According to SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin Are Slapping Them With One Complaint Every 16 Days
The billionaires are at it again. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are at each other’s throats, this time over satellites. First, it began with petty tweets and underhanded comments. Now it’s getting uglier as two of the world's richest men are bringing in the big guns—the lawyers.
The Musk-Bezos rivalry revolves around the market they both want to conquer: space. As the space race heats up, Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin are the biggest competitors in the commercial space industry. However, SpaceX is inarguably a few decades ahead of Blue Origin in terms of technology and progress.
It’s a fact that’s got Bezos feeling salty as he’s hit SpaceX with another lawsuit. Amazon filed a protest letter to the U.S. Federal Communication Commission, essentially designed to halt SpaceX’s second generation Starlink satellite program. Starlink, which aims to cover the planet with thousands of satellites to provide fast internet to every corner of the world, has already launched 1,740 satellites and plans to have roughly 30,000 in total for its second generation phase. Amazon has its own satellite ambitions through its subsidiary Kuiper Systems LLC, which doesn’t yet have any satellites in space.
Naturally, Musk was amused and filed a response to Amazon’s protest, claiming that Amazon and Blue Origin were averaging one complaint every 16 days over the past year. At least, that’s what they said on paper. Online, Musk was a little more mocking, saying that suing SpaceX is now Bezos’ full-time job after he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO.
This isn’t the only recent legal attack from Bezos’ group of companies. In August, Blue Origin filed a lawsuit and challenged NASA’s decision to award SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin’s lawsuit essentially paused the program. The last two legal actions prompted SpaceX to criticize Amazon and Blue Origin for focusing more on slowing them down than fixing their own technology. Musk even once tweeted that “If lobbying and lawyers could get you into orbit, Bezos would be in Pluto right now.”
You’d think that the two richest billionaires in the world would have better things to do than quarrel in public, but we guess all that money must buy them time to tweet—and sue each other.
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