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The first attempt by Jeff Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, to put a rocket into orbit will be a pivotal moment for the space business. After receiving the go-ahead from US regulators last week, the Amazon founder finally appears to be close to matching Elon Musk in giving humanity a way to escape the Earth’s limits, an achievement that was once unthinkable. for a single rich individual.
Despite being before Musk SpaceX for two years, blue origin has suffered years of delays. A successful launch of his orbital rocket, called New Glenn, would finally take him beyond his current limited business of ferrying passengers to the edge of space, pitting the world’s two richest men against each other in an escalating private space race.
But Blue Origin’s belated emergence comes as the rocket business enters a new phase, one that will likely be more hostile to Bezos’s ambitions than if he had made the jump to orbit years earlier. Most obviously, Bezos’ possible advance comes just as his nemesis has achieved unprecedented political rise in Washington. Musk’s closeness to the incoming US president has fueled anxiety across the tech sector, as rivals fear how his newfound influence could be used against them.
For his part, Bezos has already fought to contain SpaceX politically. After losing a bid to build a lunar lander for NASA, for example, his company warned that the number of contracts Washington was funneling to SpaceX risked turning it into a monopoly. Today, any official challenge to that growing power seems even less likely.
Musk’s influence could also be instrumental in shaping space policy in a second Trump term. That could include giving SpaceX an even more central role in US plans to return to the Moon, something that currently relies heavily on the SLS rocket, a $30 billion project led by Boeing. With only one flight so far, SLS has all the characteristics of a white elephantmaking it the kind of government waste that Musk’s new “department of government efficiency” is eager to end.
At the same time, thanks to Musk, the economics of the rocket business are advancing relentlessly against new entrants like Bezos. The most obvious challenge comes from SpaceX’s combination of its Heavy Booster and Starship launchers, which together form a giant rocket that can carry 150 tons into space, more than three times the capacity of New Glenn.
SpaceX pulled off the eye-catching trick of returning the rocket booster to its launch pad, where it was embraced by a pair of giant mechanical arms. This is a step toward making Starship the first fully reusable rocket, capable of refueling and returning to service within hours of its final flight.
Most space analysts expect this to eventually happen. drive up the cost of delivering a payload to space well below $1,000 per kilo, and perhaps below $500. That compares to the lowest price of $6,000 per kilo that SpaceX currently advertises. Even without Starship, SpaceX has steadily reduced costs by increasing its launch volume. Last year it launched nearly three rockets a week and accounted for more than half of the world’s orbital launches. It was a rapid escalation from just 33 launches three years earlier, and the kind of frequency that will take years for Blue Origin to match.
Yet despite all the ground it still needs to make up, Bezos’ rocket company won’t be short of customers. Demand for space launches is expected to far outstrip supply for the rest of this decade, and the US military, for example, is eager to find a reliable launch alternative to SpaceX. And the race to build communications satellite constellations to rival SpaceX’s Starlink is entering a new phase, with Amazon’s Project Kuiper among the challengers.
For Washington, relying on two billionaires for access to space may seem only marginally better than relying on just one. But it seems that there is no going back to the old model of spatial development, when the government assumed all the management and risks. NASA estimated that the $400 million SpaceX spent to develop its Falcon rocket was a tenth of what it would have cost in the public sector.
The trick for governments now will be to find new ways to exert control. This is likely to include new programs like SpaceX’s Starshield, a military-grade version of its Starlink network that will give the Pentagon greater influence. For better or worse, reaching orbit seems like a business for the very rich.