CNET by Eric Mack 8/16/2021
One battle between billionaires may be over, but the war continues. Forget about Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and those brief joyrides to the edge of space that we saw last month. The real conflict to watch is between Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, and the stakes are much higher than the Karman line and which imaginary boundary marks the beginning of space. This time the feud has ensnared NASA and could hold hostage humanity's leading plan to return to the moon.
United by passion, divided by its pursuitLegend has it there was a time when Musk and Bezos were friendly competitors in the space, uh... space.
The pair were photographed having a meal together back in 2004, when both space companies were still in their infancy. After the meeting, SpaceX would make its first successful test launch of a Falcon 1 in 2008, while Blue Origin conducted a few low-altitude flights of small test vehicles during the intervening four years.
The duo largely stayed out of each other's way for nearly a decade, but by 2013, it was clear the relationship had soured. At the time, NASA was looking to lease the historic launch pad 39A that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Both companies put in proposals. But before a tenant was selected, Blue Origin filed a protest following comments from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, which Bezos' company interpreted as favoring SpaceX. In the end, the GAO rejected the protest, and SpaceX got the launch pad. The whole episode played out in a way that was awfully similar to the latest dust-up over HLS.
Musk even threw some public shade at Bezos in response to Blue Origin's protest, kicking off a war of words and legal maneuvers that continues today.
"If [Blue Origin does] somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs," Musk told SpaceNews at the time. "Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
A little over a year later, SpaceX scored another victory over Blue Origin with the help of the federal government. This time the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the majority of a Blue Origin patent for landing a space launch vehicle at sea was actually unpatentable. SpaceX argued, and the board agreed, that the concept had already been conceived by various people in science and even science fiction for decades.
Let the street fight beginMore:
https://www.cnet.com/news/why-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-is-going-to-war-with-nasa-and-spacex/
