A Home on the High Frontier

Last week saw the launch of two of the most powerful rockets ever flown. On 16 January, SpaceX’s Starship was launched for its seventh test flight and its first stage booster was successfully caught—even though the upper stage was lost in a quite spectacular manner.

Earlier on the same day, New Glenn, the flagship of Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin took its maiden flight. Although the company’s much smaller New Shepard vehicle has performed many sub-orbital flights, this is the company’s first orbital vehicle. New Glenn is a similar vehicle to Falcon 9, but larger, and like Falcon 9 the first stage is designed to be recovered on a ship. On this first flight, recovery was attempted but the booster was destroyed as it entered the atmosphere. They are widely expected to get this right on subsequent flights, though and become a competitor to SpaceX.

Blue Origin’s entry into the reusable orbital launch market has rekindled popular interest in a billionaire space race between Elon Musk and Bezos—and sometimes Richard Branson—but in fact there is no such race—or, at least, things are not quite as they may seem. Because Musk has been the most publicly vocal about his plans, a lot of people believe that these three men are in a race to get humans to Mars. But Jeff Bezos does not want to send people to Mars, as he pointed out in a speech at the George W. Bush Presidential Centre in April 2018:

My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, “I have an idea for you. Why don’t you first for a year move to the top of Mount Everest. Because the top of Mount Everest is a garden paradise compared to Mars.”