Bezos applauded, but at that moment he was quietly pursuing an unexpected attack. He and Blue Origin had applied for a U.S. patent titled “Sea landing of space launch vehicles,” and a few weeks after the dinner it was granted. The ten-page application described “methods for landing and recovering a booster stage and/or other portions thereof on a platform at sea.” Musk was livid. The idea of landing on ships at sea “is something that’s been discussed for, like, half a century,” he said. “It’s in fictional movies; it’s in multiple proposals; there’s so much prior art, it’s crazy. So, trying to
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