By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) – The space race among U.S. billionaires is heating up, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning to build a lunar base and Jeff Bezos pushing Blue Origin’s ambitions as both companies aim to return humans to the moon ahead of a planned 2030 mission by China.
With an IPO planned for this year, SpaceX CEO Musk has said in recent podcast interviews and company meetings that he wants to build “Moonbase Alpha” and put a satellite launcher on the surface of the moon. The lunar base would help build the envisioned AI computing network of up to a million satellites.
Musk’s heightened commitment to the Moon has shifted SpaceX’s aspirational focus from the Mars colonization mission it has consistently promoted since the company’s founding in 2002. As recently as last summer, Musk said he hoped to launch an unmanned Starship mission to the Red Planet, calling the Moon a “distraction.”
In recent weeks, Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has focused more on its own lunar program, shutting down its suborbital space tourism business to shift those resources to its Blue Moon lunar landing program ahead of a planned uncrewed mission to the surface this year.
Musk now wants to convince investors that SpaceX will remain the dominant force in space ahead of a planned IPO later this year that could value the company at more than $1 trillion. The company launched its final astronaut mission for NASA on the International Space Station on Friday.
After a series of posts by Musk on X this week about a “pivot” to the moon, Bezos posted a black-and-white image of a turtle, recalling Aesop’s fable in which the slow and steady turtle wins the race against the quick but impulsive hare. Blue Origin has embraced this fable in its motto “Gradatim Ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferocious.”
Executives at other space companies say they also expect to benefit from increased spending on the new moon project by the US government and its two main space contractors.
BEZOS HOT ON THE MUSK GOOLS
Blue Origin’s uncrewed mission to the moon this year is a precursor to landing an astronaut as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which also relies heavily on SpaceX spacecraft.
Seattle-based Blue Origin’s lander was shipped to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas last week for thermal and vacuum tests, a key developmental step on its way to launch.
Blue Origin and SpaceX are building their lunar landers with billions of dollars in funding from NASA, which aims to use them for a series of astronaut landings on the moon, starting with SpaceX’s Starship. NASA landed the first men on the moon in 1969, and a total of 12 American astronauts walked on the moon as part of the Apollo program that ended in 1972.