Congrats to the Blue Origin team! That's a heck of a milestone (landing it on the second attempt). It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship[1] but it certainly could handle all of the current GEO satellite designs. I'm sure that the NRO will appreciate the larger payload volume as well. Really super glad to see they have hardware that has successfully done all the things. The first step to making it as reliable as other launch platforms. And having a choice for launch services is always a good thing for people buying said launch services.
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.
New Glenn significantly increases the capacity to Low Earth Orbit, which is what this first phase of the space race has always been about (for Golden Dome, and to a lesser extent commercial internet constellations). All eyes on Starship now.
Falcon Heavy does up to ~64 tons to LEO and has been available for a while. New Glenn isn't bringing any new capabilities to the table. It is still a very welcome alternative.
64 tons is if Falcon Heavy is fully expended (nothing recovered) configuration. Even with smaller payload, the center core is generally a lost cause. Falcony Heavy is extremely difficult to launch as I learned when I worked at SpaceX. It turned out that slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
I'll defer to your experience on this, however Falcon Heavy is the comparable platform so what you're saying is that New Glenn might be able to out compete Falcon Heavy given it was designed from the start for this space? (Not trying to put words in your mouth, just keeping my launch services portfolio up to date :-)).
One question for you since your worked at SpaceX. Starship v4 is supposed to be able to bring 200 metric tons to LEO vs 35 metric tons for v2. Do you have any guesses on the finally amount that New Glenn will be able to bring up when it reaches its version/block 4?
Literally Dr. Strangelove (Edward Teller). This whole thing is a decades-old Heritage Foundation scheme to beat MAD game theory so they can start and win a nuclear war.
I figure evolution will solve that. The kind of people who don’t have kids while living in prosperity will die out. The ones who reproduce will stick around.
We’ll build mirror life to assist us so we keep not needing children before evolution has a chance to fix anything. I postulate it is coming this century.
Really? They knew about Project 2025 when they started development and were 100% certain that Trump would return and green light such a project in 20205?
The "dream" of such a system was there for a long time, waiting for the proper tools to build it. Even without that plan though, once you have a hammer you'll find plenty of nails. Putting heavy stuff in space was always going to catch the eye of the deep-pocketed military.
I agree on ULA. It will be hard for them to compete on price. And if the US military has two reliable launch-providers, there won't be room for a third heavy-lift vehicle.
But it will probably take a while for the "steamroller" to get going. For the next year or two it will seem to ULA as if everything is fine. And then they'll get flattened.
The "production" lift capacity included some assumptions apparently about how much they could get out of Raptor and what they expected the assembly to weigh. Engineering constraints requiring more structure, the heat shield being inadequate, and the inability to raise the chamber pressure on Raptor to get the promised ISP have all impacted what the "expected" lift to LEO/GEO will actually be. Don't misunderstand, I am impressed as heck with SpaceX's engineering team and they are definitely getting closer to the point where they will have the design space fully mapped out and can make better estimates. The NASA documents are a better source of news on how Starship is going (as it's slated to be part of the Artemis program) than SpaceX marketing (one is engineering based, one is sales based). AND New Glenn isn't "fully" re-usable, its another 'upper stage gets consumed' platform (like Falcon). That is definitely an advantage with Starship if they make that work. For history, the shuttle has a similar history of shooting high and then finding that the engineering doesn't work.
Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
although, they were doing it with a more complicated vehicle than the falcon 9, so the delay is "somewhat" understandable.
And only "somewhat," because new glenn seemed to take forever compared to starship. It does go to show, maybe the highly iterative approach that spacex takes really is faster (or, it could just be spacex has more highly skilled engineers, but I for one can't tell what the reasons are).
It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.
ah, yeah, patent trolling is pretty horrible (and Bezos is known for this - one click)...
... although, just to play a little devil's advocate, Bezos doesn't get enough credit for jump starting private spaceflight companies. Blue Origin was started 2 years before SpaceX. Am sure Blue Origin racked up a ton of patents.
yeah, didn't state it clearly. only meant that Blue Origin has actually been at it longer than SpaceX, and probably has around the same amount of patents as them because of it. Yeah, Blue Origin doesn't get as much credit for commercial space flight as spacex, and rightful so, but seems like they still did contribute a great deal (in fact, Blue Origin was the first to complete a vertical takeoff and landing, although it was with a suborbital vehicle).
Iterations are faster than modelling, no different for software where testing in prod with actual users ends up being quicker than in a testing environment.
Iterations in hardware businesses are far more expensive, particularly for early stage (by revenue not age) companies like Blue Origin. Outside of the Vulcan engine sales, joy rides and NASA grants they don't have much inflow and depend on equity infusion.
