Three Cheers for Blue Origin … No Really

May Be Interested In:Two Jan. 6 Boosters Are Now Trump Appointees Strangling USAID From The Inside

Here’s a sort of update from the world of billionairedom. Today Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, was set to attempt its first launch of its hulking “New Glenn” rocket. But they’ve now scrubbed that attempt because of some technical issues and they’re going to try again on Thursday. Blue Origin is either 100% owned or near 100% owned by Bezos. It’s unclear whether some very limited equity may have gone to some early employees. But big picture: it’s Jeff Bezos’ company. It’s not part of Amazon or some public company. It’s his.

The company now seems to be Bezos’ main focus and he’s apparently relocated to Florida to give the company his especial attention. While all space technology is of interest to me, normally I wouldn’t be rooting for a new Bezos business venture. I have no particular beef with Bezos. But as we’ve seen repeatedly in recent months and years, what we might call the super-billionaires have way, way too much power. But in this case I’m really hoping this launch succeeds and that Blue Origin makes big strides in general.

I’m doing this post to explain why.

This is because right now the U.S. government and, in a way, the world is insanely dependent on SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company. As you know, SpaceX was gotten off the ground with a lot of government subsidies and contracts. But now the U.S. government is wildly dependent on it and it’s become a critical private-sector player in the near-earth-orbit delivery business. It might not have been possible without the U.S. government’s start-up money and obviously it’s not like Elon Musk developed anything himself. But what it’s important to understand, as far as I’ve been able to understand it, is that the technology is genuinely transformative. I don’t think there’s any one key invention. Transformative in this sense is taking a lot of 21st century technology and getting it to work consistently and economically at scale. In addition to now having a very reliable and cost-competitive project that governments and companies around the world want to use, it’s also allowed Musk to put thousands of his own satellites into orbit. As The New York Times explained in this article back in 2023, more than half the functioning satellites in orbit today are owned and controlled by SpaceX and Elon Musk.

Think about that: more than half the working satellites in space (so not counting the derelict dead ones still floating around) are controlled by this one guy. That’s what Starlink is based on. Starlink plus the space delivery service isn’t just producing an insane amount of wealth for Musk, it’s also producing a kind of power that transcends wealth, though wealth on his scale creates a kind of power far greater than any one person should have.

When you’re a U.S. military contractor, you never have total control of your technology. The U.S. government could in various ways dictate what SpaceX can and can’t do. The same goes for Starlink. And I think in the coming years we’ll need to be thinking about doing that. But in practice those aren’t muscles the U.S. government is used to flexing. There are already various examples of Musk operating in ways that no other defense contractor with a security clearance would be allowed to act. We saw this when Musk was playing footsie with Vladimir Putin over Starlink and Ukraine. I have thought for the last year that we should see Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and heavy role in the presidential election as part of this — making himself too big to touch as it were. We’re seeing an example of this right now in the UK. Musk is really, really disliked in the UK. People hate him — way, way more than in the U.S., where he’s more a 50-50 thing. But as the Times notes here, that hasn’t prevented him from basically creating a governing crisis over a years old anti-immigrant-infused grooming scandal.

This is just one example of the way that Musk has become something unique even among super-billionaires: his mix of ultra-wealth combined with key holds over communications and national security-technology has made him function more like a state than perhaps any individual in human history.

Which brings us back to Blue Origin. We need to be trimming back, not expanding, the power of the super billionaires. But as far as I can tell, Bezos is the only other player in any position to compete with Musk in space, certainly the only other American. I followed SpaceX and Blue Origin back when they were both still in the aspirational and testing stages. And my impression over the last couple years was that Musk had basically won that battle. All we’ve seen from Blue Origin are those pay-for-a-seat suborbital flights. But Bezos and Blue Origin have by no means given up. SpaceX clearly got there first, but from my admittedly cursory knowledge of the two companies’ technology there’s no clear reason Blue Origin can’t get there too. Amazon has something called Project Kuiper, which is essentially a competitor to Starlink. For the moment they’re having to get started using other launch systems, including SpaceX’s, to get their satellites in orbit.

On the question of technology, I don’t think SpaceX has any breakout technology that they’ve developed or over which they have sole possession. The triumph of SpaceX is taking something that contemporary technology should make possible and actually getting it to work consistently and economically in real life. And in case anyone is thinking that’s a knock, in the real world that critical step is what separates the winners from the also-rans. That’s a big, big deal. But I don’t get the sense that there’s any obvious reason that Blue Origin can’t accomplish the same thing. Jeff Bezos is one of the very few people in the world who has enough money to keep at it as long as it takes. And it seems like it’s his number one focus. Remember that he retired from being CEO of Amazon a few years ago.

In any case, having two super billionaires who have a dominant position in putting things into space isn’t great. But it’s vastly better than having a single super billionaire who does. And that’s especially the case when the single guy is Elon Musk.


share Share facebook pinterest whatsapp x print

Similar Content

Off The Rails And Off To The Races
Off The Rails And Off To The Races
We Are Americans. We Don’t Have Kings
We Are Americans. We Don’t Have Kings
Elon Musk And His ‘Unknown Soldiers’ Have The Federal Workforce ‘On Edge’
Elon Musk And His ‘Unknown Soldiers’ Have The Federal Workforce ‘On Edge’
Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety
Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety
Supreme Court Hears Major Trans Rights Case
Supreme Court Hears Major Trans Rights Case
Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access
Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Behind the Headlines: The Truth You Need to Know | © 2025 | Daily News