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The first attempt by Jeff Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, to launch a rocket into orbit will be a seminal moment for the space business. After receiving the go-ahead from US regulators last week, the Amazon founder finally looks close to matching Elon Musk in providing humanity with a way to escape the bounds of Earth — a once unthinkable achievement for a single, wealthy private individual.
Despite predating Musk’s SpaceX by two years, Blue Origin has suffered years of delays. A successful launch for its orbital rocket, called New Glenn, would finally carry it beyond its current limited business of ferrying passengers to the edge of space, pitting the world’s two richest men against each other in an escalation of the private space race.
But Blue Origin’s belated emergence comes as the rocket business enters a new phase — one that is likely to be more hostile to Bezos’s ambitions than if he’d made the leap to orbit years before. Most obviously, Bezos’s potential breakthrough comes just as his nemesis has reached an unprecedented political ascendancy in Washington. Musk’s closeness to the incoming US president has fed anxiety across the tech sector, as rivals fret about how his newfound influence may be used against them.
For his part, Bezos has already struggled to contain SpaceX politically. After losing a bid to build a moon lander for Nasa, for instance, his company warned that the number of contracts Washington was funnelling to SpaceX risked turning it into a monopoly. These days, any official questioning of that growing power seems even less likely.
Musk’s influence could also be pivotal 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 is currently heavily dependent on the SLS rocket, a $30bn project led by Boeing. With only one flight so far, SLS has all the hallmarks of a white elephant, making it just the sort of government boondoggle that Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency is out to kill.
At the same time, thanks to Musk, the economics of the rocket business are moving relentlessly against new entrants like Bezos. The most obvious challenge comes from SpaceX’s combination of its Heavy Booster launcher and Starship, which together comprise a giant rocket that can carry 150 tonnes into space, more than three times the capacity of New Glenn.
SpaceX has already succeeded in the eye-catching stunt of returning the rocket’s booster to its launch pad, where it was embraced by a pair of giant mechanical arms. That is a step towards making Starship the first fully reusable rocket, one capable of being refuelled and put back into service within hours of its last flight.
Most space analysts expect this to eventually drive the cost of getting a payload into space well below $1,000 per kilo, and perhaps below $500. That compares to the lowest price of $6,000 per kilo SpaceX currently advertises. Even without Starship, SpaceX has steadily driven down costs by ramping up its volume of launches. 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 only 33 launches three years before, and the kind of frequency that Blue Origin will take years to match.
Yet for all the ground it still needs to make up, Bezos’s rocket company will not be short of customers. The demand for space launches is expected to far exceed supply for the rest of this decade, with the US military, for one, eager to find a dependable launch alternative to SpaceX. And the race to build constellations of communication satellites to rival SpaceX’s Starlink is entering a new phase, with Amazon’s Project Kuiper among the challengers.
For Washington, being dependent on two billionaires for access to space may sound only marginally better than being dependent on one. But there seems to be no going back to the old model of space development, when government took on all the management and risks. Nasa estimated the $400mn 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. That is likely to include new programmes such as SpaceX’s Starshield, a military-grade version of its Starlink network that will give the Pentagon greater influence. For better or worse, getting to orbit looks like a business for the very rich.
richard.waters@ft.com