SpaceX also would find it tough without Starlink revenue to fund iterations for Starship. Similarly the early customer revenue ( plus the generous NASA grants) contributed to iterate on F9 be it Block V or for landing etc.
Beyond money, it also requires the ability to convince customers to be okay with the trade-offs and risks of constantly changing configurations, designs.
It is not that people do not know iterative testing with real artifacts is quicker, but most are limited in their ability to fund it or cannot convince customers, regulators to allow them.
Yeah, it does seem like iterative development with hardware is an extremely cash intensive way of development. And yes, what a genius move to fund a lot of this development with Starlink - it's amazing this seemingly off the cuff idea is such a cash cow, and it seemed at least like they got it up and running relatively quickly. Yeah, regardless how someone feels about Elon these days, Starlink has got to be up there for one of the most brilliant moves by an entrepreneur of all time.
And to come back to you point, yeah, I do see, you need the funds first to be able to support such a cash hungry way of development - which, on a tangent, kind of disappointed me (and a few others online) when Stoke Space decide to build their own 1st stage instead of just focusing on their unique 2nd stage. Like many in the past have mentioned, it seems like they'd be getting to space a lot quicker if they had just designed their 2nd stage to fit on a Falcon 9.
You get lot more data when running real world experiments .
For off world missions, the best examples are the Soviet Venus missions of how iterating and sticking with the goals helped do some incredible research which would be hard to replicate even today .
The benefit of not doing quick and dirty is why we got out The longevity of voyager or some of the mars rovers or ingenuity.
They were "launching cities" as one of their program chiefs said. Yes, when you can arbitrarily tax you population you can afford these loud propaganda headlines.
Spacex tends to "build rocket factories" instead of building one rocket. So they can launch and reuse hundreds a year. They're repeating this with starship.
It's hard to know what BO is doing because they're so quiet all the time, but to what degree is this scaling true for them also?
Going by the Tim Todds interview with Jeff Bezos it seems like BOs approach is very similar in this area. It looked to me that the machines they had there to build NG is set up to produce rockets in large quantities. He talked about their goals with the second stage, and that they’re looking at making a reusable version but that in parallel they’re also doing cost optimisations that may make it so cheap that reuse doesn’t make sense.
Was talking with someone else, yeah, focusing on a rocket factory instead of just building a couple of rockets does seem like a good idea. Allows you to build a lot of test articles during development, even ones that you'll launch like Space X, and during real flights, you'll have a lot of rockets available for real launches.
Yeah, Bezos has been putting most of his attention there for the past few years. And why not? What's more interesting, running a online marketplace (which still actually seems pretty interesting), or building rockets to fly into space:)
Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
Blue Origin has not sent a rocket to mars in the sense that SpaceX wishes to send Starships to mars. They have sent a probe. SpaceX has launched probes to far further celestial bodies than Mars.
Anyone who is paying attention knows that Starship is mostly going to be a launch vehicle for Starlink. It's very unlikely that the upper stage will ever support external payloads.
There is a lot to talk about here. However, the bolts that fired from the landing legs into the ship's deck were really neat. [0]
It was likely one of the simplest things involved, but SpaceX never did this. It seems far simpler than SpaceX's OctaGrabber. I think you can buy something similar at Home Depot? (edit: I just meant the explosive nail gun)
One of their patents describes exactly that -- driving a hardened stud into the softer metal of the deck, essentially by using a gunpowder actuated nail gun:
They have also included a way to disconnect the stud from the leg afterwards, such that the deck can be tidied up conveniently after the rocket had been removed. This is a neat idea -- the damage to the deck should very localized, and the rocket gets secured quickly and without putting human welders at risk.
Blue also has a cute little elephant robot that shows up later in the stream. :)
BTW, while the pyrotechnic welding bolts are kinda neat, I do hope they come up with something else (electromagnets ?) eventually as it could be quite a hassle tneeding to cut the booster from the deck every time you land. :)
In the grand scheme of things supporting a rocket turnaround, sending somebody out with a wrench (to detach the harpoons from the leg) and a grinder (to smooth out the deck surface) probably isn't that big of a deal.
This is truly sad. Despite having, collectively, a larger GDP than the US, Europe has not been at the forefront of too many technologies, compared to the US and China. [Pharmaceuticals might be the main exception.]
Sadly, I think the disadvantages will compound. Europe doesn't have a Google-type company with expertise building data centers, and are now behind on AI scaling. Without cheap access to orbit, they have missed out on building Starlink-like LEO constellations.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
I suspect that Europe is much more "reasonable", in this sense, than the US and China.
