Jeff Bezos earlier this year signed into X to post a photo of a tortoise.
No explanation. Space industry nerds, though, immediately read between the lines, seeing the Amazon.com founder as the steadier, if slower, competitor in a two-person race to the stars.
The hare? That would be Elon Musk, chief executive and founder of SpaceX, which for years has ranged far ahead of Bezos' companies' efforts in building rockets, designing satellites and extending humans' reach into space.
This week Bezos looks to forge ahead. Amazon struck an $11 billion deal to boost its nascent satellite internet business, buying satellite operator Globalstar and inking a deal with Apple. Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin is meanwhile gearing up for the next launch of its massive New Glenn rocket, set to carry a commercial payload for the first time.
And when it comes to NASA's next Artemis missions, Blue Origin sees an opening to catch or surpass SpaceX. Blue Origin has planned to this year launch a cargo vehicle to the lunar surface, a lander that would inform the company's designs for quickly getting astronauts back to the surface of the moon.
Taking off
No question, SpaceX is far ahead of Blue Origin in building and launching rockets. Leaning on its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX launches more often than its competitors in the U.S. and elsewhere, giving it a dominant position in launch services that no rival has matched.
The approach at Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, has been much more methodical. While SpaceX spent years launching rockets, having them blow up, and launching again to learn and perfect its systems, Blue Origin dedicated itself to developing a rocket, New Glenn, that could work right from its first launch.
Last year New Glenn at last took flight -- and mostly worked. The rocket's upper stage made it to orbit, achieving the flight's main goal, though the booster wasn't recaptured for reuse. A launch in November made progress, deploying two Mars-bound satellites for NASA and catching the booster.
New Glenn could launch again as soon as Friday, a flight set to carry a satellite developed by Texas-based AST SpaceMobile, which would help Blue Origin chip away at a yearslong backlog of orders. Blue Origin had a hardware explosion last week at a Florida test facility, though the company said it didn't affect its launch plans.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, has been pushing ahead with its own next-generation rocket, the giant Starship, which Musk has put at the center of the company's deeper-space aspirations. Test launches last year included blowups and successes, and SpaceX is gearing up to launch a new version in May, after pushing back the test several times.
Satellites in the sky
SpaceX's regular Falcon 9 launches have helped the company blanket the sky with roughly 10,000 Starlink satellites, enabling broadband connections even in remote and war-torn regions. Thousands more could go up in the years ahead, and SpaceX is developing a network of satellites designed to provide cellphone connections.
On Tuesday Amazon struck a roughly $11 billion deal to buy satellite operator Globalstar, which would give the company a leg up in cellphone-to-satellite connections. Globalstar operates satellites of its own, providing links that allow users of Apple's iPhone to text, call emergency assistance and seek roadside help in areas not covered by traditional cell service.
Amazon, where Bezos serves as executive chairman after handing off the CEO reins to Andy Jassy in 2021, is in the early innings of developing a more than 7,000-satellite network for broadband. While SpaceX has a big lead in household subscribers and enterprise clients, Amazon expects its satellite business, called Leo, to be integrated with its powerful cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services.
The deal "highlights the value of spectrum as a scarce resource, be it terrestrial or satellite," said Mike Crawford, an analyst at B. Riley Securities.
Blue Origin separately plans to build a 5,400-satellite constellation called TeraWave, geared toward businesses, data centers and government customers.
Moonshots
NASA's successful Artemis II mission this month amped up anticipation for a planned lunar landing in 2028. The pressure is on SpaceX and Blue Origin to make it happen, with each company developing landers for NASA that would be used on upcoming Artemis flights.
Blue Origin recently shifted resources to its lunar efforts, pausing its suborbital space tourism business to better focus on the moon. SpaceX, after years of looking to Mars, has reallocated staff and energy to the moon as well.
In mid-2027, NASA plans to test one or both of the companies' landers. Artemis III will launch a crew into low Earth orbit and evaluate the rendezvous and docking capabilities between the agency's Orion spacecraft and SpaceX or Blue Origin's landers -- or both of those vehicles.
Sending data centers to space
SpaceX and Blue Origin see a big future for data centers in orbit, hoping to tap in to solar power to satisfy the facilities' immense power needs.
The idea is still largely untested, but the companies are racing ahead, with SpaceX planning to use upgraded Starlink satellites to handle AI computing. Musk's company has sought regulatory permission to send up to one million data center satellites into space, while Blue Origin last month filed for permission to deploy nearly 52,000 satellites bearing AI computing payloads.
Musk is thinking further out. On X, he has mused about establishing a lunar base that could construct AI satellites and propel them into space.
