Bezos vs Musk billionaire space race gets serious with launches on same day – but who will win?

On 2:03 a.m. Thursday morning, the new space race began in earnest.

This time it’s not USA vs the Soviets, but a home-grown billionaire vs billionaire face-off.

Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, successfully blasted off a 320-foot-tall rocket ship made by his Blue Origin company from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the early hours of the morning. It made the company the first to successfully reach orbit on its first launch of an orbital-class rocket.

The un-manned New Glenn rocket ship is designed to carry objects, such as satellites, into outer space with part of it returning to earth and be re-used.

Not to be outdone, his rival, SpaceX founder Elon Musk – the richest man on the planet – launched a Starship rocket from his Starbase factory and launch site in Texas just after 5:30 p.m.

Things are said to be fever pitched between two men, both described as “ego fueled,” but Musk currently holds a serious lead in the race, with 138 SpaceX launches in 2024, compared to Blue Origin’s four.

“It’ll take a very long time for Blue Origin to catch SpaceX in terms of launches per year,” Ashlee Vance, author of “When the Heavens went on Sale,” told The Post.

“But this is a major achievement and milestone. It’s an incredibly hard and expensive business. Blue Origin has certainly now emerged as a legitimate competitor.”

Both launches were successes, but didn’t achieve all their objectives. Blue Origin wanted to land a rocket booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, but instead lost it.

Meanwhile, SpaceX successfully guided its Super Heavy rocket booster back to its launch site — but lost the Starship craft it launched in space.

Both rockets are designed to ship heavy payloads, such as satellites, into space. Such work can prove incredibly lucrative as thousands of satellites are backlogged for sending off the earth, but the costs of doing business also run incredibly high.

For New Glenn, the project has cost in excess of $2.5 billion so far and each launch runs around $68 million. Putting one of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rockets into space takes some $90 million per launch.

“They’re both in the game now,” Brad Stone, author of “Amazon Unbound,” told The Post. “SpaceX has had this commanding market share and now Blue Origin is there to compete. It’s a remarkable achievement.”

Despite being in competition, there doesn’t seem to be too much bad blood. Although Musk once predicted he will discover “unicorns dancing in the flame duct” of his rocket before Bezos gets one of his into outer space, he acknowledged the awesomeness of Blue Origin achieving lift off.

On his X account, Musk posted to Bezos, “Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt.”

Musk, who first rose to prominence through his Tesla electric car company and is worth $428 billion, has been closely aligned with the incoming Trump administration for months, and he has been appointed to head a new Department of Government Efficiency.

Bezos, founder of the shopping site Amazon and worth $235 billion, was later in buddying up with Trump, but made the move of cancelling his newspaper, The Washington Post, from endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He has also been seen dining at Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks.

There is speculation Musk and Bezos, along with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other technology big wigs, will all sit together at the presidential inauguration on Monday.

“It’s interesting that Musk and Bezos seemed to feud for years and have now bonded over Trump,” said Vance. “I didn’t see that coming.”

One area where the billionaire pair will be competing over the next four years is for contracts related to the government’s space agency, NASA.

Stone explained, “The companies compete for almost every NASA contract, and they sue each other over the results of those contracts. So they already have a contentious relationship.”

He was likely referring to a 2021 lawsuit Blue Origin launched over a $2.9 billion NASA astronaut lunar lander contract, which SpaceX had won. The company lost the lawsuit.

When it comes to angling for orbital business, there are two schools of thought. One is the two moguls are so far ahead of anyone else they will prove to be gentleman competitors. “I don’t think Elon is worried about SpaceX’s position; it’s so dominant,” said Vance, maintaining Musk won’t do much to derail the success of Bezos’ company.

“He seems genuinely excited about pushing forward broadly in space. And I think it’s a better look for SpaceX to have some competition.”

On the other hand, Musk could look at the success Bezos and his company are now having and revert to cut-throat Silicon Valley form.

“Elon will naturally use his proximity to Trump to privilege SpaceX,” said Stone. “He has a seat at the table, next to the king, and he’s going to use that to naturally burnish his business. They’re competitors.”

But there are commonalities. “They both want large numbers of people in space,” Rand Simberg, a space industry consultant pointed out to The Post.

“Elon does not want a monopoly.” And their overall ambitions run on parallel tracks: “Musk wants to colonize Mars and Bezos wants a billion people living in space.”

Musk founded SpaceX as a private company to provide space transportation and, ultimately, colonize Mars. In 2010, the company made its bones by being the first privately held company to put a spacecraft into orbit and recover it.

By 2024, he was called into service for one of his SpaceX spacecraft to bail out Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, astronauts stranded on the International Space Station after the Boeing rocket they were due to ride home on was deemed too risky by NASA.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos and has focused on creating rockets for space tourism and the shipping of heavy payloads into outer space. Blue Origin’s first manned mission took place in 2021 and lasted just 10 minutes. On board for the suborbital flight, which went to the edge of space, were Bezos himself and his brother Mark.

Future passengers included celebrities such as Michael Strahan and William Shatner. Bezos spent some 10 years and billions of his own dollars to get his rocket into space, allowing him to realize a childhood dream – as valedictorian at his high school graduation, said Stone, “he described his space ambition” – of being in the burgeoning business of outer space deliveries.

Early on in the endeavor, Bezos went so far as to establish a kind of think tank where people philosophized on going to the stars and science fiction writer Neal Stephenson was among those who offered input.

As the two billionaire’s wildly ambitious space dream become reality, the big winners are likely to be beyond the two wealthy men and their giant toys. “It’s a very big deal for the US,” said Vance. “In 25 years, the space program here has gone from the doldrums to the envy of the world.”

That said, we’re all strapped in, looking forward to seeing where it goes next.