Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two of the richest people on the planet, are competing fiercely in the space race. The game is expected to be exciting as both have as much money and power.
Billionaire Bezos (left) and billionaire Musk are at odds over many of the same space ambitions, from cheap space travel to global internet coverage by satellite – Photo: Reuters/Business Insider
Bezos , the world’s richest billionaire, announced on June 7 that he and his younger brother will fly into space on the New Shepard spacecraft built by his company Blue Origin. The flight scheduled for July 20 will put Bezos ahead of his “rival” Musk , who owns the more famous SpaceX Company but has never traveled to space.
Confrontation because of similarity
Like Musk, Amazon billionaire Bezos has been dreaming of space travel for decades. According to the South China Morning Post, Bezos was obsessed with the dream of physicist Gerard O’Neill, who believed that humanity could build space stations capable of housing billions of people in the future. After a conversation with a friend, novelist Neal Stephenson, Bezos founded the company Blue Origin in 2000.
Two years later, Musk founded SpaceX after failing to buy cheap rockets from Russia. The South African-𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 entrepreneur was not yet on the list of world billionaires but dreamed of “Mars Oasis”, a project to build greenhouses for humans and plants to live on the red planet.
In a 2020 post, Musk admitted he was still haunted by that dream and would fulfill his dream of building a city of 1 million people on Mars by 2050.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin aim to reduce the cost of space exploration with reusable rockets. The biggest difference is perhaps that Mr. Musk knows how to turn his passion into a money-making opportunity, while Mr. Bezos takes money from other businesses to feed his passion.
While SpaceX was bustling with its Falcon rocket projects, Blue Origin operated quietly until about 2003 and only emerged in 2015 when it began testing its New Shepard spacecraft.
After 19 years of establishment, SpaceX has “grown up” with stable annual revenue of about 2 billion USD from contracts with the government and private sector, according to the Guardian newspaper.
In 2012, SpaceX became the first private company to launch a cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). 2020 marked a milestone as SpaceX helped the US end its dependence on Russia for manned flights to the ISS.
That same year, SpaceX won a $10 billion contract to build spacecraft for a project called the Artemis Program to return Americans to the Moon by 2024.
“What is Elon Musk afraid of small competition?”
That was Blue Origin’s response statement, after Musk warned the US Congress that awarding the contract to develop the lunar spacecraft to billionaire Bezos’ company means giving space leadership to China.
According to the Washington Post, Blue Origin is determined not to let SpaceX monopolize contracts in the Artemis program and filed a lawsuit with a US government committee in April 2021.
Billionaire Bezos’ company also lobbied hard, arguing to lawmakers that to ensure astronaut safety and in the best interests of the United States, the construction of the lunar lander should be assigned to at least two businesses.
Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was convinced. She added a provision to the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (USICA) that would require NASA to seek a second company to develop spacecraft for the Artemis Program.
The bill was passed by the US Senate on June 9 and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon. Blue Origin is almost certain to be a beneficiary if the law goes into effect.
The Washington Post commented that what happened to USICA shows that billionaire Bezos has growing influence with the US Congress and can take advantage of that to “take shortcuts” to catch up with SpaceX.
Blue Origin spent nearly $2 million on lobbying last year, up from just over $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org. Bezos’s company has also ramped up its donations to politicians, up from $22,000 in 2016 to $320,000 in 2020.
