The Stratolaunch rivalries are no longer part of the billionaire space race, after 2019, having been suspended at the time of Paul Allen's death. Former rivalries Stratolaunch vs Virgin Orbit They are in a race to be first to launch paying customers on short spaceshots, with rival technological philosophies of space capsules and spaceplanes, respectively. Blue Origin vs Virgin Galactic īlue Origin and Virgin Galactic are in the same market, suborbital space tourism, with New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, respectively. In April 2021, SpaceX beat Blue Origin to a 2.9 billion dollar contract to build the lunar lander for NASA's Artemis program. The Blue Origin New Armstrong would be similar in function to the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System that Elon Musk unveiled at the same conference. Īt the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson elaborated on the Bezos vision previously outlined in the New Glenn announcement. In late 2016, Blue Origin announced the New Glenn, directly competing against SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, with a larger rocket but lower payload. Then SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 first stage, which had been used to launch a satellite into orbit, prompting more Twitter battles at the start of 2016, such as Bezos tweeting "welcome to the club". SpaceX had previously launched and landed its Grasshopper rocket multiple times without reaching space. SpaceX and Blue Origin got into a Twitter battle about the meaning of a used rocket, landed rocket, spacerocket, at the end of 2015, when New Shepard successfully landed, after a suborbital jaunt into space. SpaceX had been attempting to land rockets at sea since 2014, finally succeeding in 2016, before Blue Origin ever even built a sea-going platform to land rockets onto. SpaceX filed suit against Blue Origin to invalidate their patent on landing rockets aboard ships at sea. It is currently in the hands of SpaceX, while Blue Origin rented SLC-36 instead. SpaceX won the lease in 2013, but Blue Origin filed suit in court against that. SpaceX and Blue Origin battled for the right to lease LC-39A, the rocket launch platform that was used to launch the Apollo moon missions.
Blue Origin and SpaceX have had dueling press releases that compete with each other's announcements and events. SpaceX and Blue Origin have had a long history of conflict. On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin also made a successful flight to space. On July 11, 2021, Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic made a successful flight to space.
Elon Musk has expressed excitement for a new space race. The billionaire space race shows the aims of billionaires extend beyond just fulfilling government contracts, with their own gilding of the space age, in extending capabilities and their own luster. The base techniques of Tier One also form the basis for Stratolaunch Systems of Vulcan Aerospace. The technology of the winning entrant was then licensed by Richard Branson's Virgin Group as a basis to found Virgin Galactic. This led to Paul Allen becoming involved in the competition, creating the Scaled Composites Tier One platform of SpaceShipOne and White Knight One which won the Ansari X-Prize in the 2000s. In the 1990s, Diamandis, disappointed with the state of space development, decided to spur it on and spark the suborbital space tourism market, by initiating a prize, the X Prize. Later, Jeff Bezos became a chapter president of SEDS. In the 1980s, he founded an American national student space society, the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). The groundwork for the billionaire space race and private spaceflight was arguably laid by Peter Diamandis, an American entrepreneur.