While Amazon and SpaceX are sending complaint letters about each other to FCC, Elon Musk compliments Jeff Bezos’ photograph of Blue Origin rocket; says …
Even as Amazon and SpaceX continue to file complaint letters against each other with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), their billionaire founders exchanged a rare moment of public goodwill. Recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared a striking nighttime photograph of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket standing tall on the launch pad. The image shared by Bezos signal that the heavy-lift launcher is nearing its third mission. Amazon founder shared the image on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), showing the illuminated rocket against the night sky at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Elon Musk compliments Jeff Bezos’ photograph of Blue Origin rocket
The image shared by Bezos also grabbed the attention of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who replied with a brief compliment ‘Looks good’. The exchange between the two highlighted the growing visibility of Blue Origin’s progress as it prepares for the NG-3 mission.
Blue Origin’s booster reflight milestone
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp has also shared a daylight photo of New Glenn, showing the payload AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird satellite — enclosed in the rocket’s 7-meter nosecone. The NG-3 mission marks a milestone for Blue Origin as it plans to reuse the same booster flown in November 2025’s NG-2 mission. The first stage, nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” was recovered and refurbished for this flight.While Blue Origin has not announced an official launch date, the Space Coast Office of Tourism lists the launch for 6:45 a.m. ET on April 17, 2026. This would be only the third flight for New Glenn since its debut in January 2025.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX sends letter to FCC
Recently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed a formal letter with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about Amazon’s petition to deny SpaceX’s 1 million-satellite proposal for orbiting data centers. In the letter, SpaceX argues that if regulators apply Amazon’s criticisms to its application then they must also apply the same standards to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, who himself has filed an application for 51,600 AI satellites (original datacenter).In its filing, Bezos rocket company Blue Origin proposes to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites. The filing argues that FCC should approve Blue Origin’s plans because “insatiable demand for AI workloads” means orbiting servers represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.” The filing says that the explosive growth in artificial intelligence (“AI”) workloads, machine learning, and cloud computing is driving unprecedented demand for data center capacity that is already encountering severe roadblocks to scale through terrestrial infrastructure alone
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SpaceX seems to be effectively turning Amazon’s argument back on them, pushing for equal treatment across competing space projects.