They make the best photolithography machines, for me, it is simply the most advanced piece of tech humanity has created, look it up, everything about EUV lithography is insane.
In a sense all modern tech goes back to them, including AI. They make the machines that make the chips that make AI.
It isn't a race. EU can't do everything and so it is best to see what several others are doing and take that as a sign to do something different. If only one party (or only your enemies) then yes you should, but it seems there are plenty of players and the EU is smart to sit it out.
A bit early to say that given BO has had two launches 11 months apart and SpaceX has had 142 launches and landings in the same timeframe. With most of them in reused boosters.
Their own internet megaconstellation, called Project Kuiper until earlier today when they renamed it to Project Leo.
It's actually the current biggest commercial launch customer, Starlink is internal to SpaceX, but Kuiper/Leo has bought many launches with ULA, SpaceX and Arianespace (and Blue Origin, of course).
It doesn't seem that atypical when extremely high capex and proprietary R&D are moats. Off the top of my head, the semiconductor industry looks broadly similar right now and the fusion industry might end up looking similar for a while.
Only small parts of the semiconductor industry at the very cutting edge even remotely resemble that. And that’s technology with outcomes (I.e. process nodes) that are genuinely new and have never been done before. What’s being accomplished now in space are outcomes that were accomplished before PCs existed, so the idea of it being insurmountable R&D doesn’t hold. It’s very telling that the only “commercially viable” launch providers are billionaire trophy assets with induced demand from a heavy slice of government sponsorship and self dealing.
Meta point: why does that matter? They launch 90% of the demand for payload to orbit. Some of that demand is from a vertically integrated part of the company. It is still part of industrial demand, given that Starlink is profitable already.
The launch count of SpaceX per year compared to the rest of the world is quite large.
SpaceX in 2025 has launched 134 times. Everyone else in the entire world has launched 115 times combined, including other US companies. SpaceX launches a lot of stuff very often.
EDIT: Originally meant to do 2024 but accidentally read the wrong bar. Regardless, this holds for most years.
They're booked out years in advance only in the sense that bookings are sorted out years before the payload is ready to fly. SpaceX has emphasized that they're capable of swapping out Starlink launches with a commercial payload if needed on short notice.
F9 launches are available anytime a customer wants them. SpaceX will bump down a Starlink launch to accommodate a paying customer, All they would really need would be the payload assembly time?
Did anyone else notice the pyrotechnics in the landing feet after touchdown? I'm going to assume that they harpooned the deck surface to secure the booster.
Im pretty impressed at how simple that idea is compared to SpaceX's solution which is to have a robot drive underneath and grab the booster
I struggled to find a good video of the landing. This is a clip from their live stream: https://youtu.be/xHlPwTE-FOo
It seems like multiple video feeds glitch out right as it's about to land. There's even a black screen saying "buffering..." encoded into the video.
Still early days though, and I'm sure they're working to improve, but they're missing a huge opportunity here by not having high-quality footage like SpaceX. For comparison, here's a great clip of SpaceX's Starship landing: https://youtu.be/Hkq3F5SaunM
Back in the day SpaceX used to struggle with this during drone ship landings as well. All the vibration and heat and whatnot is rough on the transmission. Usually they'd upload better (stored) footage a couple days after the fact, and I'd expect something similar from Blue Origin.
Today's airborne tracking shot (from downrange) all the way from space to the clouds was amazing though. Never seen anything like that before.
SpaceX's landing footage has only been decent for the past few years. If I recall, they were able to fix it once Starlink reached a reasonable level of performance. Before that, their sea landings looked about the same as this BO one.
The cause seems to be the heat from the landing burn messing with normal wireless signals.
agreed, they need to pick more engineer focused people who love building rockets rather than impersonal PR people. Sometimes, the broadcast felt like a standard business seminar.
I worked under Dave Limp for multiple years in Amazon's Consumer Devices group (like way under, I think he was my manager's skip manager?). I like him personally. But:
(1) His management in the Consumer Devices group did not lead to success, I feel we (and especially the consumer robotics group) basically floundered for 7 years :(
(2) He only left Devices to join Blue Origin like 2 years ago. 2 years is a decent length of time, but far too short for us to credit this success to him -- there have been many other forces building Blue Origin to what it is today. Maybe he gets 30% credit?
p.s. no offense to Mr. Limp, I must emphasize that he was a kind, polite, caring person, and certainly had the capacity for great decisions. It is unfortunate that Consumer Devices and CoRo hasn't had great success, and success may yet be just around the corner.
