Earth’s biggest rivals bid to escape the atmosphere

John Thornhill

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft breaks apart shortly after liftoff at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Sunday, June 28, 2015. The rocket was carrying supplies to the International Space Station. (AP Photo/John Raoux)©AP

A short time ago, in a galaxy close to home, the space race was all about the rivalry between the 20th century’s two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the US.

Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in April 1961 captivated the world’s imagination and triggered an explosion of investment and innovation in the US.

A month later, President John F Kennedy pledged that his nation would “move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space”. The US fulfilled his promise to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade — even though Kennedy was no longer alive to celebrate it.

Our Earth has rotated many times since an astronaut last walked on the Moon in 1972. The Soviet Union has collapsed; Nasa’s budget has been shredded. The US space agency’s share of federal spending has fallen to just 11 per cent of what it was in the mid-1960s — even as new players, such as China and India, have joined the field.

Technology has also developed at astonishing speed. The smartphone in your pocket contains as much computing power as Nasa possessed in 1969. So it is perhaps fitting that — in the popular imagination at least — the space race is being re-run by two tech billionaires: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both intent on developing extraterrestrial travel. Few other changes so neatly highlight how the world has evolved from one of state-inspired enterprise and collective ambition to one of private affluence and personal expression.

This week, Mr Bezos briefly outshone his rival after his space vehicle, named New Shepard, flew just beyond the threshold of space and safely returned to Earth, landing a few feet from where it was launched. Deploying reusable rockets, the “Holy Grail” of space travel in Mr Bezos’s words, could transform the cost structure of the industry. His seemingly fantastical vision of “millions of people living and working in space” inched closer to reality.

In an interview with the Washington Post, which he also owns, Mr Bezos said he envisaged a day when all heavy industry could be offshored (or perhaps off-planeted) into space, leaving the Earth “preserved as this gem.” He suggested that his first human space flight could take place as early as 2017.

Having made his fortune at Amazon, Mr Bezos founded his space company, Blue Origin in 2000. Its activities have been shrouded in secrecy and its corporate philosophy is reflected in the company’s Latin motto: Gradatim Ferociter (step-by-step, ferociously). Blue Origin’s “incremental development” and “methodical innovation” appear to be taken straight out of Amazon’s own managerial manual.

The smartphone in your pocket contains as much computing power as Nasa possessed in 1969

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By temperament and style, Mr Musk appears the very opposite of Mr Bezos. He has been described by his biographer, Ashlee Vance, as a “sci-fi version of P T Barnum”. So it came as little surprise that the showman quickly took to Twitter, first to congratulate and then disparage his rival’s inferior technology.

Mr Musk, who made his fortune from PayPal and is now busily disrupting other industries with his Tesla electric cars and solar panels, founded his own space exploration company, SpaceX, in 2002. Its stated mission is to revolutionise space technology with the ultimate goal of allowing people to live on other planets. Mr Musk has declared that he himself would one day like to die on Mars (although not on impact).

He has conceded, though, that it will take many years to develop a powerful enough rocket; and it may be tougher still to make Mars habitable. “It’s a fixer-upper of a planet,” he once observed. “But we could make it work.”

SpaceX is already having a big impact on the space industry and has completed about 20 successful launches with a long backlog of flights. Its Falcon rockets have blasted satellites into orbit — at some $60m a pop — and are challenging the state-run launch companies in the US, Russia, China and Europe.

It may be tempting to dismiss this space obsession of Mr Bezos and Mr Musk as a classic — if extreme — case of “toys for boys”. Other hubristic billionaires, including Richard Branson and Paul Allen, have also been lured by the prospect of commercial space travel and are investing heavily too.

The rich have always loved to flaunt their wealth in fashionable ways, to amass vast art collections or build extravagant homes. In medieval Italy, two wealthy families outdid each other to build ever taller towers in the city of San Gimignano. In the early 20th century, Henry Frick competed with Andrew Carnegie to build the most opulent mansion in Manhattan.

If today’s billionaires are going to flash their cash, then there are certainly more senseless ways to do it. And if some governments have given up dreaming about space, then maybe the private sector has to take up the challenge.

Competition, whether between nations or companies, is the rocket fuel of ingenuity and urgency. It is inspirational that at least some bold souls on our planet have moved on from moonshot technologies and are now dreaming of walking on Mars. / Financial Times