Stitched into the red and brown leather cowboy boots that Jeff Bezos has worn to every one of Blue Origin’s rocket launches is a Latin phrase: “Gradatim Ferociter.”
It translates to “step by step, ferociously” and his interpretation and execution of it is at the core of his business rivalry with Elon Musk, a fellow billionaire owner of an aerospace company, SpaceX.
“Basically, you can’t skip steps,” Bezos explained in 2013 after he adopted it as his own aerospace company’s motto. “You have to put one foot in front of the other; things take time. There are no shortcuts, but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.”
In the sand dunes and scrubland around Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, from where his 30-story New Glenn rocket lifted off for the first time early last Thursday, gopher tortoises burrow and forage; living representations of the company’s mascot — a tortoise.
Tortoises feature on Blue Origin’s coat of arms. They are etched onto the hatch of its New Shepard rocket, a suborbital joyrider that since 2016 has carried paying customers from the Texas desert to the edge of space for brief Earth-viewing experiences in weightlessness. Bezos wears tortoise cufflinks.
“Slow and steady wins the race. Slow is smooth — and smooth is fast,” he reasoned.
For Musk and SpaceX, the philosophy and methodology tend more towards the maverick. Their process of “rapid iterative design” is all about prototyping rockets fast, prioritizing core functionality over perfection then refining them through in-flight experimentation.
Rapid iterative design brings higher odds of a rapid unscheduled disassembly, a light-hearted engineering euphemism for catastrophe. Test flights of Starship — SpaceX’s moon-to-Mars super-rocket — have variously resulted in explosions, bits flying off, parts melting down, but also important engineering lessons learnt.
While Bezos scoffs that simply launching more frequently has the potential for creating an “illusion” of progress, Musk’s risk-tolerance level and aggressive schedule has nonetheless gained him both the visual and competitive edge.
“If things are not failing, you’re not innovating enough,” Musk has said. “Pace of innovation is a fundamental determinant of competitiveness.”
The story of Musk and Bezos’s rocket rivalry would be more closely akin to Aesop’s “Tortoise and the Hare” fable if it wasn’t that Musk already crossed the finishing line — on the first leg of the race, at least — years ago and that each of the space barons are pursuing somewhat differing ambitions.
“If things are not failing, you’re not innovating enough.”
For Musk, colonizing Mars has always been the ultimate goal — “Mars or bust” he declared in 2021. Building the hardware to get there is the task at hand. Bezos’s ambitions are more lunar-centric and include building a space station, Orbital Reef, as a base for research and development, tourism, industrial manufacturing and more.
SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket — a reusable, medium-lift vehicle in commercial service since 2010 — sends cargo and humans to low Earth orbit.
Payloads and crew have included astronauts and supplies heading to the International Space Station, launches of SpaceX’s own Starlink satellites and privately contracted missions for customers including Jared Isaacman, a citizen astronaut nominated by Donald Trump to be the next head of Nasa. Musk himself is at the heart of the inner circle in Trump’s second administration, heading up a Department of Government Efficiency alongside his varied business endeavors.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket went into service seven years ago and is an even meatier, heavy-lift model, to which Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is now an operational rival. Though each has no shortage of commercial customers and missions in the pipeline.
Among Bezos’s customers for New Glenn are the US Department of Defense, Nasa and — in a sense — himself. New Glenn will help to build Amazon’s $10 billion Kuiper satellite constellation providing global broadband — a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink service.
Starlink already has more than 5,000 satellites in orbit and rolling plans for 12,000 more. Falcon 9 launches are now a regular spectacle over Florida, sometimes at the pace of two or three a week — a cadence made possible by the reusability of the Falcon 9 rocket that carries them to space. Kuiper has two test satellites deployed to date and is aiming for 3,236.
With New Glenn now in the space club, Blue Origin will have to work on the reusability challenge — the company’s attempt to re-land its first-stage booster segment out on a droneship in the Atlantic last Thursday morning having ended in a fiery failure.
On the personal front, the rivalry between Bezos and Musk has been just as much of a rollercoaster. Musk is variously given to trolling Bezos with anything from vulgarities — “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol” he teased on Twitter in April 2021 when Nasa selected SpaceX over Blue Origin for a lunar landing contract — to space supremacist snark.
“Congratulations on being able to sit in a capsule for a few minutes of weightlessness, Jeff,” he scoffed on Twitter in 2021, after Bezos flew to the edge of space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket, which takes joyriders to 62 miles altitude (100km) for a matter of minutes, and “the lunar lander that can’t land on the moon” after Blue Origin lost out on the moon contract.
Blue Origin later sued for a lunar contract — “Haha, retire to pursue lawsuits against SpaceX full time,” Musk taunted — and won. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are now partners with Nasa on its Artemis moon program.
When Musk’s personal wealth overtook that of Bezos in 2021 — a constant cycle of outdoing each other in the billionaire rankings — Musk teased “I’m sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B, along with a silver medal,” to emphasize Bezos’s runner-up status.
However, insiders say there is more admiration than enmity between them and that their rivalry is galvanizing rather than destructive. There have been moments of magnanimity. “God speed,” Musk posted in a message to Bezos on X before New Glenn’s launch, followed by congratulations shortly after the rocket’s success.
For both, there is also a mutually shared sense that the clock is ticking on Earth’s long-term shelf-life, its vulnerability to climate change and a historic obligation for humankind to continue to explore.
Blue Origin’s coat of arms features one more element that encapsulates it; a Victorian cemetery symbol. “It’s a Victorian cemetery symbol which means ‘time is fleeting,’” Bezos explained. “We don’t have forever.”
Jacqui Goddard is a South Florida–based freelance journalist
