MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Early this morning, a new rocket built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took flight.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Five, four...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: ...One. Lift off.
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MARTIN: And later today, a new rocket built by Elon Musk is also scheduled to launch. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has been following this billionaire space race, and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Geoff.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So Bezos and Musk are two of the richest men on the planet, both launching their rockets around the same time. That's kind of curious.
BRUMFIEL: That's the era we're living in. We've got so many billionaires with so much money they can launch rockets on the same day. But it is just a coincidence.
MARTIN: So tell us a little bit about these rockets.
BRUMFIEL: Sure. So, Elon Musk, let's start with him. His company's called SpaceX, and they've built a rocket called Starship. It is the tallest rocket ever built. It's a giant stainless steel beast. New Glenn is the name of the rocket built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' company, Blue Origin. And it's also very tall, but it's a little bit wider to accommodate large satellites. So they're both massive rockets.
MARTIN: And tell us more about why they're doing this. What's the goal here?
BRUMFIEL: Well, it's not just about money, not completely, because these rockets are costing billions to develop, and globally, the launch market is just around $10 billion a year, which really isn't all that much. I spoke to Carissa Christensen. She's CEO of BryceTech, which analyzes the rocket business, and she says this is in large part about these two guys' legacies and their visions for humanity.
CARISSA CHRISTENSEN: Jeff Bezos talks about colonies orbiting the Earth, and Elon Musk, of course, talks about Mars as a destination.
BRUMFIEL: You know, Musk founded SpaceX with a mission to go to Mars and take the first people there.
MARTIN: What's at stake with today's launches? Let's start with Bezos and Blue Origin.
BRUMFIEL: Yeah. So this was the very first launch of their rocket called New Glenn. It's taken a long time to develop, and Blue Origin had a lot riding on it. Before the launch, I spoke to Scott Manley. He's a popular YouTuber who closely tracks the space business, and he told me this rocket had to fly right on the very first try.0
SCOTT MANLEY: They spent all this time doing all the groundwork, doing all their homework before launch. They need to get into orbit on their first launch to be taken seriously.
BRUMFIEL: So that happened, although the booster rocket failed to come back and land on a barge in the Atlantic where it was supposed to. But the rocket was called So You're Telling Me There's a Chance, so they kind of knew they might not nail it.
MARTIN: OK, and what about Elon Musk's SpaceX?
BRUMFIEL: Yes. For Starship, this is going to be the seventh launch, and they've been making steady progress in its development, but it's got a long way to go before it can get to Mars. One critical thing they'll be trying to do is launch some satellites on this mission. Manley says that's really important because SpaceX runs a satellite internet company called Starlink. And if Starship can launch Starlink satellites, it'll help offset its development costs.
MANLEY: They can actually start launching real hardware with Starship. It'll start paying back the investment money they put on it.
MARTIN: OK, we've got a couple of seconds here. President Trump will be sworn into office in just a few days. How is his administration going to play into this billionaire space race?
BRUMFIEL: Well, he's got another billionaire lined up to run NASA, a guy named Jared Isaacman. Now Isaacman is an investor in SpaceX, and he's also flown to space twice on a SpaceX capsule. So what I think we can say is that these billionaires are really poised to be the ones who decide what's happening on the final frontier, at least for the next few years.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Geoff Brumfiel. Geoff, thank you.
BRUMFIEL: Thank you.
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