Top Billionaires Space Race

Image of space (Credit: Pixabay)

It is arguably believed that the foundation for the space race and private space travel was brought about by Peter Diamandis who was a Greek-American engineer physician and entrepreneur best known for being a founder alongside Robert D Richards and Todd B Hawley of the American national student space society in the 1980s, well known as Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), which is a non-profit international student organization whose purpose is is to drive space advocacy of space exploration and development through educational and engineering projects.

Later on, Jeff Bezos became a chapter president of SEDS. In the 1990s, Peter Diamandis was very frustrated with the state of space physical process and decided to encourage it on and light the suborbital space tourism market by initiating a prize (X Prize) which led to Paul Allen becoming involved in the competition and created the Scaled Composites Tier One platform of SpaceShipOne and White Knight One which won the Ansari X-Prize in the 2000s.

The billionaire space race basically is the contention among entrepreneurs who have entered the space commercial enterprise from other enterprises (especially computing) which involves sending rockets to the ionosphere (mesosphere and thermosphere), orbital launch rockets and suborbital tourist spaceflights. The space race shows the aims of billionaires increasing beyond fulfilling the system of rules contracts, with their own social club of space age, in broadening capabilities and their own brilliancy.

SpaceX and Blue Origin Battle

It is evident that SpaceX and Blue Origin have always had a long continuum of group action where both companies give dueling press releases that contend with each other in making promulgations and events.

SpaceX satellite (Credit: Pixabay)

SpaceX and Blue Origin have before battled for the right to lease LC-39A (rocket launch platform used to launch Apollo moon missions) and SpaceX eventually won the lease back in 2013, but Blue Origin filed a suit in court against that, which is still presently in the guardianship of SpaceX while Blue Origin rented SLC-36 instead. Again in 2014, SpaceX won a court fight in a filed suit against Blue Origin to invalidate their patent on landing rockets aboard ships at sea. Ever since 2014, SpaceX had been attempting to land rockets at sea unsuccessfully but eventually in 2016, they succeeded even before Blue Origin ever built a sea-going platform to land rockets onto.

Blue Origin company headquarters in Seattle, WA (Credit: blueorigin)

Both companies (SpaceX and Blue Origin) have previously gotten into a twitter battle about the meaning of a used rocket, landed rocket and space-rocket.

Space Race Trends

Back in the late 2016, Blue Origin made ana announcement that the New Glenn, will be directly competing against SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, with a larger rocket but lower payload. Early 2021 (April), SpaceX made the headlines by beating Blue Origin to a 2.9 billion dollar contract to build the lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis program.