Jeff Bezos’s flight of fancy

THE BATTLE of the space cadets is hotting up. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, a pair of billionaires who made their fortunes bending terrestrial technologies to their will, have long been trying to do something similar in outer space, and have founded companies, and Blue Origin respectively, to this end. Their motives, however, are not purely commercial. There is a new-frontier zeal involved, too. Both have plans for their firms to build crewed Moon landers. Mr Musk, indeed, has been contracted by NASA to do so. He also hopes to spearhead the human colonisation of Mars. Mr Musk won an important round of the unspoken competition last year, by being the first to launch people into outer space, courtesy of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, lifted atop a Falcon 9 rocket. But he has not yet gone there himself. Mr Bezos looks likely to trump him here, albeit that the definition of “outer space” involved is quite a technical one—being above the so-called von Kármán line, beyond which the air is so thin that the speed required to provide aerodynamic lift exceeds that required to achieve orbit. Conventionally, this is defined as 100km, though 80km might be a more accurate value.