Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The space race among U.S. billionaires is heating up, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning to build a moon base and Jeff Bezos pushing the ambitions of Blue Origin, which aims to return humans to the moon ahead of China’s planned mission in 2030.
SpaceX CEO Musk has said in recent podcast interviews and company meetings that he wants to build an “Alpha moon base” and place satellite launchers on the lunar surface, with plans for an initial public offering this year. A lunar base would help build what he envisioned would be an artificial intelligence computing network of up to a million satellites.
Musk’s increasing focus on the moon has shifted SpaceX’s focus away from the Mars colonization mission he has been promoting since he founded the company in 2002. As recently as last summer, Musk said he wanted to launch an unmanned Starship mission to the Red Planet, calling the moon a “distraction.”
In recent weeks, Bezos’s space company Blue Origin has also focused more on its own moon plans, shutting down its suborbital space tourism operations and shifting those resources to the Blue Moon lunar lander program before planning an unmanned lunar mission this year.
Musk now hopes to convince investors that SpaceX will remain a dominant force in space ahead of a planned IPO later this year that could value the company at more than $1 trillion. The company launched its latest astronaut mission to the International Space Station for NASA on Friday.
This week, after Musk posted a series of posts on X about “pivoting” to the moon, Bezos posted a black-and-white photo of a tortoise, reminiscent of Aesop’s fable, in which the slow and steady tortoise wins a race against the fast but impulsive hare. Blue Origin embraces this parable in its motto, “Gradatim Ferociter” (Latin for “Step by step, ferociously”).
Executives at other space companies say they also hope to benefit from increased spending by the U.S. government and its two major space contractors on new moon landing programs.
Bezos goes after Musk
Blue Origin’s unmanned lunar mission this year is a precursor to astronaut landings as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which also relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starship.
Seattle-based Blue Origin’s lander was shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas last week for thermal and vacuum testing, a key development step in its launch process.
Blue Origin and SpaceX are using billions of dollars in funding from NASA to build lunar landers, and NASA aims to use them to conduct a series of astronaut landings on the moon, starting with SpaceX’s Starship. NASA sent the first humans to the moon in 1969, and as part of the Apollo program, which ended in 1972, a total of 12 American astronauts landed on the moon.