What makes you believe it was his management specifically instead of other factors? AFAICT he has been at Blue Origin for only a few years, so the root of their success may have been laid much earlier and they succeeded either because or despite his influence.
Not saying he's a bad manager, just that the fact this one launch was a success is not proof of his skills. Luck is definitely still a possibility. And as a sibling comment mentions, it's not like he has a flawless track record.
He was brought in to fix Blue's culture and try to speed things up, since the former Honeywell guy was taking forever to do anything.
I think it can be safely argued that since the fixes between attempt 1 and 2 happened entirely under him and faster than we're used to seeing from BO, he may have played a role.
"on second try" sounds like the rocket did a go-around :-) (the current techcrunch title is "Blue Origin sticks first New Glenn rocket landing and launches NASA spacecraft" and doesn't mention the previous failure until the first paragraph.)
Ey calm down now. They were some of the most visible members of the US space program, and many people like them for providing that service. That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
I'm suggesting the set of names to draw from is large. There's tons and tons of names that could be chosen. The of the potentially dozens or hundreds of names that are hugely influential, the first two picked were from the SS?
You could name it Neil, Alan, John, Yuri, Valentina, Katherine, Konstantin, Buzz, Mae, Sally, Sergei, Maxime, Margaret, Katherine, or Mary.
All of whom are well established critical figures in rocketry history. And not members of the SS.
> Not everything is about nazism
Of course not! But sometimes it does involve literal Nazis, in which case it's not not about nazism.
> That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
Even with the good faith assumption that is not why these names were suggested, I don't think it is appropriate to commemorate these people by naming stuff after them.
Von Braun had a history of bending the truth to minimize his membership in the Nazi party and climb up the ranks of the SS. It is hard to take him at his word that he did so purely to advance his career.
It is also worth noting that the career that led to him being promotoed 3 times by Himmler had as it's key accomplishment the development of the novel V2 rocket weapons that killed an average of 2 civilians per launch. Von Braun oversaw production in slave labor camps that killed even more people building the rockets than the rockets killed on impact.
There's many heroes of the space industry to name stuff after who weren't also literal nazis who directly used slave labor to advance their career.
> the novel V2 rocket weapons
> that killed an average of 2
> civilians per launch
That's positively humanitarian in the context of WWII. Can you name any other weapon system developed during that war which had such a low civilian casualty rate, adjusted for the money spent on it?
Operation paperclip was a disgrace and I’ll do what I can to not let anyone forget it. The fact that the new US space figurehead does salutes on TV while covering himself in the stars and stripes makes it only more pertinent.
Von Braun had thousands of concentration camp inmates work on his rockets under horrible conditions. He should have been tried for crimes. Maybe we can name it New Himmler or New Goebbels.
Landing (the booster) on their second launch is nice...but I'm more impressed by them being (probably...) 2-for-2 on their very first couple orbital launch attempts.
(Yes, SpaceX's Falcon reached that milestone back in 2010.)
Was thinking about that. It is interesting how they got so much working in just two launches compared to SpaceX, which works so incrementally.
Still, am wondering though if SpaceX's highly iterative approach is a better way, because with Blue Origin's more standard approach of getting everything right the first time, you may need to over engineer everything, which seems like it may take longer.
On the flipside, SpaceX's approach might tax the engineers, because they have to deal with launching so often, and maybe if they had done less launches, they might have actually gotten falcon and starship out quicker...
...But, then again maybe at Spacex, the "launch" engineers are really the ones that have to deal with getting the rockets ready for launch, while the core design engineers can focus on building the latest version. And all the launches are used to test out different ideas and gather real life data). Hmm, for my part, am leaning towards the spacex way of doing things.
(maybe SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers could share their thoughts if they're reading this??)
Good point, this is probably the right way to go, to have a factory that is able to build a lot of your rockets quickly and cheaply. Yeah, during development, this would allow for quicker build and launches, to test your vehicles. And afterwards, with a usable rocket, allows for a high number of rockets available for real missions.
A lot of SpaceX employees went over to Blue Origin over the years, so there also was a lot of knowledge transfer and Blue could capitalize on the iterations of SpaceX.
Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
Congrats to the Blue Origin team! That's a heck of a milestone (landing it on the second attempt). It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship[1] but it certainly could handle all of the current GEO satellite designs. I'm sure that the NRO will appreciate the larger payload volume as well. Really super glad to see they have hardware that has successfully done all the things. The first step to making it as reliable as other launch platforms. And having a choice for launch services is always a good thing for people buying said launch services.
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.
Falcon Heavy does up to ~64 tons to LEO and has been available for a while. New Glenn isn't bringing any new capabilities to the table. It is still a very welcome alternative.
