Bezos and Musk battle it out in the billionaire space race – but who is winning?
Anyone up early to watch the debut launch of Jeff Bezos’s rocket this morning would have been disappointed, because after being pushed back several times, it was eventually cancelled.
Blue Origin said it was ‘reviewing opportunities’ for the next launch attempt for New Glenn.
Live stream footage turned out to be a damp squib rather than a dramatic narrowing of the gap in the latest space race, between billionaires this time rather than world governments.
Amazon founder Bezos hopes his new rocket will be able to rival Falcon 9, the workhorse rocket by Elon Musk’s company Space X, which already made history in 2020 as the first commercial rockedt to take humans into orbit.
Although Musk has larger rockets, it is the Falcon 9 which has been up and down hundreds of times, proving its worth to the US space programme.
In recent years, Space X has been a clear winner in space tech, even managing to catch a booster for the most powerful rocket ever built on a pair of ‘chopsticks’ last year, and stepping in to rescue two astronauts still stranded in space after the Boeing Starliner which carried them there was deemed not safe enough to take them home.
But Blue Origin was more closely matched previously, and Bezos was making headlines in 2021 for going to the edge of space himself on a commercial flight (although people seemed equally interested in the fact he did so in a cowboy hat).
His New Glenn rocket, which was due to take off from Florida before dawn, is five times taller than the New Shepard rocket he rode from Texas.
But controllers had to deal with an unspecified issue in the final minutes of the countdown and ran out of time.
The test flight had already been delayed by rough seas which would have made it difficult toland the booster on a boat in the Atlantic.
New Glenn is named after the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn.
Before the launch, Mr Bezos said ‘we’re going to pick ourselves up and keep going’ no matter what happens.
He founded his space company 25 years ago and hopes his new rocket will challenge Space X’s dominance by taking cargo to space and satellites to orbit, eventually taking people too.
Bezos has been courteous publicly about his rival’s successes, and said yesterday that he does not think Musk will use his close ties with Donald Trump to undercut his company and takes what he says at face value.
He was ‘very optimistic’ about the incoming administration’s space agenda,he said.
Musk has not always been as friendly, posting on X, the social media platform he bought, last November: ‘Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock.’
Mr Bezos wrote: ‘Nope. 100% not true’, to which Mr Musk responded: ‘Well, then, I stand corrected.’
He also called for the break-up of Amazon in 2020.
Last month, Musk said the US should go for sending missions straight to Mars instead of back to the moon first, fueling concerns of a major shakeup to NASA’s space exploration program.
Asked what he thought of this, Bezos said: ‘My own opinion is that we should do both – we need to go to the moon and we should go to Mars What we shouldn’t do is start and stop things. We should continue with the lunar program for sure.’
These two massively rich billionaires not the only ones in the space race.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic also says it will ‘launch a new space age’, so the skies could be getting crowded.
But for now, Space X is, if not lightyears ahead, at least the 250 miles to the International Space Station.
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