The two space billionaires have previously jousted over whose rocket is bigger. Mark Wilson / Getty Images WASHINGTON — Amazon founder and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos unveiled Thursday a mock-up of a lunar lander from his Blue Origin rocket company. Bezos, the world's richest person, who's worth an estimated $107 billion, also proclaimed his aspiration for humanity within generations to live in vast, glass-walled space colonies. "We can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we would have 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins," said Bezos at his presentation in Washington, DC. The glitzy event featured a rock music intro, purple lighting, and a swinging camera on a crane for audience close-ups. "This would be an incredible civilization," said Bezos of his space colonies. Today, our founder shared our vision to go to space to benefit Earth. We must return to the Moon—this time to stay. We’re ready to support @NASA in getting there by 2024 with #bluemoon. Bezos has invested billions into his private space company, Blue Origin, which plans to launch the first crewed flight of its suborbital "New Shepard" rocket later this year, and a very large (270 feet tall) "New Glenn" rocket in 2021. His moon lander, measuring more than 21 feet wide, would comfortably fit inside that large rocket, he noted. And it could serve as a lander for NASA's work-in-progress plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2024, a March directive made by Vice President Mike Pence. Fellow space entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk of SpaceX, however, immediately took a shot at Bezos with a photo-altered tweet. The two space billionaires have previously jousted over whose rocket is bigger. In his presentation, Bezos also took a few potshots at Musk's own space aspirations. Musk has famously said he wants to "die on Mars," but Bezos called that planet too far away for colonization. Bezos also decried "fake" reusable rockets that need lengthy refurbishment before their next launch, a complaint aimed at Musk's Falcon 9 rockets. So Musk was in a sense just responding to those jabs with his crude tweet. Beyond Musk, other observers criticized Bezos's space aspirations, starting with his priorities. A weird thing about all the billionaires with HG Wells space dreams is that they’re missing this obvious opportunity to be revered on THIS planet for literally helping save it. Like, Jeff, my good dude, spend $50 billion on solar panels, see how public opinion swings your way! One expert on water resources took issue with his vision of the future, premised on endless population growth and energy demand increases. (Bezos asserted in the presentation that covering the Earth's land surface with solar panels would need to happen to satisfy future energy needs, necessitating human migration to space instead.) TFW you discover someone's major motivation is based on a complete misunderstanding of reality. https://t.co/v0B3fNjmIq Still others asked why the owner of a super-wealthy internet company couldn't livestream his presentation. When @ElonMusk started launching things for @SpaceX he did it live for all to see - even when things kept blowing up. We watched right over his shoulder. Alas @JeffBezos won't even livestream a simple powerpoint presentation from a @BlueOrigin media event. NASA still hasn't come up with a price tag for landing astronauts on the moon by 2024, promising Congress at a hearing this week a budget outline still in discussion with the Office of Management and Budget. Ars Technica has reported that the space agency estimates it would need as much as an additional $8 billion a year over the next five years on top of its yearly $19 billion budget, but whether it will go to Congress with that request — already iffy in the current political environment — is still not clear. If NASA does go back to the moon, it will likely need someone to build a lander, since it doesn't have one now and doesn't have any money in the budget for one. Blue Origin has a three-year head start on designing one, Bezos noted toward the end of his presentation.<doc-sep>The US Air Force has, traditionally, done a terrible job of buying new rockets. Now, as lawmakers consider a total reorganization of the US military’s space operations, the Pentagon’s latest attempt to purchase new launch vehicles has become a hotly contested rivalry featuring the military-industrial complex and rocket billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Of course, there’s a Russia angle, too. The battle could shape not just US national security but also the future of private space companies writ large—access to revenue from military launches bolster a rocket-maker’s offerings to a range of potential customers. Musk’s SpaceX revolutionized the space industry and became the world’s leading commercial launcher thanks, in part, to winning Pentagon business. SpaceX’s success forced its primary competitors—longtime military contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman—to compete on price and innovation for the first time in years. Add in Bezos’s company Blue Origin, with its own Silicon Valley-inflected approach to space, and the US boasts