64 tons is if Falcon Heavy is fully expended (nothing recovered) configuration. Even with smaller payload, the center core is generally a lost cause. Falcony Heavy is extremely difficult to launch as I learned when I worked at SpaceX. It turned out that slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
I'll defer to your experience on this, however Falcon Heavy is the comparable platform so what you're saying is that New Glenn might be able to out compete Falcon Heavy given it was designed from the start for this space? (Not trying to put words in your mouth, just keeping my launch services portfolio up to date :-)).
Also falcon heavy use the same fairing as falcon 9 which limits payload size for heavy
Super interesting. Didn't know this.
One question for you since your worked at SpaceX. Starship v4 is supposed to be able to bring 200 metric tons to LEO vs 35 metric tons for v2. Do you have any guesses on the finally amount that New Glenn will be able to bring up when it reaches its version/block 4?
>200 tons to LEO
*In fully reusable first AND second stage configuration.
An expendable starship would double the tonnage.
Thanks:)
The fact that Golden Dome is what these billionaires are racing for is greatly underappreciated. It's literally a multi-trillion dollar project.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...
Literally Dr. Strangelove (Edward Teller). This whole thing is a decades-old Heritage Foundation scheme to beat MAD game theory so they can start and win a nuclear war.
Well at least we have the answer to the Fermi Paradox now.
Prosperity induced fertility collapse beat it to the punch.
I figure evolution will solve that. The kind of people who don’t have kids while living in prosperity will die out. The ones who reproduce will stick around.
We’ll build mirror life to assist us so we keep not needing children before evolution has a chance to fix anything. I postulate it is coming this century.
Time for a wall-e rewatch.
income correlates with fertility in for example Sweden where the highest income bracket has 2.1 children.
2.1 is replacement.
Sweden’s over all fertility rate looks to be around 1.8.
reading comprehension
the topic is fertility collapse
Everyone can’t be in the highest income bracket.
reading comprehension
the topic is fertility collapse due to prosperity
the point is, is that actually the core issue?
The future's most inconvenient truths always get the most downvotes
Really? They knew about Project 2025 when they started development and were 100% certain that Trump would return and green light such a project in 20205?
The "dream" of such a system was there for a long time, waiting for the proper tools to build it. Even without that plan though, once you have a hammer you'll find plenty of nails. Putting heavy stuff in space was always going to catch the eye of the deep-pocketed military.
Yes, but under a different name. Biden was the first to really push back.
Read https://scheerpost.com/2025/02/11/the-pentagon-is-recruiting...
Who will think of the billionaires!
.. but I thought it was about Mars! /s
I agree on ULA. It will be hard for them to compete on price. And if the US military has two reliable launch-providers, there won't be room for a third heavy-lift vehicle.
But it will probably take a while for the "steamroller" to get going. For the next year or two it will seem to ULA as if everything is fine. And then they'll get flattened.
Doesn't ULA use Blue Origin's rocket engines?
Yes, for Vulcan [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/evolution-of-a-plan-ula-execs-spell-ou...
Yes, which makes it even harder for ULA to compete.
> Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change
What do you mean here? I was under the impression that it was increasing each new version. Is that incorrect?
The "production" lift capacity included some assumptions apparently about how much they could get out of Raptor and what they expected the assembly to weigh. Engineering constraints requiring more structure, the heat shield being inadequate, and the inability to raise the chamber pressure on Raptor to get the promised ISP have all impacted what the "expected" lift to LEO/GEO will actually be. Don't misunderstand, I am impressed as heck with SpaceX's engineering team and they are definitely getting closer to the point where they will have the design space fully mapped out and can make better estimates. The NASA documents are a better source of news on how Starship is going (as it's slated to be part of the Artemis program) than SpaceX marketing (one is engineering based, one is sales based). AND New Glenn isn't "fully" re-usable, its another 'upper stage gets consumed' platform (like Falcon). That is definitely an advantage with Starship if they make that work. For history, the shuttle has a similar history of shooting high and then finding that the engineering doesn't work.
And the payload bay door situation is… not great. They managed to get Starlink simulators out, but all other birds have a non-pancake shape.
(Naturally, getting Starlinks to work is critical for cash flow, but still, it’s an issue for the launch platform business.)
The heat shield is rumored to be much heavier than was originally planned.
I read that buried in the middle of an article on moon landing mission architecture: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/what-would-a-simplifie...
Starship v3 is slightly smaller than previous versions (not much).
Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
although, they were doing it with a more complicated vehicle than the falcon 9, so the delay is "somewhat" understandable.
