Michio Kaku Says SpaceX is Destroying Blue Origin in the Space Race

The battle between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk continues. Rather, the space race between their companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, respectively, is signaling a bright and clear winner: SpaceX. 

For theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, Musk's SpaceX has a "tremendous lead" over Bezos' Blue Origin. Speaking to Fox Business on Varney & Co. on Wednesday 13 October, Kaku confidently remarked that SpaceX was the leader in the "battle of the billionaires."

"They've been around the Earth several times, they go to the space station. In fact, the last launch that they had went even past the Hubble Space Telescope; that's how far it went into outer space. Also, Elon Musk is selling tickets to go to the moon, and a Japanese billionaire actually bought all the tickets for the first flight to the moon," Kaku said.

Kaku isn't wrong. SpaceX has launched multiple crewed missions to orbit, as well as successfully launching the world's first all-civilian Earth-orbiting mission, Inspiration4, where they spent three days in space, and it's moving fast toward its goal of developing a heavy launch vehicle to send NASA astronauts back to the Moon in 2024. 

In contrast, Blue Origin launched civilians into space, with the famed actor William Shatner onboard, on October 13 for 3 minutes and 30 seconds before returning back to Earth. Compared with SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission that lasted three days, the lead is quite clear between the two companies. 

As Kaku said "So none of this, going up for three minutes and coming back down. No, we're talking about the moon now."

Continual competition

And the competition between Bezos and Musk isn't only taking place in the space department. There's Bezos' Project Kuiper and Musk's Starlink satellite internet battle, too. Last year, Bezos' Amazon acquired self-driving startup Zoox, which prompted Musk to call Bezos a "copycat" on Twitter in reference to his Tesla software. Not to mention their close fight for the title of the richest person on Earth.

The two entrepreneur billionaires may be interested in similar advances, but when it comes to space, as Kaku commented, Musk's SpaceX is miles ahead.