perhaps the deepest industrial base for space-launch in world history. The Air Force will only choose two companies to fly five years’ worth of national-security missions, a prize of more than a billion dollars in annual revenue split 60-40 between the winning companies. The losing firms will be left to compete for civil or commercial launches without the support of the traditional third leg of the rocket-business stool. The stakes had Blue Origin scrambling to convince the Air Force to change the way it is structuring the contracts, or at least delay the final choice. Despite political pressure, the Air Force has stood firm and will choose just two companies. Perhaps the most conservative customers in the space world will be responsible for choosing the culture that will define American rockets for the next decade. Can it do so without halting the last decade’s progress? How not to buy a rocket If you want to understand the current fight over Air Force space dollars, you need to look at some history. In the 1990s, the Air Force began the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV) program to replace old rockets based on ballistic missiles. This year, it was renamed the National Security Space Launch program (NSSL), in part because some of its newer SpaceX vehicles are reusable, not expendable. In its early years, the new design process produced a string of failures. Over-optimistic assumptions by its two participants, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, almost pushed their rocket-building divisions to go out of business. In 2006, the US military—desperate for access to space—overruled the Federal Trade Commission and allowed the two firms to join forces in a subsidized rocket monopoly called United Launch Alliance, which left the American space industry globally uncompetitive and stagnant. By the end of 2014, the program that began as EELV had cost taxpayers $60.5 billion, more than twice the original estimate when it kicked off 16 years before. This is in part because space technology is expensive and difficult to design and, as auditors pointed out for years, the Air Force did not understand what it was paying ULA to do and did not manage the process. Then Musk’s SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket arrived on the scene, with plans to explore the solar system and build reusable rockets. Musk, looking for more business, sued the Air Force for the right to compete against ULA, arguing its much cheaper rockets could put satellites into orbit just as well. SpaceX benefitted from a geopolitical turn of events as well: ULA’s workhorse rocket, the Atlas V, is powered by Russian-built rocket engines as part of a post-Cold War policy to keep former Soviet engineers away from rogue states. After Putin’s invasion of Crimea, however, buying expensive engines from a Russian state-owned enterprise became politically damaging, through no fault of ULA. The legal battles ended in a sealed settlement that allowed SpaceX to compete and win 10 launches; a rough comparison with ULA’s prices suggests the competition saved taxpayers more than $1 billion. Today, US military and spy agencies rely on SpaceX and ULA to fly surveillance, communication and navigation satellites seen as vital to projecting US power overseas. However, those contracts expire in 2022, and Congress has forbidden the Air Force from paying for any new Russian engines—which is to say, the Atlas V—after that year. A new round of procurement The military is preparing to purchase a new round of about 25 satellite launches between 2020 and 2024. It still wants to select just two providers when it makes the final cut, arguing that there is not enough business to support three American rocket companies. This time there are four competitors: Bezos’ Blue Origin and the defense contractor Northrop Grumman have joined SpaceX and ULA in the race. The Air Force started out by offering cash for the competitors to develop their rockets and launch systems before the final selection was made. In October 2018, Blue, Northrop and ULA split $2.3 billion of this funding to prepare next-generation designs. That includes ULA’s Vulcan rocket, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Northrop’s OmegA. SpaceX did not receive any of that development funding, with Musk later telling acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan that his company’s proposal was poor and “missed the mark.” The company’s next rocket, Starship, is a huge vehicle designed for space exploration and isn’t expected to fly for several years. AP Photo/Jae C. Hong Turns out this space stuff is pretty lucrative. