Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has only just begun to launch a heavy-lift rocket that was a decade in the making — its orbital-class New Glenn launch vehicle, which had its first flight in January. But it’s already planning something even bigger to rival Starship, the super-rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Bezos simply isn’t ready to share those plans yet. Actually, a super-heavy-lift rocket concept known as New Armstrong (named in honor of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong) has been talked about for almost as long as New Glenn (whose name pays tribute to John Glenn, the first American in orbit). Bezos mentioned the idea way back in 2016, but said at the time that it was “a story for the future.” Details about New Armstrong are still a story for the future, according to an account in “Rocket Dreams,” a book about the billionaire space race written by Washington Post staff writer Christian Davenport. “They’ve been very quiet about it,” Davenport says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I asked Jeff specifically about that at the New Glenn launch, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”
In the book, he quotes Bezos as saying only that “we are working on a vehicle that will come after New Glenn and lift more mass.” New Armstrong is one of the few mysteries that Davenport wasn’t able to crack in his account of the space rivalry between Bezos and Musk. Davenport first addressed that rivalry seven years ago in a book titled “Space Barons,” but this updated saga is set in the context of an even bigger rivalry between America and China. Both nations are aiming to send astronauts to the moon by 2030, if not before. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy doubled down on the space race this week when the space agency introduced 10 new astronaut candidates to the public. “I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA, or beat America, back to the moon,” he said. Duffy’s boss, President Donald Trump, has high expectations as well. During his inaugural address, Trump said it was “our manifest destiny” to have U.S. astronauts plant the Stars and Stripes on Mars. Musk, who was in the audience, responded with a gleeful thumbs-up.
Six decades ago, NASA was fully in charge of the first space race. But this time around, the space agency is depending more than ever on private companies to manage how America will get to the moon and Mars. The parallel races between America and China, and between SpaceX and Blue Origin, are the focus of “Rocket Dreams.” For now, SpaceX is miles ahead: It’s been flying astronauts for NASA since 2020, and beat out Blue Origin for a multibillion-dollar contract to land the first crew on the moon for NASA’s Artemis program. In “Rocket Dreams,” Davenport writes that SpaceX’s dominance has been a long-running source of frustration for Bezos. On multiple occasions, reports bubbled up that “Amazon Jeff” would be turning up the heat on Blue Origin to accelerate progress — just as he has historically done at Amazon, the other company he founded. Bezos made his most recent major move two years ago when he named former Amazon VP Dave Limp to become Blue Origin’s CEO. New Glenn’s first launch came a little more than a year after Limp took the helm. But New Glenn’s second launch — which is supposed to send a pair of orbiters to Mars for NASA — has been repeatedly delayed. “They still have a lot to prove, and they’re still really, really far behind SpaceX,” Davenport says. “I think Amazon Jeff is probably frustrated and wants to move faster.” “Rocket Dreams” takes the story of the space race up to two of its recent high points: SpaceX’s execution of a spectacular catch of the Starship launch system’s Super Heavy booster last October, and the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn. Since then, there have been a few new twists and turns. SpaceX went through three less-than-fully successful Starship flight tests, followed by a more encouraging flight last month. The fact that Starship’s development timeline is lagging behind Musk’s ever-optimistic projections has led some to wonder whether a modified version of the Starship upper stage can get the Artemis 3 crew onto the lunar surface on NASA’s 2027 timetable. Count Davenport among the wonderers. “Pretty much everyone knows that that’s highly unlikely,” he says. Meanwhile, Blue Origin is continuing to work on its own Blue Moon lunar landing system, which was awarded a NASA contract two years after SpaceX won the initial lunar lander competition. The Blue Moon MK1 lander is currently scheduled to take on an uncrewed test mission to the moon within the coming year — which means it’s possible that Blue Moon will reach the lunar surface before Starship does. Blue Origin is also working on moon-related projects beyond launch and landing. In one of the later chapters of “Rocket Dreams,” Davenport recounts his visit to a secret laboratory north of Los Angeles, where Blue Origin engineers are working on technologies to convert moon dirt into valuable resources ranging from breathable oxygen to solar cells and transmission wire. The project, known as Blue Alchemist, won $34.7 million in NASA funding in 2023 and passed a critical design review just this month. Davenport says Blue Origin seems to be ahead of SpaceX in the development of off-world infrastructure. “You hear Elon talk about, yeah, we’re going to build a city on Mars. But what technologies are you working on to make us have a sustainable presence there?” he says. Unlike Davenport’s earlier book, “Rocket Dreams” doesn’t spend a significant amount of ink on other players in the commercial space race — except to touch on Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson’s role in spoiling the hype surrounding Bezos’ suborbital spaceflight in 2021. The rise of a second wave of space upstarts will have to be documented in a future book. Davenport is most intrigued by Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space, which is building its own reusable rocket. “They’re moving incredibly fast, and everything you hear about their progress is very, very positive,” he says. “There’s always a lot of hype around these companies, and the bottom line is, you have to prove it. You have to fly.” Perhaps the biggest issues to watch for in a sequel have to do with the Trump administration and what happens to NASA’s Artemis moon program over the next three years. In “Rocket Dreams,” Davenport recounts an episode in which NASA officials had to tell Trump that a milestone launch would be postponed if the conditions weren’t right, “and there is nothing you can do about it,” and there is nothing you can do about it. Will Trump take no-go for an answer this time around? “You begin to worry about safety — about cutting corners, doing something to accelerate the program, and getting there for the political goal of beating China,” Davenport says. “I just worry that maybe you do something that is unsafe.” Trump’s fondness for winning isn’t the only factor behind the new space race. There’s a bigger reason why the federal government, and tech billionaires, are spending billions of dollars on space programs. In an age of increasing threats from above, ranging from drones to hypersonic weapons to satellite killers, space is the final frontier for national security — and for the perception of global technological prowess. That’s just how it was during the first space race in the 1960s. “Some of the biggest themes in the next five to 10 years may not necessarily come from civil space, or it’ll come from civil space acting somehow in concert with national security space, with the Pentagon,” Davenport says. “Because I think the idea that space is a warfighting domain and a contested environment — that is here, unfortunately, and we are seeing that.” Christian Davenport will discuss “Rocket Dreams” and the new space race at Seattle’s Museum of Flight at 7 p.m. PT Oct. 1, with Alan Boyle serving as the event’s moderator. Check the museum website for ticket information, and consult this LinkedIn post to find out about Davenport’s other upcoming book-tour events in Chicago; Orlando, Fla.; and Huntsville, Ala. Alan Boyle’s co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com. Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot’s 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Check out the original version of this report on Cosmic Log for recommendations on further reading about the new space race. And stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.