Jeff Bezos prepares to close the gap in his space race with Elon Musk

SEATTLE — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have become the two wealthiest men in the world thanks to their breakthrough technology companies. But Musk, through SpaceX, has long held a big lead in the pursuit closest to their hearts: colonizing space.

Now, their space race is entering a new era as Bezos approaches two milestones that, if successful, could chip away at Musk’s dominance.

Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, is planning to soon launch New Glenn, a massive rocket that will compete directly with SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets. Then Amazon — founded by Bezos, who serves as its board’s executive chair — is preparing to deploy Project Kuiper, the company’s network of satellites that will challenge SpaceX’s Starlink network in providing internet access from space in low Earth orbit.

Together, New Glenn and Project Kuiper are perhaps the most ambitious attempt in years to take on SpaceX’s tight grip on the commercial space market.

The new rocket and satellites also represent a new chapter in the longtime rivalry between the billionaires behind Amazon and Tesla. Amazon has become one of the most recognizable retail brands in the world as Tesla has dominated the market for electric cars. But Musk has been far more successful in space.

SpaceX has reshaped how rockets are built and launched since Musk started it about two decades ago. Its reusable rocket boosters have reduced the cost and increased the frequency that payloads can be shot into orbit. For transporting things like satellites as well as cargo and crew headed to space stations, governments and other customers at times have few other options.

With launches every few days, SpaceX carried about 85% of all orbital mass put into space in the most recent quarter — 12 times as much as the next-largest launcher, China’s primary government contractor. SpaceX has completed more than 130 launches this year and is testing an even bigger rocket, named Starship.

SpaceX’s Starlink network has more than 6,000 satellites positioned above the globe. It serves more than 4 million customers and has become a critical provider of internet to off-the-grid places as varied as battlefields in Ukraine and recreational vehicles in rural Virginia.

Bezos also founded his space company around two decades ago, but it has not yet launched a single thing into orbit. Although it has ferried small groups of celebrities and wealthy passengers on brief trips to the edge of space, Blue Origin has had limited commercial effect so far.

“The only reason we are taking Blue Origin more seriously is because Bezos is bankrolling it,” said Chad Anderson, a startup investor at Space Capital. “They have spent a ridiculous amount of money.” By his estimate, that’s $14 billion.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is enormous, as tall as a 32-story building, and designed to repeatedly haul satellites and other cargo into space. With a reusable booster, New Glenn is now standing at Blue Origin’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is expected to fly in the next few weeks.

“It’s literally on the pad now waiting for regulatory approval,” Bezos said this month at the DealBook Summit, an annual gathering of leaders in business, politics and culture hosted by The New York Times.

Project Kuiper was supposed to begin launching its constellation of 3,232 satellites before the end of this year, but it was bumped from the schedule of its rocket provider, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in favor of government missions. The launch is now delayed to “early 2025,” according to Amazon. (Project Kuiper did successfully test two satellites in orbit this year.)

Amazon declined to comment.

Bezos grew up inspired by NASA’s Apollo missions, and he has talked about moving humanity to space since at least high school.

“I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he said on a podcast last year. “The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations.” People would visit Earth the “same way that you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation,” he said.

The “primary reason” he stepped down as CEO at Amazon, he said, was to focus on Blue Origin and add urgency and speed to its operations.

Bezos put on a flight suit and joined the crew on Blue Origin’s first suborbital passenger flight in 2021. Last year, he moved to Miami, in part, he said, to be closer to Cape Canaveral.

“This is very personal,” said Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian at the University of Washington.

The company has increasingly focused on building the ability to manufacture rockets at scale. At the DealBook event, Bezos said he thought that Blue Origin had the potential to be a larger business than Amazon.

In 2018, when he was still Amazon’s CEO, the company hired a group of top Starlink engineers who had split with Musk. They began secretly working on what would become Project Kuiper. They designed it from the ground up and created a system that required fewer, but potentially more complicated, satellites.

When Amazon said the next year that it was pursuing a satellite network, Musk tweeted an emoji calling Bezos a “copy cat.”

Analysts estimate that Amazon has spent more than $16 billion on Project Kuiper. This year, the company opened a facility to manufacture the satellites in Kirkland, Washington, a Seattle suburb about a 15-minute drive from Starlink’s manufacturing hub.

Although there are other smaller competitors to Starlink, Amazon has the potential to attract real business, said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of BryceTech, a space analytics and engineering firm. “It has enterprise and industrial relationships, and it also has consumer relationships at an extraordinary scale,” she said.

Amazon still needs thousands of satellites to provide the coverage it envisions, but it is dependent on outside rocket companies for launches, a challenge since SpaceX dominates the market.

For the sake of Project Kuiper, New Glenn needs to work. While the two are separate, their fates are intertwined. Last year, Bezos hired a former senior Amazon executive who oversaw Project Kuiper to run Blue Origin. And Project Kuiper is depending on New Glenn for many of its launches. Another leading provider is a new United Launch Alliance rocket that uses Blue Origin engines.

But even Amazon couldn’t avoid asking SpaceX for help in getting the Project Kuiper satellites into space. Last December, it contracted with SpaceX for three launches, which would start in “mid-2025,” Amazon said.

Musk also grew up steeped in science fiction books and has long set his sights on colonizing Mars, which he views as a hedge against climate change and other problems on Earth.

Musk has said he sees Starlink as a means to an end, a service that can generate enough cash to pursue his deeper vision of building Starship, the rocket that he hopes will bring humans to the moon and Mars.

“We think this is a key steppingstone on the way to establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon,” Musk said in 2019.

He first filed regulatory papers for Starlink in 2016. SpaceX began launching the Starlink satellites in 2018, eventually almost weekly, to blanket the skies. As part of SpaceX, Starlink didn’t need outside rocket companies to send the satellites into space and instead could rely on the company’s workhorse rockets.

“SpaceX just started churning and burning,” said Chris Quilty, an analyst who has covered the space industry for decades. “This is the single biggest advantage, not only in cost but just in volume.”

Even some of Musk’s supporters hope Bezos will make headway. “SpaceX needs some competition,” said Anderson. He said Musk not only had the best, and often only, viable solutions to various space needs but, as a close adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, was also in a position to influence Trump’s agenda.

As an investor in SpaceX, Anderson can profit from the company’s success, but, he said, “I don’t like to see any single point of failure, especially with infrastructure, that is that critical to economic stability and national security.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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