The competition between billionaire space entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos has reached new heights.
On Monday (Sept. 12), Bezos announced that his company Blue Origin is developing a family of heavy-lift rockets known as New Glenn, after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. With a maximum height of 313 feet (95 meters), New Glenn will be taller than the 230-foot (70 m) Falcon Heavy, which Musk's SpaceX is building.
The Falcon Heavy will be more powerful, however, generating 5.1 million pounds of thrust, compared to New Glenn's 3.85 million pounds.
The first stages of the Falcon Heavy (including the two strap-on boosters, which will be derived from Falcon 9 first stages) and New Glenn will be reusable, in keeping with the priorities of SpaceX and Blue Origin; both companies aim to slash the cost of spaceflight by landing and reflying their rockets multiple times.
The two companies' parallel efforts to develop this technology spawned a minisquabble between Musk and Bezos in November 2015, after Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket landed during a suborbital test flight, becoming the first booster ever to do so.
Musk congratulated Bezos via Twitter at the time, but also stressed that bringing a rocket back during an orbital launch — as SpaceX had been trying to do with its Falcon 9 — was a much more difficult task. (New Shepard is a suborbital rocket designed to take paying customers and science experiments on brief jaunts to space, while the Falcon 9 launches payloads to orbit.)
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