Elon Musk is trying to bait Jeff Bezos into a rocket-measuring contest

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
Image: Blue Origin

There's no shade like the shade that space-exploring billionaires throw at each other.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk — tweeter extraordinaire — challenged Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on rocket specs on a landmark day for private spaceflight.

Blue Origin, Bezos's private spaceflight company, successfully launched its New Shepard rocket to space and landed it back on Earth Monday in its first successful "reusability test," which requires a rocket stage to come back intact from space. Monday's Blue Origin test flight was, by any measure, impressive. The company's suborbital New Shepard vehicle took its capsule 100.5 kilometers above Earth before separating from the craft and making its way back to the planet for a soft landing.

The rocket's trip became the subject of an unlikely and very nerdy dispute between the billionaires.

Be warned: The disagreement came down to the nuances of "orbital" and "suborbital," which measure how fast and far a rocket has traveled from the Earth's surface. Space is thought to start at 100 km above the Earth. If you get there while going at 8 km/second, you're orbital. If you're not, you're suborbital, which is just a little less impressive.

Musk has a vested interest here. He also hopes to one day create a fleet of reusable rockets that could bring people and cargo to orbit at a fraction of the cost of current means.

So when Bezos's rocket made it up into space and back — appearing to beat him at his own game, though not really — Musk wanted to issue a reminder that it was only a "suborbital" trip.

He expressed his concerns, Musk-like, very publicly. On Twitter. To his 2.94 million followers.

So Musk has been tweeting up a (sometimes defensive) storm about the New Shepard's trip, including its insufficient reach. Musk's rockets, he says, can go higher than Bezos's rockets.

Musk started his tweeting innocuously enough, congratulating Blue Origin on a job well done for launching and landing the New Shepard.

Soon, however, Musk showed irritation. He seemed to take issue with some people claiming the Blue Origin test was the "first" successful landing of a reusable commercial rocket on land after a suborbital spaceflight.

SpaceX has attempted to land the first stage of their Falcon 9 rockets on a drone ship at sea, but aside from an approach over water earlier in the program, the company hasn't successfully executed a successful recovery.

Bezos would not let Musk's comment stand unchallenged.

"The SpaceX first stage does an in-space deceleration burn to make their reentry environment more benign, so if anything, the Blue Origin booster that we just flew and demonstrated may be the one that flies through the harsher re-entry environment," Bezos told Mashable when we asked for a response to Musk's comments during a press call Tuesday. "The hardest part of vertical landing and reusability is probably the final landing segment which is the same for both boosters."

While SpaceX's watery landings haven't quite worked out, SpaceX has successfully brought the company's Grasshopper rocket with landing legs back from suborbital space, Musk said.

Bezos, for his part, appears to be taking the high road while throwing just a little rocket-themed shade of his own.

"You have to remember, SpaceX is only trying to recover their first stage booster which is suborbital. Of course, the first stage is suborbital," Bezos said to reporters.

(For what it's worth, Musk refuted this claim on Twitter too, saying that, given the right conditions, the booster could actually be orbital.)

And, at least for now, though, Bezos is keeping his thoughts about Musk's claims off Twitter.

Oh well. This should comfort you the next time you fight off a troll. Even charismatic billionaire space nerds have Twitter beef. No one is immune.

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