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The first attempt by Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin to launch a rocket into orbit will be a pivotal moment for the space business. After receiving the green light from US regulators last week, the Amazon founder finally looks close to matching Elon Musk in providing humanity with a way to escape the confines of Earth – a once-unthinkable achievement for a single, wealthy private individual.
Despite being two years ahead of Musk’s SpaceX, Blue Origin has suffered years of delays. A successful launch of his orbital rocket, named New Glenn, would finally take him out of his current limited job of ferrying passengers to the edge of space, pitting two of the world’s richest men against each other in an escalating private space race.
But Blue Origin’s belated appearance comes as the rocket business enters a new phase — one that is likely to be more hostile to Bezos’ ambitions than if he had made the jump to orbit years earlier. Most obviously, Bezos’s potential breakthrough comes just as his nemesis has achieved unprecedented political ascendancy in Washington. Musk’s closeness to the incoming US president has fueled anxiety across the tech sector, as rivals worry his newfound influence could be used against them.
For his part, Bezos has already struggled to contain SpaceX politically. After losing a bid to build a lander for NASA, his company, for example, warned that the number of contracts Washington was funneling toward SpaceX risked turning it into a monopoly. These days, official questioning of that growing power seems even less likely.
Musk’s influence could also be key in shaping space policy in Trump’s second term. That could include giving SpaceX an even more central role in America’s plans to return to the moon — something that currently depends heavily on the SLS rocket, a $30 billion project led by Boeing. With only one flight so far, the SLS has all the hallmarks of a white elephantwhich makes it just some kind of government nonsense that Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency wants to kill.
At the same time, thanks to Musk, the economics of rocket business are relentlessly working against new entrants like Bezos. The most obvious challenge comes from SpaceX’s combination of its Heavy Booster launcher and Starship, which together form a massive rocket that can carry 150 tons into space, more than three times the capacity of New Glenn.
SpaceX has already succeeded in the eye-catching feat of returning a rocket booster to the launch pad, where it was embraced by a pair of giant mechanical arms. It is a step towards making Starship the first reusable rocket, which can be refueled and returned to service hours after its last flight.
Most space analysts expect it will eventually increase the cost of delivering payloads into space well below $1,000 per kilo, and perhaps below $500. That compares to the lowest price of $6,000 per kilogram that SpaceX is currently advertising. Even without Starship, SpaceX has steadily cut costs by increasing launch volume. Last year, it launched nearly three rockets a week and accounted for more than half of the world’s orbital launches. That was a rapid escalation from just 33 launches three years ago, and the kind of frequency that will take Blue Origin years to reach.
Still, regardless of all the catching up to do, Bezos’ rocket company will have no shortage of customers. Demand for space launches is expected to far outstrip supply by the end of this decade, and the US military, for example, is eager to find a reliable launch alternative to SpaceX. And the race to build constellations of communications satellites to rival SpaceX’s Starlink is entering a new phase, with Amazon’s Kuiper project among the challengers.
For Washington, depending on two billionaires for access to space may sound only marginally better than depending on one. But it seems that there is no going back to the old model of space development, when the state took over all the management and risks. Nasa estimated that the $400 million SpaceX spent developing 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 exercise control. That will likely include new programs like SpaceX’s Starshield, a military version of its Starlink network that will give the Pentagon more leverage. For better or worse, getting into orbit seems like a job for the very rich.
richard.waters@ft.com
