Kamal Ghorui
Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin launched the New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 19. The rocket was sent into orbit using the same booster from the previous mission, NG-2. This milestone advances Blue Origin’s reusable rocket capabilities for lower-cost orbital launches, following the mission’s partial success in attempting to deploy a direct-to-cellphone satellite despite an off-nominal payload orbit. Bezos shared a video of New Glenn first-stage booster executing a successful vertical landing on a droneship in the Atlantic in an X post. The post caught the attention of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who congratulated Jeff Bezos on the achievement. “Congrats,” wrote Musk. Earlier this month, Elon Musk complimented Jeff Bezos’ photograph of Blue Origin rocket. Replying to a post sharing a nighttime photograph of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket standing tall on the launch pad, the world’s richest persona said “Looks dood”.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX sends letter to FCC
The compliments come as Amazon and SpaceX continue to file complaint letters against each other with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Recently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed a formal letter with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about Amazon’s petition to deny SpaceX’s 1 million-satellite proposal for orbiting data centers. In the letter, SpaceX argues that if regulators apply Amazon’s criticisms to its application then they must also apply the same standards to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, who himself has filed an application for 51,600 AI satellites (original datacenter).In its filing, Bezos rocket company Blue Origin proposes to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites. The filing argues that FCC should approve Blue Origin’s plans because “insatiable demand for AI workloads” means orbiting servers represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.” The filing says that the explosive growth in artificial intelligence (“AI”) workloads, machine learning, and cloud computing is driving unprecedented demand for data center capacity that is already encountering severe roadblocks to scale through terrestrial infrastructure aloneSpaceX seems to be effectively turning Amazon’s argument back on them, pushing for equal treatment across competing space projects.
