Bussiness
Elon Musk is reigniting his space feud with Jeff Bezos: ‘Sue Origin’
Blue Origin recently expressed concerns over the environmental impacts of SpaceX’s rocket launches on nearby facilities in a filing to the FAA, which the agency published on Friday.
The company also recommended imposing a cap on the Starship-Super Heavy mega-rocket’s “launch, landing, and other operations” so that it would have a “minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community.”
“An obviously disingenuous response,” Musk said on X on Tuesday. “Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX’s progress by lawfare.”
“Sue Origin,” Musk said in a subsequent post, taking a jab at the company’s name.
This isn’t the first time the two space barons have feuded.
In fact, Musk himself mentioned two other disputes that SpaceX 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 launchpads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to SpaceX. The GAO rejected their complaint.
Then, in 2014, Blue Origin was granted a patent for a reusable rocket concept that involved landing the rocket on a boat. The US Patent and Trademark Office canceled the patent a year later after SpaceX protested that the technology being patented “was, at best, ‘old hat’ by 2009.“
To be sure, Blue Origin isn’t the only party that has flagged the environmental concerns posed by SpaceX’s rocket launches.
In 2021, residents of Brownsville, Texas, told BI that rocket explosions at a nearby SpaceX launchpad were a source of environmental pollution.
“SpaceX explosions are littering our ecosystems, home to the endangered ocelot, aplomado falcon, and numerous 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.
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