With Bezos and the New Glenn, the Moon and Musk seem less distant

After the launch and recovery of the first stage of Blue Origin’s orbital rocket, the Amazon founder’s space standing soars, starting with his proposal for an alternative to Starship as early as Artemis 3

BY EMILIO COZZI

It is hard to grasp the magnitude of the feat when watching it only through a screen.
When an orbital rocket returns to Earth’s atmosphere and lands on a platform at sea, there is little or nothing around it to provide a sense of scale.
For about ten years, this has been happening with the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets: watching them land with extraordinary regularity has become almost routine, to the point that they can seem like toy rockets. In reality, they are metal cylinders nearly four meters wide (about the length of an Suv) and as tall as a ten-story building.

It is only when images are released showing people working around their legs that one realizes the amount of power, precision, and engineering required to bring a colossal structure weighing hundreds of tons back to the ground with such grace. What Elon Musk accomplished was and remains incredible. Now, however, Jeff Bezos has arrived, and he has immediately begun setting records.

The New Glenn Returns

After its January debut, on its second launch the New Glenn, the second most powerful rocket on the market (after Falcon Heavy, since Starship is not yet ready), sent Nasa’s dual Escapade mission toward Mars (along with a Viasat technology demonstrator designed to test new deep-space communication technologies). And while the two probes were making their way toward the Red Planet, the New Glenn booster returned toward the Atlantic Ocean, slowed to within a few dozen meters of the water’s surface, adjusted its trajectory with a surgical maneuver, and settled onto the autonomous drone ship Jacklyn. Even in the case of New Glenn, the images don’t do justice to human ingenuity. It’s only by looking at the photo posted a few days later by Bezos, with technicians at work, that you realize just how massive the booster really is.

Blue Origin has thus carved out its own niche in history. Almost ten years after the first ground landing of a SpaceX launch vehicle, achieved on December 21, 2015, the first stage of New Glenn has landed intact on an ocean platform.
For now, it is the largest rocket to have accomplished this feat: the first stage alone has a diameter of seven meters and stands as tall as an 18-story building. Musk duly honored his competitor with a congratulatory post on X.

Today, two multibillionaires are competing to dominate space, and the gap, still enormous, between the first, Musk, who revolutionized the sector, and the second, Bezos, is narrowing. To be sure, Bezos knows he has a lot to catch up on. But he’s also aware that everything could change “depending on the Moon.”

“Heaven and Earth”

New Glenn is a heavy lift launcher: it can carry 45 tons into low Earth orbit (Falcon 9 carries 22) and place seven tons into lunar orbit. SpaceX, however, has the Falcon Heavy, currently the most powerful commercial rocket, with which the company based in Starbase, Texas (its first headquarters was in Hawthorne, California) manages to recover two boosters from the same launch. The scene of the simultaneous return of the two stages after the maiden flight, the one that released a Tesla Roadster convertible and Starman, the mannequin in the driver’s seat, will remain in the history books. The Space Launch System is intended only for Artemis missions, while Starship, although it promises yet another revolution in the sector, is not yet ready. And this is where, for Musk, problems could begin.

When in October the current acting administrator of Nasa, Sean Duffy, sounded the alarm about the race to the Moon, Blue Origin forcefully returned to the competition as a player capable of providing an alternative to Starship. The development of SpaceX’s launch system, selected to serve as the lunar lander, is indeed behind schedule: after eleven test flights it has not yet completed an orbital mission. And the timeline (2028, the new date for Artemis 3) to bring humanity back to the lunar surface is becoming increasingly tight, making it progressively more plausible that China could arrive first. “If Nasa wanted to accelerate the timeline, we would move Heaven and Earth, in the literal sense of the phrase, to try to reach the Moon earlier. And I think we have some good ideas,” said Blue Origin’s chief executive Dave Limp in an interview with Ars Technica.

Two Alternatives for Isaacman

Blue Origin has been selected by Nasa to provide the lunar landing vehicle starting from Artemis 5. The idea is now emerging of adapting the vehicles developed for cargo transport to carry a human crew. The company has made enormous progress, and New Glenn, after only two launches, has shown that it can be a reliable rocket. In tandem with Nasa’s Space Launch System (the SLS launches astronauts aboard the Orion capsule, who then must transfer to the commercial vehicle, SpaceX or Blue Origin, to descend to the Moon) the scenario appears realistic.

Responding to criticism, Musk stated that Artemis 3 will instead be a mission carried out entirely by SpaceX, without contribution from the SLS. A few days ago, reporter Audrey Decker wrote in Politico that SpaceX is working on an uncrewed lunar landing scheduled for June 2027, with the goal of returning humanity to the lunar surface in September 2028. For now, however, these are intentions. Actions will be needed.

It is not yet known what Jared Isaacman thinks about all this. He was once again nominated by Trump as the next administrator of Nasa after the reversal in May. He is another billionaire at the top of the space sector, strongly supported by his friend Musk. Yet Isaacman too will be forced to carefully weigh the facts in order to achieve the goal of returning to the Moon before anyone else, especially if the Starship option were to prove truly unworkable. It is also a matter of prestige, and the Trump administration has no intention of being humiliated.

Bezos and Blue Origin do not have a revolutionary vehicle like the one developed by SpaceX, but the completion of two orbital missions, one of them toward Mars, the supreme ambition of Musk, provides a solid foundation. The company is developing more traditional lunar landers, is placing its own mega satellite constellation into orbit (formerly known as Kuiper, now Amazon Leo), and Bezos is the only space billionaire with wealth comparable to that of his competitor.

True, Elon Musk ranks highest in every listing. This is why a fall from the stars could carve out an enormous crater.