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets—still the newest orbital rockets on the planet—are likely to be leading competitors in the final selection, if only because no competitor has a new rocket that will be ready to fly by 2022. That’s one reason Blue Origin pushed for a two-year delay: The Air Force will have to make decisions based on designs and plans, not operational vehicles. Industry sources outside Blue Origin say the parameters of the contest were clear when bidding began. Blue, which originally hoped to fly its New Glenn rocket for the first time next year, is now expecting a 2021 debut. The company still has yet commit to a final design of the rocket and complete test programs on the two different engines that will propel it into space. Competitors also point out that the procurement request doesn’t prioritize factors like system readiness and schedule, which gives an advantage to companies who haven’t finished their rockets yet. Others argue that the haste to make a choice is designed to favor the incumbents, ULA and SpaceX, and their existing vehicles. That concern is focused on a provision allowing the use of backup vehicles if the primary rocket isn’t ready, which could allow ULA to compete its unbuilt Vulcan rocket, then use an Atlas V to complete the mission. And the competitors are skeptical of language in the final procurement that allows the Air Force to select the second provider based on how it complements the first, a criteria they say is totally subjective. Above all, the Air Force insists it cannot wait to fund a rocket program if it wants to have viable options by the time the Atlas V is retired in 2022. But given the lack of flight-ready new rockets, some observers expect the outcome will be purchasing the same rockets the US military uses today, at least for the early years of this procurement. That doesn’t necessarily match the Air Force’s stated goal of driving innovation in the rocket industry—and ending reliance on the Russian engines used by ULA. An opaque decision process Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, wrote a letter to the Pentagon last month asking for the Air Force to delay the procurement decision until the service can get a look at the newest options and their prices. The result was a slightly altered contract. But the military is full speed ahead. “The industrial base is ready,” Air Force secretary Heather Wilson said in a statement. The participating companies each spent more than a million dollars on lobbying in 2018. Smith, whose district includes operations for both Amazon and Blue Origin, certainly has an interest in his home-state company.<doc-sep>On Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin presented its plans to reach the Moon, including a brand new design for its "Blue Moon" lander. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk then took to Twitter to crudely imply that Bezos was building unwarranted hype for a plan that wasn't going anywhere — a move that could be read as the ultimate example of "pot calling the kettle black" irony. In the tweet, Musk writes "Oh stop teasing, Jeff," along with a winky face emoji and a photoshopped image of the lander with "Blue Moon" replaced by the words "Blue Balls," a reference to the uncomfortable feeling that can follow sexual excitement without release. Maybe Elon Musk has never heard the proverb about how visionary CEOs who consistently fail to make good on their own ambitious promises about space travel shouldn't throw stones. That's how the saying goes, right? This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original original article.<doc-sep>
If there are two things that Elon Musk loves, they must be tweeting and using his tweets to tweak Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — especially when it comes to the two billionaires’ private space programs. So it should probably have come as no surprise that Musk, who in addition to running Tesla is also CEO of space-exploration company SpaceX, went on Twitter late Thursday to poke at Bezos and his Blue Origin space company. The impetus for Musk’s cheeky tweet was Blue Origin unveiling the Blue Moon, its first planned lunar lander. Bezos showed off the Blue Moon at a presentation Thursday. The New York Times wrote a story about the lunar lander, which included an image from Bezos’ presentation that showed the Blue Moon on the moon and the words “Blue Moon” across the lander. That’s where Musk came in. Oh stop teasing, Jeff 😉 pic.twitter.com/wuWPENcSE1 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 10, 2019 Musk started his tweet saying, “Oh stop teasing, Jeff,” next to an image of a winking face emoji. But there was more. The rest of the tweet included an altered image from the Times’ story that showed the Blue Moon upon the moon’s surface. Only under a different name. In the image tweeted by Musk, the word “Moon” had been marked out and replaced by … “Balls.” Related Articles Tesla ditches radar sensors Elon Musk upheld after a fatal crash Opinion: California air board should force Tesla divestment of Bitcoin Tesla announces it will stop taking bitcoin payments Elon Musk, billionaire comedian for a night Tesla will pay $750,000 fine, build microgrid system to settle air quality violations So, yeah: Elon Musk, a billionaire CEO of one of the most famous companies in the world, sent out a tweet using a colorful bit of juvenile humor. This wasn’t the first time Musk has used Twitter to make fun of Bezos’ space-exploration efforts. In April, Musk called Bezos a “copycat” for his plans to launch 3,000 satellites into orbit to provide wireless internet access to remote areas around the world. That tweet included the word “copy” next to a cat emoji. So much for space being the final frontier when you have Twitter as your battlefield.