The 160ft SN9 rocket’s timing was just a little off. The reusable prototype, designed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, was attempting to land vertically when it failed to complete its flip and crashed in a huge fireball.
Just hours later, Musk received yet more bad news. His rival Jeff Bezos had announced he would be stepping down as chief executive of Amazon to focus on other projects, including space company Blue Origin.
The world’s two richest men — Bezos with a net worth of $195bn and Musk now the richer at $200bn — both have their sights set on the night sky with plans for mega-satellite constellations and missions to the moon and Mars.
Up until now, all bets had been on Musk to outdo Bezos. Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX but so far has little to show for it, despite the fact that Bezos funds the company by selling $1bn of his Amazon stock every year.
That, however, could be about to change. With his resignation, Bezos will have plenty more time on his hands to dedicate to his passion project.
“Space is one of Jeff’s major passions,” says Mark Boggett, who runs space investment firm Seraphim Capital. “The two richest men in the world are now using their resources to accelerate the pace of development in space.”
Bezos’s passion for space exploration is no secret. He cites his inspiration for Blue Origin as the 1999 space film October Sky and conversations at that time with science fiction author, Neil Stephenson. Bezos even enjoyed a cameo as an alien in the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond.
But his ambitions are serious. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin aims to cut the cost of space flight by developing reusable vertical take-off-and-landing rockets. In particular, it has focused on human space flight and tourism.
‘My most important work’
Blue Origin has made clear it sees space as a long-term endeavour, but it is hard not to draw comparisons with Musk’s SpaceX. “We are not in a race, and there will be many players in this human endeavour to go to space to benefit Earth,” the company’s website says.
Bezos's Blue Moon lunar lander
Credit: Reuters
Yet Amazon and Blue Origin are also increasingly in open competition with Musk. Amazon is planning a planet-spanning broadband satellite constellation, called Project Kuiper. This will have more than 3,200 satellites operating more than 370 miles in the atmosphere.
This puts it into direct competition with Musk’s Starlink, which has already begun trialling its satellite broadband internet in remote locations. In a recent tweet, Musk accused Amazon of attempting “hamstring Starlink” by appealing to US regulators after Starlink asked for permission to orbit some of its satellites on the same plane as Kuiper.
Amazon responded: “It is clearly in SpaceX’s interest to smother competition in the cradle if they can, but it is certainly not in the public’s interest.”
Shagun Sachdeva, founder of space investment consultancy Kosmic Apple, says: “Kuiper has started slowly, but with Amazon restricted to people who have the internet, they have started thinking about people who do not have the internet. Those customers can then go back into Amazon’s revenues.”
Boggett adds Amazon’s constellation could also be used to plug into its data centre infrastructure, and even ultimately serve more futuristic goals such as data centres in orbit, as well as serving to monitor climate change.
Musk vs Bezos
But perhaps most ambitious are Bezos’s plans to launch interplanetary flights. Blue Origin is hoping to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. It has developed a moon lander, Blue Moon. The billionaire even has a vision of colonies of millions of people living on the moon and in space in hoop-shaped orbital cities.
From the moon, Bezos also plans to jump to Mars. He will face stiff competition from Musk, whose giant Starship superheavy vehicle is planned to lift colonists to the red planet — and back.
Of course, he will need to make sure they can land safely first, unlike Tuesday’s flight.
With such grand ambitions, it is little wonder Bezos has described Blue Origin as his “most important work”.
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