Who’ll win the battle of the galactic billionaire egos? As Bezos wins a $3.4B contract to race Musk to put man back on the Moon, TOM LEONARD reveals the dark side of their 20-year feud
Outrageous egos battling each other across the cosmos? Check.
Sci-fi nerds who’ve definitely watched too much Star Trek? Check.
Humanity’s next chapter in a space left in the hands of insanely rich tech billionaires happy to take NASA’s tax-payer billions? Check.
This is Mission Control: We have lift-off!
Just a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the world’s most powerful rocket to date – the 400-ft long, $67 million Starship – only for it to explode mid-air just four minutes into flight, a phoenix has risen from the flames to bravely take on the quest for space travel.
Or at least, that may be how bitter rival Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos sees it.
On Friday, NASA awarded his space-exploration company Blue Origin a coveted $3.4 billion to build a ‘lunar lander’ to take astronauts to the Moon.
As part of NASA’s Artemis V mission, scheduled for 2029, the lunar lander will collect astronauts from a NASA outpost orbiting the Moon, take them down to the lunar surface – and then bring them back again.
But, given that Musk’s company is already working on doing precisely the same thing for the Artemis program, we now face the prospect of two of Silicon Valley’s most contentious figures competing head-on in a bizarre new 21st-Century space race.
And this is no ordinary commercial contest. These are two ultra-competitive international business titans, both of whom have held the title of world’s richest person, and whose fierce rivalry goes back two decades.
Most recently, in 2021, SpaceX beat Blue Origin and another US company, Dynetics, to win a $2.9 billion contract to build a lunar-lander version of its vast Starship rocket – called the Starship HLS (Human Landing System) – to put man back on the Moon for the first time since 1972.
Last month’s SpaceX explosion was of an early unmanned test flight, with the lift-off date for the first manned flight, Artemis III, scheduled for as early as December 2025. Musk will also provide a lander for Artemis IV in 2028.
Bezos had been furious at the decision to award the first contract to Musk – especially since NASA had been expected to award two contracts. Blue Origin even tried to sue NASA in federal court, but lost.