Blain’s Morning Porridge Jan 17th 2025 – The New Space Race: The Tortoise and the Hare.
“Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed.”
This has been a massive week for the expanding Space Economy. New launches from Blue Origin (6/10) and Space X (3/10), plus the UK set to fire up a rocket from Shetland! It’s a serious and difficult sector – and it’s going to become increasingly competitive. Everyone is betting on Space X, but is it froth over content?
There is a new space race underway – two of the richest men in the world are having the most expensive willy-waggling contest of all time as they launch their massive, ahem, rockets into space. On Wednesday Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn thundered skywards. On Thursday, Elon Musk’s 7th Starship blasted into the heavens, and the second stage promptly exploded – a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – showering parts of the Caribbean in bits of broken rocket causing planes to divert and be delayed.
The respective outcomes of this week’s launches demonstrate two very different approaches to the space race. Space X famously likes to “fail fast”, testing multiple prototypes to see what breaks and then fix them. When Starship No 7 blew up yesterday, Musk shrugged. His attitude and subsequent comment about success and entertainment, (which I’ve used in the headline this morning), sums up Musk’s appeal. Setbacks do not deflect him. He is unstoppable. (And he will block anyone who says different.)
Bezos and Blue Origin are more careful. They understand space is binary; you either succeed or die/lose everything. Design and components are tested and retested. The firm has a tortoise as its logo and its motto is gradatim ferociter: “step by step, ferociously.” Space industry insiders say it’s like Aesop’s fable of the race between the Tortoise and the Hare. The Tortoise won – which is something the VC investors who’ve funded Space X as the most valuable private company might like to reconsider.
Space.. the final frontier and all that… promises all kinds of income generating opportunities from satellites for telecoms, broadband, and monitoring the earth, defence payloads, gravity-less fabrication plants, energy, space hotels, asteroid mining and whatever else the human imagination invents. (And, yes, I am looking for ideas to fund via Windshift Capital.)
Two factors are driving the rapidly expanding potential of the space economy:
- It is now possible for satellite launch customers to pretty much chose when to launch rather than wait for years for a slot. Just yesterday, approval was given for the first ever orbital launch from Europe will be fired from the new Shetland launch site: SaxaVord Spaceport. Now that would be something to see.
- The cost of putting payloads into space has tumbled. In the 1990s, it cost $60,000 to put a kilogram of payload into low earth orbit (LEO) from Nasa’s Space Shuttle. Today it costs less than $3000 to launch a kg on a Space X’s Falcon 9. Musk has stated he expects to get the cost per kg to less than $100 using his new Starship. Bezos’ New Glenn will carry about double the payload of a Falcon Heavy into any orbit – including geo-synch – at a significantly lower cost.
The new flexibility in space has been enabled by multiple launch companies emerging – not just Space X and Blue Origin – and that’s what encouraging end-use innovation and new space based business. For instance, the Space Tourism sector is expected to hit $18 bln by 2032, a CAGR of 34%!
Credit for the commercialisation of space has been seized by Musk bragging about his success at Space X. Behind every noisy man is a smart woman. Industry insiders say Space X’s success is largely due to his team led by COO Gwynne Shotwell, who has been described as “The Brilliant (Non-Musk) mind behind Space X”. Musk has been smart enough to let the team get on with it while he plays court-jester to Trump.
The reality on the private commercialisation of space is that Jeff Bezos launched Blue Origin a couple of years before Musk caught on. He generated buzz and free publicity around it by telling everyone he planned to move to Mars. (When?) Musk understands showmanship. Bezos has a passion for doing it properly.
Both firms are likely to become dominant launch players – but it will be a very competitive space with new firms innovating new ways into orbit. One example is Stoke Space which has new engine tech and 100% reusable rockets coming on stream. Space launches will become a highly competitive space. When Musk launched Starlink, (his constellations of internet connecting satellites), it was hailed as a masterstroke, but now its clear other constellations will be available and compete with him.
As Musk learnt with Tesla – you can invent a whole new industry, EVs, but all that ultimately does is lead to competition. As I’ve pointed out before, the Wright Brothers invented flying and sold the first aircraft to the biggest buyer on the planet, the US Armed Forces. But within 20-years they’d been usurped and replaced by other manufacturers. Space launches and Space based internet are going to become commodities. Valuable, but commodities.
There are, however, some words of caution around the Space Economy:
The first issue is the Kessler Syndrome: how LEO is getting increasingly crowded. The probability that a satellite hits another, or someone shoots them down in a pre-emptive strike, would create wreckage/space junk, chaotically creating collisional cascading effects, a chain-reaction that could swiftly make LEO too full of orbiting shrapnel and dangerous for future space missions.
The second issue is evolution. It took 66 years from the Wright Brothers first 70-yard hop at Kitty Hawk to Concorde’s first flight. In computing we’ve had Moore’s law about capacity doubling and cost halving every year, leading to enormous technological leaps – from Pong to Quantum Computing in a life-time.
We have not seen the same pace in Space. Why? As Bezos and his team have noted, it’s partly because the outcomes are extremely binary: in space you either succeed or you die/lose everything.
It’s also mindset. We might have gone to the Moon, but we never went back – which would seem to say something about the limited ambitions of mankind’s bureaucrats in space. NASA and Roscosmos (the Soviet space agency) were set goals based on national prestige rather than commercial opportunity. (Even saying European Space Agency can trigger narcolepsy.) The agencies did things by the book. They trended away from anything difficult outside their limited remits because space is unquantifiably big and unimaginably expensive – and any failures would cost them future budget allocations. Risk vs Return was not a question. Avoiding risk was everything.
Suddenly it’s all change in the Space Race. Forget Russia and America racing to the moon. Now its two evil Bond villains head to head cage fighting as to who will be the ultimate commercial success? Who would you bet on?
Bezos’ New Glenn rocket has been delayed for years, and it’s frankly it seems a bit underwhelming compared to Musk’s new Starship which Musk says will hoick twice the payload into LOE at half the cost – when it’s fully match ready and proven. He can point to the success of Space X’s Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies, which are cheap. But what the world wants is probably not a pointless vanity project to Mars (which Starship was designed for), but space lorries to service orbital and moon-based industries.
Once we get that stage of the space economy right, and design new systems – like the fabled Alcubierre Drive that might, or might not, make exploring the Solar System realistic – then we can go to the next stage.
Space X has succeeded because the Falcon created the DC-3 of the space age – the 1930s plane that triggered the explosion in airlines. There were nearly 260 Falcon launches in 2024. They are the workhorses of the sky.
The problem for Musk may be that Bezos’s New Glenn may prove to be the Hercules of the new Space Space – the Herkybird four-engine transport plane first flew in 1954 but remained mainstay of raw heavy airborne lift for 70 years. DC3 are antiques – Hercules move stuff.
What Musk’s Space X has taught us is that well-funded private industry can successfully deliver launch capacity at affordable prices, reliably. We learnt that a massive shift from bureaucracy and the frankly prohibitive costs of NASA’s programmes, with delivery systems culminating in the Space Shuttle, was a barrier to innovation.
We still aren’t past the main problem of the Space Shuttle – a significant statistical chance of 100% catastrophic failure. The costs of failure can be significantly mitigated by unmanned missions, mass-manufacturing, and AI. Delays and cost-overruns in space flights are generally around the human squishy-ware. Would you rather fly Musk or Bezos?
The Space Economy has enormous potential. How to fulfil that is the question – though Musk entertaining us, or Bezos making stuff that is safe and reliable? It’s going to be a competitive space.
Have a great weekend.. Out of time, and back to the day job…
Bill Blain
Author of the Morning Porridge
