Battle of the Billionaires
First of three parts.
Along the southern beaches and western mountains of Texas, two of the world’s richest men are launching rockets. Geography, wealth and an obsession with space have fueled the enterprises of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But other than murals depicting their skyward-gazing faces in Brownsville and Van Horn, respectively, the two have little in common.
“These are egos engaged,” said John Logsdon, who founded George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “There are individual aspects to this competition. It transcends normal business.”
Musk, 50, founded SpaceX in 2002. His more than 14,800 tweets have created a loyal fan base as he shares technical insights, answers direct questions and publishes random thoughts and memes.
Bezos, 57, founded Blue Origin in 2000. His Instagram is a more careful curation of family photos, celebrity selfies and information on his companies and causes.
SpaceX recently launched five Starship prototypes outside of Brownsville — the first four of these spacecraft exploded spectacularly. Success was measured by how much the company learned. Musk celebrated the first failure, “Mars, here we come!!”
Blue Origin had one partial failure out of 15 New Shepard rocket system launches north of Van Horn. On the first New Shepard launch, the rocket did not land in a gentle, upright position, but the capsule did land safely.
“If New Shepard had been a traditional expendable vehicle, this would have been a flawless first test flight,” Bezos said.
SpaceX has been fast and aggressive, not afraid to butt heads with regulators. Blue Origin has moved slowly and methodically. There’s an underlying rivalry, yet both companies are strengthening the state’s commercial space industry. Texas is increasingly known for more than just NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
And they’re working toward the same lofty goal: giving more people access to space.
“I’ve never thought of it as anything other than a healthy competitive spirit,” said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at the analytics and engineering firm BryceTech, “and not unlike the kinds
of competition that occurred with railroads, newspapers and that sort of thing in ages past.”
There is an important distinction between the two companies. SpaceX has developed a tried-and-true rocket, the Falcon 9, that has launched satellites and NASA astronauts into Earth’s orbit. Blue Origin is still developing a rocket that could push payloads into orbit, and its suborbital New Shepard system has not yet launched people.
That’s set to change July 20, when Blue Origin sends its first crew on an 11-minute journey to space and back.
It’s a simpler mission than flying people to the International Space Station. But this New Shepard flight will have its own accolade — it’s sending the boss into space. Bezos is flying with his brother Mark, 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the son of Joes Daemen, who founded Somerset Capital Partners investment firm based in the Netherlands. Daemen’s seat was purchased for an undisclosed amount.
He was almost the first billionaire to ride his own creation into space. But shortly after Bezos announced his July 20 flight, Virgin Galactic said its billionaire founder, Richard Branson, was headed into space. Branson took his flight from New Mexico on July 11.
Musk was there to cheer him on. Blue Origin originally released an aggressive tweet about how New Shepard would fly higher, but Bezos later congratulated Branson on Instagram.
“Can’t wait to join the club!” Bezos said.
Gulf Coast vs. wide-open West Texas
In Texas, SpaceX and Blue Origin are using the state’s waterfront property and wide-open spaces to chase much different goals.
“It’s an accident of geography,” Logsdon said.
SpaceX is developing and testing a system that could carry people to Mars. Its location on a South Texas beach means SpaceX can launch over water — away from most people — and to the east, where the Earth’s spin provides a boost. SpaceX also might launch from former oil rigs converted into ocean spaceports.
Blue Origin is targeting the suborbital space tourism market. There is plenty of uninhabited West Texas land to launch and then come back down.
Blue Origin has not said what it will cost to go into space. It held an auction for a seat on its first flight, and the winning bid was $28 million. This is being donated to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future, that’s dedicated to STEM education.
The highest bidder later opted for a subsequent flight due to scheduling conflicts. Daemen, who had a seat on the second New Shepard flight, was moved to the first flight.
The two companies compete more directly outside of the Lone Star State. They were among four companies, including Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance, to compete for a contract to launch national security missions.
SpaceX went into the competition with two flight-proven rockets: the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin proposed using its New Glenn rocket, which had not yet flown.
“SpaceX has a pretty strong ground to justify its confidence,” Smith said.
The Space Force, which became the sixth branch of the military in 2019, awarded contracts to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in 2020.
United Launch Alliance, which has a proven track record with its Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, is planning to use its Vulcan Centaur rocket. The Vulcan Centaur has not yet launched. But when it does, it will use BE-4 rocket engines provided by Blue Origin.
“Folks in government like to see the activity and the competition,” said Brendan Curry, chief of Washington operations for the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that seeks to get more people engaged with space. “If the federal government has a need for a space service and you have competition between a variety of players, you know at the end of the day it should work out ideally best for the taxpayer.”
More recently, SpaceX and Blue Origin have gone head-tohead for a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon. A third company, Dynetics, also was being considered.
SpaceX proposed using Starship for NASA’s human landing system. Blue Origin designed a lander in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.
NASA was expected to select two companies, but it ultimately chose just SpaceX. Congress didn’t provide enough funding to support two landers.
Blue Origin is protesting this decision, and it has found a sympathetic ear in Congress. When the Senate passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act in June — a bill designed to keep America technologically competitive, particularly with China — there was a provision that would authorize $10 billion for NASA to select a second human
“I’ve never thought of it as anything other than a healthy competitive spirit.”
Phil Smith, space industry analyst
landing system.
It is unclear if the legislation will get lost among other national priorities or if the desire to stay abreast of China will carry this bill through the house, Curry said.
