The dark side of the 20-year feud between Bezos and Musk

Outrageous egos fighting each other across the universe? check.

Sci-fi geeks who have surely watched a lot of Star Trek movies? check.

The next chapter for humanity in a space left in the hands of insanely wealthy tech billionaires happy to take NASA’s taxpayer billions? check.

This is Mission Control: We have launch!

Just a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket yet—it’s 400 feet long, it costs $67 million—only for it to explode in mid-air just four minutes into flight, a phoenix rose from the flames to bravely take on In search of space travel.

Or at least, that may be the way arch-rival Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, sees it.

On Friday, NASA awarded his space exploration company Blue Origin $3.4 billion to build a “lunar lander” to take astronauts to the moon.

As part of NASA’s Artemis V mission, scheduled for 2029, the lunar lander will collect astronauts from a NASA lunar orbiting outpost, bring them to the lunar surface — and then return them back.

But, with Musk’s company already working on doing exactly the same thing for the Artemis program, we now face the prospect of two of Silicon Valley’s most controversial figures going head-to-head in the strange new space race of the 21st century.

This is no ordinary trading contest. These are two super competitive international business giants, both holding the title of the world’s richest person, and their fierce rivalry dating back two decades.

More recently, in 2021, SpaceX defeated Blue Origin and another US company, Dynetics, to win a $2.9 billion contract to build a moon probe version of the spacecraft’s massive rocket — called Starship HLS (Human Landing System) — to bring back a human. on the moon for the first time since 1972.

SpaceX’s blast last month was an early unmanned test flight, with the first crewed flight, Artemis 3, slated for December 2025. Musk will also provide a landing for Artemis IV in 2028.

Bezos was furious at the decision to award Musk the first contract — especially since NASA was expected to award two contracts. Blue Origin even tried to sue NASA in federal court, but lost.

Then, last September, after getting a bigger budget from Congress, NASA announced it was reopening the competition (hence Friday’s news of a new Blue Origin contract).

NASA has long faced criticism from US politicians who question whether handing out government contracts to private companies run by billionaires like Bezos ($138.5 billion) and Musk ($180.7 billion) to indulge their space travel fantasies is good value for money. (Though Blue Origin, at least, insists it will contribute far more to the project than it would get from NASA.)

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has also stressed that the presence of both Musk And Bezos at work seems to make perfect sense.

“We want more competition,” he said on Friday. This means that you have reliability. Have backups.

But, of course, that also means we’ll have a lot of sparks flying between two guys who used to come out on top.

Bezos, 59, launched Blue Origin in 2000 — while Musk, 51, founded Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, in 2002.

Bezos, a Star Trek fanatic since childhood, has long harbored ambitions about man’s future in outer space. He believes that one day the Earth’s resources will inevitably run out and so humanity must colonize the universe, perhaps living in miles-long floating cylindrical tubes. For a time, he had been spending at least $1 billion a year on his rocket company.

Meanwhile, Musk is also a big fan of science fiction. He, too, shares similar views on the need to look beyond Earth – though he argues that the survival of the human race ultimately depends on the creation of a “self-sustaining civilization” on Mars.

In their first moments together, the couple dined in 2004 to discuss their shared ambition to develop reusable rockets—seen as a crucial way to lower the enormous cost of space travel—but reportedly didn’t. Continue from the beginning.

Musk said he felt Bezos was “barking up the wrong tree” with his ideas about the rocket design.

“Dude, we tried that and it turned out really stupid, so I’d say don’t do the stupid thing we did,” Musk recalled telling his rival, claiming that although he did his best to give good advice, Bezos had largely “ignored” him. .

Observers point out that the pair have fundamentally different approaches to spaceflight, as indicated by their company logos.

The “coat of arms” of Blue Origin bears a turtle and the motto “Gradatim Ferociter” in Latin means “step by step, fiercely”.

SpaceX’s slogan – ‘Head down. Cross the line’ – reflects Musk’s more optimistic, less cautious philosophy.

It certainly wasn’t surprising that SpaceX first launched a rocket, the Falcon 1 (naturally named after the famous Millennium Falcon in Star Wars) just four years after the couple first met in 2008.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard, the first reusable suborbital launch vehicle, won’t touch the edge of space until 2015.

In these early years, their rivalry remained largely private although Musk occasionally complained about Blue Origin’s tactic of poaching its employees by doubling their paychecks.

Then in 2013, open hostilities properly erupted when Blue Origin lodged a formal protest against SpaceX’s efforts to win exclusive use of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch pad for its own rockets. To Bezos’ anger, the government decided in favor of Musk.

The following year, it was Musk’s turn to call the lawyers when SpaceX challenged Blue Origin’s new patent for landing rockets on water. SpaceX insisted that the supposed invention was “old hat” in the rocket engineering industry. Once again, US officials ultimately sided with Musk.

In 2019, Bezos was particularly barbed about his rival, mocking his dream of colonizing Mars during a private lecture: “My friends who want to go to Mars? Do me a favor, I say: go live on Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it, because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars.

Three months later, Musk fired back, this time with his weapon of choice: Twitter.

After Blue Origin teased the first lunar lander, Musk tweeted a photo of the rover, Blue Moon, only this time it changed its name to “Blue Balls.” Try to imagine JFK sending Soviet rival Nikita Khrushchev the same kind of court-wide insult during the first space race in the 1960s.

But it’s unfortunately, critics say, such childish sniping that comes from leaving so much running in the mission to return to the Moon — and beyond — to two billionaire tycoons who seem to treat space travel as just another outlet for themselves. single superiority.

Things turned especially bad in 2021 when, just months after Musk overtook Bezos as the richest person in the world, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to land on the moon.

Bezos has angrily claimed that NASA is “endangering” America’s return to the Moon by stifling competition.

What is musk response? Back to school silly Twitter with “I can’t get it (to orbit) lol”.

After losing his court battle to overturn NASA’s decision, Bezos licked his wounds and moved on, cementing Blue Origin’s public recognition by ferrying celebrities (like William Shatner, Jeff’s beloved Star Trek star) into zero gravity at the edge of space.

This prompted complaints in some quarters that space travel for the rich was less urgent than many of the problems we face here on Earth. Not least is climate change – and experts say an 11-minute spaceflight could pump out up to 75 tons of emissions, more than the average person emits in a lifetime.

But such criticism is unlikely to deter Musk and Bezos when they are convinced they are on a mission to save humanity.

who will win?

It’s not a race Blue Moon insists, but industry insiders say Bezos would say given the lead Musk already has with a lunar lander slated for launch years before Bezos’ version.

On paper, Blue Moon is also a bit behind when it comes to technology. They haven’t yet tested a serious “heavy lift” rocket capable of carrying people and payloads into space, for example. Sources say Musk is simply more driven when it comes to space, while Bezos still sees it as a hobby.

However, Musk is also more impulsive. And like the slow but sure reptile on his company’s tagline, Jeff Bezos may well prove to be the tortoise who outsmarts the hare.