And only "somewhat," because new glenn seemed to take forever compared to starship. It does go to show, maybe the highly iterative approach that spacex takes really is faster (or, it could just be spacex has more highly skilled engineers, but I for one can't tell what the reasons are).
It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.
Fortunately it was challenged and the USPTO invalidated patent 8,678,321: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-08-...
ah, yeah, patent trolling is pretty horrible (and Bezos is known for this - one click)...
... although, just to play a little devil's advocate, Bezos doesn't get enough credit for jump starting private spaceflight companies. Blue Origin was started 2 years before SpaceX. Am sure Blue Origin racked up a ton of patents.
Your devils advocate paragraph seems to contradict itself.
Unless you mean to say spaceX somehow benefited from the patents blue origin filed previously. I don't see how that would be the case though.
yeah, didn't state it clearly. only meant that Blue Origin has actually been at it longer than SpaceX, and probably has around the same amount of patents as them because of it. Yeah, Blue Origin doesn't get as much credit for commercial space flight as spacex, and rightful so, but seems like they still did contribute a great deal (in fact, Blue Origin was the first to complete a vertical takeoff and landing, although it was with a suborbital vehicle).
Iterations are faster than modelling, no different for software where testing in prod with actual users ends up being quicker than in a testing environment.
Iterations in hardware businesses are far more expensive, particularly for early stage (by revenue not age) companies like Blue Origin. Outside of the Vulcan engine sales, joy rides and NASA grants they don't have much inflow and depend on equity infusion.
SpaceX also would find it tough without Starlink revenue to fund iterations for Starship. Similarly the early customer revenue ( plus the generous NASA grants) contributed to iterate on F9 be it Block V or for landing etc.
Beyond money, it also requires the ability to convince customers to be okay with the trade-offs and risks of constantly changing configurations, designs.
It is not that people do not know iterative testing with real artifacts is quicker, but most are limited in their ability to fund it or cannot convince customers, regulators to allow them.
Yeah, it does seem like iterative development with hardware is an extremely cash intensive way of development. And yes, what a genius move to fund a lot of this development with Starlink - it's amazing this seemingly off the cuff idea is such a cash cow, and it seemed at least like they got it up and running relatively quickly. Yeah, regardless how someone feels about Elon these days, Starlink has got to be up there for one of the most brilliant moves by an entrepreneur of all time.
And to come back to you point, yeah, I do see, you need the funds first to be able to support such a cash hungry way of development - which, on a tangent, kind of disappointed me (and a few others online) when Stoke Space decide to build their own 1st stage instead of just focusing on their unique 2nd stage. Like many in the past have mentioned, it seems like they'd be getting to space a lot quicker if they had just designed their 2nd stage to fit on a Falcon 9.
> Iterations are faster than modelling
For launch perhaps, but what about for Moon and/or especially Mars landing?
With limited Mars launch windows, probably faster to have less attempts with more modelling, than vice versa
You get lot more data when running real world experiments .
For off world missions, the best examples are the Soviet Venus missions of how iterating and sticking with the goals helped do some incredible research which would be hard to replicate even today .
The benefit of not doing quick and dirty is why we got out The longevity of voyager or some of the mars rovers or ingenuity.
It is matter of tradeoffs and what you want
They were "launching cities" as one of their program chiefs said. Yes, when you can arbitrarily tax you population you can afford these loud propaganda headlines.
I wonder if they are comparable.
Spacex tends to "build rocket factories" instead of building one rocket. So they can launch and reuse hundreds a year. They're repeating this with starship.
It's hard to know what BO is doing because they're so quiet all the time, but to what degree is this scaling true for them also?
Going by the Tim Todds interview with Jeff Bezos it seems like BOs approach is very similar in this area. It looked to me that the machines they had there to build NG is set up to produce rockets in large quantities. He talked about their goals with the second stage, and that they’re looking at making a reusable version but that in parallel they’re also doing cost optimisations that may make it so cheap that reuse doesn’t make sense.
Was talking with someone else, yeah, focusing on a rocket factory instead of just building a couple of rockets does seem like a good idea. Allows you to build a lot of test articles during development, even ones that you'll launch like Space X, and during real flights, you'll have a lot of rockets available for real launches.
Blue Origin has seen significant internal and cultural restructuring. That’s why we are finally seeing progress.
Yeah, Bezos has been putting most of his attention there for the past few years. And why not? What's more interesting, running a online marketplace (which still actually seems pretty interesting), or building rockets to fly into space:)
For a small but reasonable sum, I'd be happy to take over running the online marketplace for him. I have a number of improvements I'm ready to make...