“The Human Landing System program needs competition, not the delay of starting over,” Blue Origin said May 27 on Twitter.
Love/hate relationships
Feisty tweets are a new style for Blue Origin, which until recently had been quiet about its operations.
And SpaceX, which was initially more open, now is moving in the opposite direction, said Greg Autry, a clinical professor of space leadership, policy and business for Arizona State University. The company has grown to a point where its technology and national security missions could attract the attention of foreign adversaries.
“SpaceX is, for very practical reasons, becoming less accessible,” Autry said, “and Blue is getting smarter about the value of public exposure.”
Public perception of the billionaire founders also affects the companies.
Both are recognized as technology innovators. They’re also extremely wealthy. According to Bloomberg, Bezos was the world’s richest man as of July 15 and Musk was the second-richest man.
Bezos also is viewed as someone who makes lavish purchases, including a superyacht, Logsdon said. He had a highprofile divorce, and Amazon gets criticized for its treatment of warehouse workers. More than 155,000 people have signed a petition titled “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth.”
Musk has created a quirkier image. He’s become “kind of a folk figure,” Logsdon said, “that’s mainly positive.”
People like how Musk interacts with fans on Twitter. He jokes and feels more approachable than the typical billionaire.
“Elon’s gone through the trouble to make them love him,” said Autry, who also is launching an ASU executive master’s program in global space management, “where Bezos chose to be super secretive about his company to the point where it really irritated people in the space community early on.”
Musk’s prolific use of Twitter also has gotten him into trouble. In 2018, Musk (who is also Tesla’s CEO) said he was considering taking the electric vehicle company private. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud; this was settled with Musk agreeing to step down as Tesla’s chairman and to pay $20 million. Tesla also paid $20 million to settle its charge.
Still, SpaceX has a cult-like following that Blue Origin lacks. This can be seen on Louis Balderas’ LabPadre YouTube channel, which provides 24/7 livestream video of SpaceX in South Texas. His channel has 190,000 subscribers; ads and contributions from global SpaceX fans have doubled Balderas’ income.
His eight South Texas cameras have captured the company’s launches, explosions and exponential growth.
“It could be at 3 o’clock in the morning and absolutely nothing going on, but a crane starts coming down the highway,” Balderas said. “‘Oh my God, there’s a crane coming. What kind of crane is it? Where’s it going and how tall is it?’ People freak out on the littlest thing. They count cars. When there’s nothing else going on, they count cars.”
More people are traveling to the Brownsville area to see SpaceX. Someone even stayed in town for weeks driving Uber and waiting for a launch, said Ramiro Gonzalez, director of government and community affairs for the city of Brownsville.
“You can tell there’s a lot of excitement,” Gonzalez said.
‘Who are they?’
The enthusiasm is not ubiquitous.
In April 20 comments sent to the Army Corps of Engineers, Sidney Maddock highlighted Blue Origin’s ability to launch and land rockets that don’t explode. She also noted that Blue Origin is not located near valuable wetlands.
“The recent successful activities of Blue Origin launching a rocket into space demonstrate that there are practicable alternatives for rocket launch activities that do not involve fill of valuable wetlands,” wrote Maddock, an independent contractor who has done non-breeding piping plover research for agencies, universities and environmental organizations.
“If there were an explosion with a Blue Origin launch similar to what occurred multiple times at Boca Chica with SpaceX, the Blue Origin rocket debris would not be falling in valuable habitats used by the threatened piping plover and other shorebirds and waterbirds,” Maddock said.
SpaceX initially sought at least $36 million in state and local tax subsides — $31.3 million for its launch site in South Texas and $5 million for its rocket engine testing facility in McGregor — and potentially millions more in property tax relief, records show.
Blue Origin said it did not receive any incentives or tax breaks.
"They never asked," said Culberson County Auditor Mark Cabezuela.
Cabezuela and Van Horn Mayor Becky Brewster said Blue Origin was a welcome newcomer to their community — but also a secretive one. Signing tax-incentive agreements with the city or county would require disclosing financial information that Blue Origin probably prefers to keep to itself, they said.
In the case of SpaceX, which did not respond to a request for comment, it’s unclear exactly how much in tax incentives Musk's company ended up receiving.
SpaceX backed out of some deals or failed to provide proof that it met its job-creation requirements, officials said.
“The reason we never paid out anything to SpaceX is because they never provided (enough) documentation,” said Raudel Garza, manager and chief executive officer of the Development Corporation of Harlingen Inc., which had agreed to pay SpaceX $450,000 if it could show at least 10 percent of its new hires were Harlingen residents.
The largest incentive pledged to SpaceX was $13 million from the state’s Spaceport Trust Fund. Gov. Greg Abbott's office didn't answer questions about how much has been spent by the trust fund, and it declined to immediately provide payment documentation to the Houston Chronicle after the newspaper filed an open records request for the information.
Brewster doesn’t pay too much attention to SpaceX, though she has seen its explosions on the news. She prefers how Blue Origin is developing New Shepard north of her community.
“I tend to be a little bit more cautious,” Brewster said.
As a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, she’s excited to see people launch into space. Others in the community also have become ardent Blue Origin fans. Local business owner Vance Cottrell hears the word “SpaceX” and responds, “Who are they?”
Of course, Twitter is full of Blue Origin mockery. “Nice carnival ride. How long before you achieve orbit?” @mobileheath said May 18.
But both companies are flying and will continue to fly, helping to make Texas the state of space.