A walk through the space race: who is taking the lead?
The space industry and space travel have suffered a considerable loss of reputation and public interest from its boom back in 1969 with the famous quote from Neil Armstrong “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” upon his landing on the Moon, till the beginning of the 2000s. The fall of the Iron Curtain officially led to the end of the space race between the USA and the USRR to govern the skies.
The public funding to space-related projects was substantially reduced and important institutions as NASA were downgraded to a group of enthusiastic scientists with no resources to achieve their dreams. However, the irruption of new players into the game, such as the super tycoons Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, moved the focus back to this exciting adventure.
The world is very excited about space travel and the cinema industry exploit this feeling with several super film production. One of the latest news is that Tom Cruise is in negotiations with SpaceX, NASA, and Universal Pictures to shoot the first movie in space. Tom Cruise already tried to do it 20 years ago with James Cameron, but it seems that now he will not surrender. Tom Cruise, one of the most popular representatives of Scientology and a well-known actor for his stunts, is decided to be the first actor filming a space movie in a real space environment.
The new space race is now a reality. Space agencies are running their machines at full powers and hundreds of novel private companies fight every year to get their piece of the pie. Such a space marathon started a few decades ago with the foundation of the two major representatives of the private sector in the space industry: Blue Origin and Space X. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon magnate. Since his childhood, Bezos had been interested in space with a major dream in mind: building hotels in space. Blue Origin’s plans were very secret until 2015 but its idea was to reach space quickly, cheaply, and safely. On the other hand, SpaceX was founded in 2002 as the most personal project from Elon Musk, who made an “all in”, investing most of his fortune after the sale of PayPal. Musk’s main target: colonizing Mars.
Both Musk and Bezos brought forward the idea of reusing part of the rockets and considerably cheapen the design and production process in the sector. Although Blue Origin had been working in the shadows for a long time, SpaceX managed to be the first private company to put a rocket (Falcon 1) in orbit in 2008. Musk’s company got a contract with NASA to develop the Falcon 9 rocket, the Dragon capsule and resupply the ISS (International Space Station).
In 2015, when the gates from Blue Origin’s secret laboratory opened, the world first learned about Bezos’s space company and its New Shepard rocket. The artefact effectively performed a couple of suborbital flights, becoming the first rocket to reach space and land back. This major achievement was rapidly followed by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket raising the bet to an orbital flight. Elon Musk, not content enough with SpaceX triumph, gloated that Bezo’s rocket was much simpler, rejecting the comparison between the two. This was one of the first public clashes between the two space suitors, firing up a real race towards the lead of the rockets and launchers business.
After this, Musk lightened the pace. SpaceX took the lead to place satellites in orbit and refuelling the ISS while their new rocket effectively performed a landing manoeuvre, hence reusing it. On the other side of the pitch, Blue Origin kept playing on a minor league of suborbital flights for certain experiments.
The turning point in the trajectory of Blue Origin seemed to occur in 2016 with the presentation of Bezo’s plan to build a large orbital rocket, the New Glenn. However, it has not yet been developed while SpaceX already had plans for a large rocket as well, the Falcon Heavy, which first flew in 2018, making it the most powerful rocket in operation. Musk strikes again.
SpaceX’s next milestone is the announcement of the creation of a constellation of satellites to provide internet to anywhere in the world in 2017, Starlink. Following the trend, Bezos sold out the Kuiper project through Amazon in 2019. This also sparked the occasional dispute between the companies since Bezos denounced that SpaceX was covering too many orbits that could harm the performance of other constellations. Meanwhile, SpaceX began to develop its new rocket: Starship. This rocket will be the largest and most powerful rocket ever developed and still the cheapest. Despite all of Musk’s propaganda verbiage, the disastrous flight attempts of the Starship have been the main topic of conversation within the space community. Anyway, Musk is never ready to lose and Starship performed its first successful landing manoeuvre on the 5th of May of 2021. Indeed, NASA chose SpaceX and its Starship to return to the moon. This was chosen in a competition in which Blue Origin was also participating with a lander. Elon Musk used the occasion to tease Bezos writing on Twitter: “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol.”
As of today, it seems that Elon Musk is confident to lead the development of the space industry being one of the major ambassadors of the idea of colonizing Mars. Nonetheless, a new business gap is to be filled: space tourism. Although SpaceX has already sent two groups of astronauts to the ISS, the North American company is still a neophyte in the space tourism sector. This business strategy became real with the first space tourist back in 2001, Dennis Tito. The American billionaire reached an agreement with the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) despite stiff American opposition. Tito took off on April 28, 2001, at sixty years of age, becoming the second oldest person to reach space, second only to John Glenn.
Blue Origin is now auctioning tourist seats for its maiden flight, which is expected soon. SpaceX for its part will use Starship to take tourists to the Moon, all paid for by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. In this new game, it is worth mentioning Sir Richard Branson and its company Virgin Galactic, which are actively working on this ostentatious feat.
Let’s see who will take the lead in such an exciting race.