Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos: Who’s going to win in space?

Editor’s Note: Dr. Don Lincoln is a senior physicist at Fermilab and does research using the Large Hadron Collider. He has written numerous books and produces a series of science education videos. He is the author of, most recently, “The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things that Will Blow Your Mind.” Follow him on Facebook. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

This week, we witnessed another blow in a very public battle between two heavyweights. I’m talking about Elon Musk’s successful vertical landing of his Falcon 9 rocket and his undisguised glee at trumping Jeff Bezos’ recent vertical landing of New Shepard.

Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and PayPal while Jeff Bezos is founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are privately held aerospace companies whose goals are the privatization of space exploration.

Don Lincoln

Of the two, Musk is the more flamboyant and entertaining. He’s like a real world Tony Stark, minus the flying Iron Man suit and weapons. Bezos is known to be more private. Judging by the number of their tweets – Musk’s 1,500 vs. Bezos’ 5 – we know who likes to talk.

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But when it comes to passion, the two are an equal match. Both of them want to bring humanity into a new era of commercial spaceflight.

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Musk’s plan is to build a heavy lift rocket that would make spaceflight more economical. His big idea is to send humans to Mars in a decade or two. Once the heavy lifting technology is reliable, the next step is working out the issues of interplanetary travel.

Perhaps his grandest vision statement was revealed when he said that he’d like to die on Mars and preferably not on impact.

Bezos holds his plans a bit closer to his chest, but his company’s successes seem to be aimed more at the suborbital tourist market.

His New Shepard capsule, which successfully landed on November 24, is designed to travel about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) above the surface of the Earth and land safely. If he can do this economically, there are many affluent people who would pay to see the Earth from space. Interestingly, Bezos has publicly rejected any plans to compete for U.S. national security missions.

It’s been rather fun to observe the catty public communications between these two strong-willed leaders. Bezos was close-lipped when SpaceX successfully lifted a payload to the International Space Station in May of 2012 and also when SpaceX placed a satellite into a geostationary orbit in December 2013. But recently, he’s loosened up.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly into space, was launched in a Vostok 1 space capsule on April 12, 1961. He spent 108 minutes orbiting the Earth before parachuting back to firm ground.

Less than a month after Gagarin's trip, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space. On May 5, 1961, Shepard piloted Freedom 7, the first manned mission in the Mercury program. His suborbital flight lasted a little more than 15 minutes.

Sputnik I, the world's first satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. It orbited the Earth every 98 minutes.

Laika the dog is pictured aboard Sputnik II on November 13, 1957. She was the first animal to orbit the Earth. She did not survive her trip, but the mission provided valuable data that paved the way for the first human in space.

John Glenn, aboard the Friendship 7, became the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. He also set a record as the oldest astronaut in space when, at the age of 77, he went on a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1996.

Valentina Tereshkova, seen here with Yuri Gagarin, is the first woman to fly into space. She piloted the Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963.

Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was the first human to die during a space mission. He died when the Soyuz 1 spacecraft crashed during its return to Earth on April 23, 1967. It was his second spaceflight.

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission put the first humans on the moon. Neil Armstrong famously commemorated his first steps on the moon by saying, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, who was with Armstrong on Apollo 11, salutes the US flag on the lunar surface. Aldrin followed Armstrong and became the second man to walk on the moon.

This is the first photograph of Earth's south polar ice cap. It was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 as the astronauts traveled to the moon in December 1972.

Skylab, the United States' first space station, orbited Earth from 1973 to 1979. The Soviet program had launched their first space station, Salyut, in 1971, and it stayed in space for 15 years.

On July 15, 1975, Cold War adversaries temporarily broke the thaw when the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on their first joint space mission. Russia's Soyuz craft launched seven hours before the US Apollo craft, and the two vehicles linked up 52 hours after Soyuz lifted off. Here, the two crews pose for a portrait.

Soyuz 19 commander Alexei Leonov, left, shakes hands with Thomas Stafford, commander of the Apollo 18, on that first joint mission in 1975.

Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, center, looks at a homemade rocket in Havana, Cuba, in 2009. Mendez became the first Latin American, the first person of African descent and the first Cuban to fly in space when he flew aboard the Soviet Soyuz 38 on September 18, 1980.

Columbia made the first orbital flight of NASA's space shuttle program on April 12, 1981. Here, crew members John Watts Young, left, and Robert Laurel Crippen hold a model of the orbiter in 1979.

Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space when she was part of a crew aboard the space shuttle Challenger in June 1983.

Guion "Guy" Bluford was the first African-American to go into space. He was a mission specialist on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983.

In February 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless became the first astronaut to float in space untethered, thanks to a jetpack-like device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit. The units are no longer used, but astronauts now wear a similar backpack device in case of emergency.

Jan Davis and Mark Lee were the first couple to go into space together when the husband and wife were astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour in 1992.

The private company SpaceX sent an unmanned capsule with supplies to the International Space Station on October 7, 2012. It was the first commercial space mission and the first of a dozen commercial cargo flights under a contract with NASA.

New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator were released by NASA in 2015. The New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006. It's the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its moons. The mission completed the reconnaissance of the classical solar system, and it made the United States the first nation to send a space probe to every planet from Mercury to Pluto.

Famous firsts in space

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The technology that will be crucial to bringing the price of spaceflight down is one that opens the gateway to reusable rockets.

SpaceX has experimented with landing rockets on a barge in the ocean and three attempts had been unsuccessful. So when Bezos’ New Shepard rocket launched to a height of 100 kilometers and successfully landed vertically just a few feet from its launch point, it heralded a significant breakthrough in the commercial space race.

Bezos first tweet ever was: “The rarest of beasts - a used rocket. Controlled landing not easy, but done right, can look easy.” Musk was a bit dismissive in response: “It is, however, important to clear up the difference between ‘space’ and ‘orbit’.”

Musk correctly pointed out that the New Shepard simply rose to a great height and returned to Earth, but it didn’t orbit. It might be counterintuitive, but to successfully orbit the Earth, you need to put 100 times as much energy into getting the payload to go sideward than you need to lift it above the surface. Musk’s rockets can orbit, so his technology is far superior in this regard.

SpaceX’s success on Monday was that it gently landed a rocket that also successfully inserted 11 satellites into orbit. Bezos’s congratulatory tweet had enough catty snark to be funny: “Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!”

It’s hard to know which of these two companies will win the commercial space race, but it appears that Musk has the advantage. He has over 60 missions contracted worth about $7 billion. On the other hand, it would be foolish to count Bezos out; after all, he has built one of the most successful Internet companies in the world. It may be that his focus on suborbital travel is simply a conservative business milestone on the way to a more ambitious vision.

This really is an epic battle between two visionary tech titans, and whether you’re more interested in commercial space flight or simply their exchanges on Twitter, all earthlings win.

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