With the news last week that Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos’ commercial spaceflight and rocketry venture Blue Origin would set up shop at Florida’s Cape Canaveral, The Am Law Daily decided to look into which big firms were reaping the rewards from helping clients compete in the new space race.
The aerospace and rocket industry, long dominated by companies like The Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., has become a battleground among upstarts such as Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (also known as SpaceX Technologies), as well as rebranded entities such as Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings. The latter, formerly known as the General Tire and Rubber Co. (GenCorp), reportedly made a $2 billion unsolicited bid this month for the United Launch Alliance, a Denver-based satellite launch provider jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed. (ULA, a top supplier of rockets to the Pentagon, is trying to fend off competition from the likes of Blue Origin and SpaceX.)