We should talk to him given his lack of interest, it'd be win-win for you both:)
The jury is still out on Starship, it has all chances take even more time from development start to orbit.
Ten years ago SpaceX claimed they would send a rocket off to mars in 2022. They have not yet. Blue origin just did.
Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
So SpaceX hasn't launched anything that has actually gone to Mars? Weird.
I still don't understand how Musk can promise a Mars launch next year every year and not at least send something, no matter how small, to Mars.
It would hardly be the first time he' demonstrated a casual approach to the truth
Blue Origin has not sent a rocket to mars in the sense that SpaceX wishes to send Starships to mars. They have sent a probe. SpaceX has launched probes to far further celestial bodies than Mars.
Starship will never go to Mars. It's very unlikely it will go to the Moon.
I have said this for years. Starship will eventually go to orbit, it MIGHT go a few times to the Moon. It will lucky if it ever makes it to Mars.
More than happy to be proven wrong. I mean they are still progressing but it is just a case of figuring out how long their runway is (economics).
Anyone who is paying attention knows that Starship is mostly going to be a launch vehicle for Starlink. It's very unlikely that the upper stage will ever support external payloads.
Cmon. Don’t kill my dream. I dream of Elon musk flying to Mars. And staying there.
He hasn't even been to orbit.
Blue Origin just sent a rocket to low Earth orbit. Its payload, owned and operated by NASA, will be going to Mars.
Video of the launch if anyone was looking for it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheyXgtG7EI&t=14220s
There is a lot to talk about here. However, the bolts that fired from the landing legs into the ship's deck were really neat. [0]
It was likely one of the simplest things involved, but SpaceX never did this. It seems far simpler than SpaceX's OctaGrabber. I think you can buy something similar at Home Depot? (edit: I just meant the explosive nail gun)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/iheyXgtG7EI?si=zXnZ_lMAEoWjzpzg...
One of their patents describes exactly that -- driving a hardened stud into the softer metal of the deck, essentially by using a gunpowder actuated nail gun:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240092508A1/en
They have also included a way to disconnect the stud from the leg afterwards, such that the deck can be tidied up conveniently after the rocket had been removed. This is a neat idea -- the damage to the deck should very localized, and the rocket gets secured quickly and without putting human welders at risk.
The weight of the landing legs is what made spacex go for the grab-tower
Blue also has a cute little elephant robot that shows up later in the stream. :)
BTW, while the pyrotechnic welding bolts are kinda neat, I do hope they come up with something else (electromagnets ?) eventually as it could be quite a hassle tneeding to cut the booster from the deck every time you land. :)
In the grand scheme of things supporting a rocket turnaround, sending somebody out with a wrench (to detach the harpoons from the leg) and a grinder (to smooth out the deck surface) probably isn't that big of a deal.
However, for an alternative that would be wild to see from a rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beartrap_(hauldown_device)
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240124165A1/en
Cool! Thanks for that. So, it's recent, compared to the landing ship patent.
Insane that it took a decade for another company to do it, but better late than never. Great to see. Next up: China.
The Zhuque-3 attempt should be a few weeks away,
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/... ("China's 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight")
I bet the next 5 companies/entities that do it are Chinese.
Interesting to see how many are using methlax now as well.
It’s almost as good as hydrogen for iSP but way easier to handle. Also cheaper than RP1.
It's nowhere near as good as hydrogen for ISP, it's just slightly better than RP1. And it has lower density than RP1 as well.
It's a good compromise, however, as well as being cheap and easy to simulate the combustion of.
Why did nobody use it before the Raptor?
I understand why Raptors use methalox, as it can be produced on Mars. But many of these new rockets are not destined to be refueled on Mars.
I think it should also have better thrust than hydrogen, so more suitable for first stages.
The next one is likely Chinese but if the next 4 are, it'll be because they put a pinstripe on the first company's rocket and called it their own.
Rocket Labs https://www.space.com/space-exploration/rocket-lab-delays-de...
I wish EU was next but we slept too much on this one
This is truly sad. Despite having, collectively, a larger GDP than the US, Europe has not been at the forefront of too many technologies, compared to the US and China. [Pharmaceuticals might be the main exception.]
Sadly, I think the disadvantages will compound. Europe doesn't have a Google-type company with expertise building data centers, and are now behind on AI scaling. Without cheap access to orbit, they have missed out on building Starlink-like LEO constellations.
I wish I knew why this is and how to fix it.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
I suspect that Europe is much more "reasonable", in this sense, than the US and China.
One other exception is ASML.
They make the best photolithography machines, for me, it is simply the most advanced piece of tech humanity has created, look it up, everything about EUV lithography is insane.
