Blue Origin, the company promoted by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, successfully launched its New Glenn rocket last Thursday with two NASA spacecraft destined for Mars, which subsequently landed accurately. A feat that has so far only been achieved by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Thus, the struggle between both tycoons for the space business is entering a new phase. A space race with distinct industrial and financial profiles, pitting the world’s two richest men against each other with the backing of major investment and technology groups.
The launch was delayed for several days due to weather conditions both on Earth and in space. In fact, the second delay was motivated by “high solar activity” that worried NASA because it feared it could affect or damage its spacecraft. As NASA explained, the two twin spacecraft built by Rocket Lab will investigate how a continuous stream of solar particles moving at millions of kilometers per hour (known as the solar wind) is gradually destroying much of the Martian atmosphere, as part of a mission led by the University of Berkeley.
During the second flight of the rocket, Blue Origin managed to recover the fuel for reuse. Until Thursday, only SpaceX had performed a similar maneuver with an orbital rocket. Elon Musk himself congratulated Jeff Bezos and the Blue Origin team through a message on his social network X.
Blue Origin’s achievement comes amid a growing rivalry between the two private space companies, both owned by tycoons, just as NASA recently opened bidding for its lunar mission.
New Glenn, named after astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, is a powerful two-stage launch vehicle manufactured by Blue Origin. The rocket is designed to be reusable, and the first stage, or launch vehicle that provides the initial boost after launch, is protected to last at least 25 flights, according to the company.
The launch space is one of the main bets of Jeff Bezos, who in the past has gone so far as to say that one day Blue Origin will be bigger than Amazon itself, which currently has a market value of about $2.3 trillion, and is one of the most capitalized companies in the world, second only to Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet.
So far, Blue Origin is almost entirely financed by Bezos, who, according to some specialized media, spends at least 2 billion dollars annually to maintain the company. Some analysts have given launch estimate 50,000 to 100,000 million. A number that could increase 40 times in the next ten years and reach four billion than Amazon.
In any case, Blue Origin’s current numbers are lower than SpaceX’s 400 billion, the second launch the most valuable in the world for OpenAI, which has closed various rounds of funding with the support of groups such as Alphabet and Fidelity. The company under the control of Elon Musk is a global leader in space launches. In fact, his reusable rockets accomplish 85% of US launches, and not a week goes by without the tycoon publicly highlighting it on social media. At Tesla’s recent shareholder meeting, which approved his controversial $1 billion bonus if he achieves a series of milestones, Musk opened the door to a SpaceX IPO. He also predicted that Optimus, Tesla’s robot, and its vehicles “will play an important role” in the future establishment of bases on the Moon and Mars. “It’s going to be something great, a next-generation lunar or martian vehicle,” he told investors.
On the sidelines, as part of those moves, Amazon renamed its Kuiper business, which aims to compete with Musk’s Starlink in satellite communications, to Amazon Leo. The firm already has 150 satellites in orbit and is preparing an acceleration to enter commercial services, which are not yet operational. The goal is to build a network of more than 3,200 units.
In addition, Amazon Leo has clients such as JetBlue, L3Harris, DIRECTV Latin America, Sky Brasil, NBN Co. or Australia’s national broadband network operator. Amazon Leo is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, where it conducts primary research and development. It also has a satellite manufacturing facility in Kirkland, Washington, where it can produce up to five satellites a day, and a satellite processing facility at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, where it prepares and integrates its satellites with Blue Origin, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance rockets before launch.
In any case, it will not be easy because he will be competing with a company that is already well positioned. Amazon Leo will compete with Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, which already has nearly 9,000 satellites in orbit and serves more than six million customers worldwide. The founder of Tesla is making a multimillion-dollar bet to buy spectrum for mobile phone communications in the United States. So SpaceX recently agreed to buy EchoStar’s unassigned AWS-3 licenses for $2.6 billion, expanding an agreement signed by both companies in September that valued the entire deal at $17 billion.
