Bezos vs Musk billionaire space race gets serious with launches on same day but who will win?
On 2:03 a.m.Thursday morning, the new space race began in earnest.This time it’s not USA vs the Soviets, but a home-grown billionaire vs billionaire face-off.Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, successfully blasted off a 320-foot-tall rocket ship made by his Blue Origin company from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the early hours of the morning.
It made the company the first to successfully reach orbit on its first launch of an orbital-class rocket.The un-manned New Glenn rocket ship is designed to carry objects, such as satellites, into outer space with part of it returning to earth and be re-used.Not to be outdone, his rival, SpaceX founder Elon Musk – the richest man on the planet – launched a Starship rocket from his Starbase factory and launch site in Texas just after 5:30 p.m.Things are said to be fever pitched between two men, both described as “ego fueled,” but Musk currently holds a serious lead in the race, with 138 SpaceX launches in 2024, compared to Blue Origin’s four.“It’ll take a very long time for Blue Origin to catch SpaceX in terms of launches per year,” Ashlee Vance, author of “When the Heavens went on Sale,” told The Post.“But this is a major achievement and milestone.
It’s an incredibly hard and expensive business.Blue Origin has certainly now emerged as a legitimate competitor.”Both launches were successes, but didn’t achieve all their objectives.
Blue Origin wanted to land a rocket booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, but instead lost it.Meanwhile, SpaceX successfully guided its Super Heavy rocket booster back to its launch site — but lost the Starship craft it launched in space.Both rockets are designed to ship heavy payloads, such as satellites, into space.Such work can prove incredibly lucrative as thousands of satellites are backlogged for sending off the earth, but the costs of doing business also run incredibly high.For New Glenn, the project has cost in excess of $2.5 billion so far and...