-
Space barons Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have long had competing ambitions to take over the skies.
-
Bezos’ Blue Origin recently proposed a limit on SpaceX launches due to environmental concerns.
-
Musk denounced the move and gave the company a new name: ‘Sue Origin’.
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, thinks the FAA should limit SpaceX launches — and Elon Musk isn’t too happy about that.
Blue Origin recently raised concerns about the environmental impact of SpaceX’s rocket launches on nearby facilities in a filing with the FAA, which the agency published on Friday.
The company also recommended imposing a limit on the “launch, landing and other operations” of the Starship-Super Heavy mega rocket so that it would have a “minimum impact on the local environment, local operating personnel and the local community”.
“A clearly disingenuous response,” Musk said on X on Tuesday. “Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to hinder SpaceX’s progress through legal action.”
“Sue Origin,” Musk said in a subsequent post, joking about the company’s name.
This isn’t the first time the two space barons have feuded.
Musk himself mentioned two other disputes SpaceX has had with Blue Origin in the past in an earlier post he made on Tuesday.
In 2013, Blue Origin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) after NASA chose to lease one of its launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to SpaceX. The GAO dismissed their complaint.
Then in 2014, Blue Origin received a patent for a reusable rocket concept that required the rocket to land on a boat. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceled the patent a year later after SpaceX protested that the patented technology “was ‘old hat’ at best in 2009.”
In recent years, Blue Origin also filed a lawsuit to stop SpaceX from using what is now our main launch pad at 39A and tried to get a patent for landing a rocket on a ship, even though the idea already existed 70 years!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2024
To be fair, Blue Origin is not the only party that has identified the environmental problems arising from SpaceX’s rocket launches.
In 2021, residents of Brownsville, Texas, told BI that rocket explosions at a nearby SpaceX launch pad were a source of environmental pollution.
“SpaceX explosions are polluting our ecosystems, home to the endangered ocelot, aplomado falcon and countless migratory birds,” Brownsville resident Bekah Hinojosa told BI’s Kate Duffy.
SpaceX and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
Read the original article on Business Insider
