Space Rage: Who Cares About The SpaceX vs Blue Origin Space Race? (The Naked City)

Space Rage: Who Cares About The SpaceX vs Blue Origin Space Race? is the latest column (March 24, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.

On the 21 July 1969 the American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

As he plonked his left foot onto the lunar surface, he declared what was probably a very well rehearsed line: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The landing was greeted with enormous media and public interest worldwide that continued for months afterwards. It also inspired a rash of commercial cash-ins from ‘space age’ TV shows and movies, kids games, automobile design, amusement machines, restaurant and cafe fit outs and even household furniture.

There was a widespread faith in the future, not only in technology but in humanity itself. The world was reaching out to explore the universe at large and we all felt inspired and excited.

More recently the two NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, stuck on the International Space Station for nine months, returned to earth to a fairly moderate media reception. Prior to their rescue they occasionally featured on the evening news, cavorting in microgravity with Suni’s voluminous mane of salt-and-pepper curls floating above her.

In Australia, their inclusion was often a filler at the end of the bulletin, along with some fatuous piece of propaganda about the British Royals. Did anybody really care?

Unlike the 60s and 70s when the world was captivated with space exploration and all things space-tech, today it all seems a bit ho-hum. Not surprisingly our focus is more on the bloody and continuous wars that plague the planet as well as a myriad of other problems like climate change, epidemics, the cost of living and increasing poverty and a convicted sex offender known as Donald Trump.

There is also a growing suspicion and anger at the involvement of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in the US space race. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has apparently invested around $15 billion in his Blue Origin rocket company with a wages bill of around $2 billion a year.

His rival Musk started SpaceX in 2002, investing $100 million he made from the sale of PayPal. The figures fluctuate daily in the volatile US market but the company is said to be now worth around $350 billion. Musk himself owns approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity and controls 79% of the voting rights.

Both projects have the distinct odour of personal vanity and whilst there’s money to be made by the sale and accumulation of shares, you have to ask what their eventual aims are. NASA and SpaceX are already at loggerheads over government funding and Musk’s baby has been accused of numerous environmental breaches as well as the poor treatment of its workers.

Blue Origin has already had some spectacular failures. In January of this year their much touted ‘New Glenn’ rocket reached orbit on its first attempt, but the booster failed to land as planned on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean – burning up in the atmosphere. It was a major setback for their plans to develop reusable rockets which one critic cynically likened to developing a reusable atomic bomb.

It’s not all a mad race to reach Mars or pave the way for a Trump resort on the Moon. In early April SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin won U.S. Space Force contracts worth a combined $13.5 billion through 2029 to send some of the Pentagon’s most sensitive and complex satellites into space. Musk and Bezos might like to portray themselves as modern day explorers, delving the depths of outer space and enabling earthlings to one day colonise the universe, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the meantime, Donald continues to look after his best buddies.

You could almost guarantee that in the most unlikely event of a massive asteroid colliding with Earth in the next couple of years, a SpaceX and Blue Origin rocket would blast off with an ultra exclusive passenger list.

Trump, Musk and Bezos guaranteed the first class seats but also room for Putin, Jacob Chansley (the QAnon and Jan 6 Shaman), Benjamin Netanyahu, Sean Hannity, Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart plus direct from Trump’s inauguration, Kid Rock and The Village People – hell, they will need some entertainment when they land on the Moon or Mars!