Bezos vs. Musk: the rivalry fuelling the modern space race
They are the two richest men on the planet. But the world is not enough for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Nick Rufford explains how their billionaire rivalry went galactic
The stairway to the heavens starts in Texas. In 2003, a young Elon Musk was scouting for a suitable location to fulfil his dream of becoming a space pioneer. He had started Space Exploration Technologies Corp – SpaceX for short – with the aim of building rockets and one day sending humans to the Moon, or even Mars. First, though, he had to find somewhere to carry out the noisy and dangerous job of rocket testing. The wide open spaces of Texas, where folk are more relaxed about firearms and explosives, provided the perfect solution. There, amid the rattlesnakes and searing heat, Musk set to work. rocket later transported four more astronauts to the International Space Station – the first mission of its kind by a commercial operator. Not to be outdone, Bezos aims to launch a rocket next year that will be bigger than the Falcon 9, and has unveiled plans for a module to land astronauts on the Moon for the first time since 1972.
In the next decade, the two men are set to reap the huge rewards that space offers – from satellites for internet, telecoms and surveillance to tourism. Nasa has started subcontracting the sending of astronauts into low Earth orbit, a business worth billions. You might think there is room for both in space. But what began as a light-hearted spat has become an epic rivalry. Lori Garver, a former Nasa executive who has had dealings with both men, said that despite their declarations about sending colonists to other planets to save the human race from disease or obliteration by war or asteroid, their motives may be less altruistic. “It’s boys and their toys,” she said.
first American to orbit the Earth), and with inaugural flights pencilled in for next year, it will be the world’s largest orbital rocket – the biggest since the Saturn V that carried men to the Moon, unless it is beaten to lift-off by Nasa’s colossal Space Launch System. If proof were needed the gloves were off, this was it. Not only did it show Bezos’s financial muscle, it was a clear statement of his aim to reach further into space than Musk.
When I first interviewed Musk in
2011, he had succeeded in putting a
Falcon 1 into orbit after three failed attempts. It was his single greatest achievement, he told me. “The reason I began looking at space,” he said, “[was] not from the perspective of starting a company, but to understand why we had not advanced from the Apollo era. Other areas of technology have advanced, and yet we’ve gone backwards. If you’d told someone in 1969 that the US wouldn’t even be able to get [humans] into orbit 42 years later they would have expressed disbelief – if not punched you.”
Of course, just as the rewards are potentially huge, so is the risk. Musk himself has admitted that “the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one”. He told me in a later interview that he came close to a nervous breakdown when he thought his SpaceX endeavour was about to fail, leaving him penniless. At the 11th hour Nasa stepped in with a $1.6bn contract. “Yeah, that was the darkest time,” he said. Musk is prepared to talk candidly about his disasters, and his supporters love him for his heroic failures and swashbuckling style. SpaceX shared a blooper reel of mishaps on social media, showing Musk’s reusable Falcon rockets crashing into the sea instead of landing on drone ships as they were supposed to. Last week he tweeted “Mars, here we come!!” after a prototype exploded spectacularly while attempting to land after its test launch in Texas. Bezos has had disasters too – there has never been a rocket programme without them – but he doesn’t advertise them.
“Whoever wins the race is likely to be hailed as an inventor who will have
changed the lives of humankind”
Instead, Bezos’s approach is steady and systematic. He has succeeded in launching and landing the same rocket six times to demonstrate its reusability, painting a tortoise on the side after each attempt. It symbolises his philosophy – one that, in the hare and tortoise parable at least, eventually wins the race. “Step by step, ferociously” is Blue Origin’s motto, and Bezos is sitting on a mountain of money that could give him an unassailable lead. He once described Amazon as a lottery win. “I’m taking those lottery winnings and investing them in Blue Origin,” he said. Revealing a rare nugget about Blue Origin’s finances, he then added: “I sell about $1bn of stock a year and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.”
While Musk’s contract with Nasa gave him a head start, Bezos has been catching up. Like Musk, he has tapped into government agencies. When both men bid for funding to develop systems for astronauts to descend to the surface of the Moon or other planets, Bezos won the lion’s share. In April, Nasa awarded him $579m; Musk’s contract was worth $135m. Bezos also got $500m from the US Space Force – a delightfully named arm of the US air force charged with countering threats in space – to develop New Glenn, the rocket he hopes will be a symbol of Blue Origin’s superiority.
If you doubt that two such brilliant men could be involved in point-scoring, you only have to look at how their rockets have leapfrogged each other in size. When Bezos announced a bigger rocket than Musk’s Falcon 9 in 2016, his rival went one better, unveiling his interplanetary transport system, now known as Starship. Musk’s new rocket would be 400ft tall – and supposedly capable of flying passengers to Mars by 2024. Bezos then revealed plans for his New Armstrong rocket – named after Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. Its details are secret, but it will almost certainly be a challenge to Starship. The two men even went head to head over plastic spacemen. Coveting Bezos’s cleverly named Mannequin Skywalker, Musk put his own dummy on a rocket to intercept Mars’s orbit and, courtesy of David Bowie, named him Starman.
Behind the antics of rich-man rivalry, however, there are also serious rewards up for grabs. The prize is not in mining rare metals from asteroids, or establishing off-world colonies. Instead it’s a new age of the internet. Musk has laid plans for a necklace of 12,000 satellites circling the globe and beaming high-speed internet to the billions without access. The potential of the project, called Starlink, is mind-boggling. The cost to design, build and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in 2018 at $10bn. But leaked internal documents indicate SpaceX believes the satellite business could bring in annual revenues of $30bn.
Once again Bezos is hot on Musk’s heels. He has won permission to launch 3,236 satellites under a rival programme called Project Kuiper that would reach the “tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet”. He might have added that this would also give access to his Amazon store to a huge number of potential new customers. Running Kuiper Systems is a savvy executive called Rajeev Badyal, who worked for Musk and ran Starlink before switching sides. Whoever wins the race to be the first global internet supplier is likely to be hailed as an inventor who has changed the lives of humankind. That is, of course, an intoxicating prospect.
Musk and Bezos have recently cooled the rhetoric, perhaps as a result of being distracted by more earthly considerations. Both found their private lives under scrutiny. At the start of last year, Bezos announced that he and his wife MacKenzie were divorcing, after the US media discovered he was having an affair with Lauren Sánchez, a helicopter pilot whose company filmed promo videos for Blue Origin. Meanwhile Musk was named in the Johnny Depp libel trial after he dated Amber Heard, Depp’s wife – though Musk insisted their affair happened after Depp and Heard’s divorce. Musk is currently in a relationship with Claire Boucher, a Canadian singer-songwriter known professionally as Grimes, with whom he has a young son, named X Æ A-Xii. Temporarily, at least, the feud has been put on hold.
Beyond the intoxication, the boys toys, the billionaire adventures and the vast commercial potential, some see other, even bigger considerations in the long run. There are huge strategic implications bound up in the two billionaires’ space dreams. So much so that you could argue that the corporate ingenuity of Bezos and Musk is America’s best hope of countering the rising commercial and military might of other space superpowers, notably China and Russia. Could the billionaires one day join forces in the national interest? Don’t bank on it. In the freezing temperatures of space, revenge is a dish best served cold.
A longer version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times. © Times Newspapers Limited 2020.