been at odds for years, but now they have bonded over Mr. Trump,” Vance said. “I didn't see that coming.”
One of the areas the two billionaires will compete over the next four years will be contracts related to the government's space agency, NASA.
Stone explained: “Both companies are competing for almost all NASA contracts and suing each other over the outcomes of those contracts, so they already have a contentious relationship.”
He was likely referring to the 2021 lawsuit filed by Blue Origin over the $2.9 billion NASA Astronaut Lunar Module contract, which SpaceX won. The company lost the lawsuit.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to fishing for orbital business. One is that the two moguls are far ahead of everyone else and they will prove to be gentlemanly competitors. “I don't think Elon is worried about SpaceX's position. It's very dominant,” Vance said, adding that retaining Musk would do little to derail Bezos' company's success. Dew.
“He seems genuinely excited about moving forward broadly in space. And I think it's better for SpaceX to have some competition.”
On the other hand, Mr. Musk may see the success that Mr. Bezos and his company are currently achieving and return to the tougher forms of Silicon Valley.
“Elon will naturally use his closeness to Trump to give SpaceX special privileges,” Stone said. “He has a seat next to the king at the table and he's going to use that to naturally hone his business. They're competitors.”
However, there are also commonalities. “Both countries want to put a lot of people in space,” space industry consultant Rand Shinberg told the Post.
“Elon doesn't want a monopoly,” and their overall ambitions are parallel. “Mr. Musk wants to colonize Mars, and Mr. Bezos wants a billion people to live in space.”
Musk founded SpaceX as a private company to provide space transportation and eventually colonize Mars. The company had a tough time in 2010 when it became the first private company to send a spacecraft into orbit and recover it.
By 2024, he was flying into space to rescue astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were stranded on the International Space Station after the Boeing rocket they were scheduled to return to was deemed too dangerous by NASA. Summoned to one of the X spaceships.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos and has focused on building rockets for space tourism and transporting heavy cargo into space. Blue Origin's first crewed mission took place in 2021 and took just 10 minutes. Bezos himself and his brother Mark were on board the suborbital flight to the edge of space.
Future passengers included celebrities such as Michael Strahan and William Shatner. Mr. Bezos spent about 10 years and billions of dollars of his own money to launch a rocket into space, and as the valedictorian of his high school graduating class, Mr. Stone said, “He talked about his ambition to go into space,'' a dream from childhood. Made it happen. Delivery business to space.
Early on in this effort, Bezos went so far as to create a kind of think tank to philosophize about people going to the stars, and science fiction author Neal Stephenson was among those who provided input.
The big winner could lie beyond the two millionaires and their giant toys, as their wildly ambitious space dreams become a reality. “This is a huge deal for the United States,” Vance said. “In 25 years, the space program here has gone from a doldrums to the envy of the world.”
That said, we're all firmly committed and looking forward to seeing where we go next.