In a sense all modern tech goes back to them, including AI. They make the machines that make the chips that make AI.
It isn't a race. EU can't do everything and so it is best to see what several others are doing and take that as a sign to do something different. If only one party (or only your enemies) then yes you should, but it seems there are plenty of players and the EU is smart to sit it out.
It quite literally is a race.
A space race.
> this one
Heh. I like your optimism.
Mbah, just copy China's rockets once they stop exploding. It would be embarrassing for them to complain about a little industrial espionnage.
Competition is good. We desperately needed competition or, at the very least, a viable strategic alternative to the WankerX - and now we have one.
Yes, China. But would also love to see Honda step it up a bit for Japan. (NSX edition!)
A bit early to say that given BO has had two launches 11 months apart and SpaceX has had 142 launches and landings in the same timeframe. With most of them in reused boosters.
Maybe it tells you a lot about the real commercial demand for this.
SpaceX launches 90% of the payload of the entire world to orbit now.
Most of which was for Starlink. Not saying it's not an achievement - it is. But if you exclude their own payload, the picture is somewhat different.
Blue has similar commercial demand from Amazon (it's easy to forget given Bezos' ownership, but they're actually separate companies).
Oh, wasn't aware that Amazon is launching something to space - what are they launching ?
Kuiper (now Leo):
2020 Amazon’s Project Kuiper is more than the company’s response to SpaceX (95 points, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209940
2021 Amazon's Kuiper responds to SpaceX on FCC request (72 points, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26056670
2023 Amazon launches Project Kuiper satellite internet prototypes (75 poins, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813711
2025 Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Starlink (58 points, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827083
Their own internet megaconstellation, called Project Kuiper until earlier today when they renamed it to Project Leo.
It's actually the current biggest commercial launch customer, Starlink is internal to SpaceX, but Kuiper/Leo has bought many launches with ULA, SpaceX and Arianespace (and Blue Origin, of course).
I’m not sure how that’s relevant? Or do you think it’s typical for valuable markets to field no other competitors for a decade in the 21st century?
It doesn't seem that atypical when extremely high capex and proprietary R&D are moats. Off the top of my head, the semiconductor industry looks broadly similar right now and the fusion industry might end up looking similar for a while.
Only small parts of the semiconductor industry at the very cutting edge even remotely resemble that. And that’s technology with outcomes (I.e. process nodes) that are genuinely new and have never been done before. What’s being accomplished now in space are outcomes that were accomplished before PCs existed, so the idea of it being insurmountable R&D doesn’t hold. It’s very telling that the only “commercially viable” launch providers are billionaire trophy assets with induced demand from a heavy slice of government sponsorship and self dealing.
Wild! Does that count their own Starlink payloads? Curious what this number looks like when you only look at the launch customer market.
Meta point: why does that matter? They launch 90% of the demand for payload to orbit. Some of that demand is from a vertically integrated part of the company. It is still part of industrial demand, given that Starlink is profitable already.
The launch count of SpaceX per year compared to the rest of the world is quite large.
SpaceX in 2025 has launched 134 times. Everyone else in the entire world has launched 115 times combined, including other US companies. SpaceX launches a lot of stuff very often.
EDIT: Originally meant to do 2024 but accidentally read the wrong bar. Regardless, this holds for most years.
142 F9 launches, 72% Starlink.
> Curious what this number looks like when you only look at the launch customer market
SpaceX makes 50%+ margins on its launches, which are booked out years in advance, for a reason.
They're booked out years in advance only in the sense that bookings are sorted out years before the payload is ready to fly. SpaceX has emphasized that they're capable of swapping out Starlink launches with a commercial payload if needed on short notice.
> booked out
How so ?
F9 launches are available anytime a customer wants them. SpaceX will bump down a Starlink launch to accommodate a paying customer, All they would really need would be the payload assembly time?
How much of that is self dealing Starlink?
Did anyone else notice the pyrotechnics in the landing feet after touchdown? I'm going to assume that they harpooned the deck surface to secure the booster.
Im pretty impressed at how simple that idea is compared to SpaceX's solution which is to have a robot drive underneath and grab the booster
Welding isn’t great for reuse. SpaceX experimented with it early on.
Interesting, did see a couple of small pops after landing on the drone ship, was that them?
I struggled to find a good video of the landing. This is a clip from their live stream: https://youtu.be/xHlPwTE-FOo
It seems like multiple video feeds glitch out right as it's about to land. There's even a black screen saying "buffering..." encoded into the video.
Still early days though, and I'm sure they're working to improve, but they're missing a huge opportunity here by not having high-quality footage like SpaceX. For comparison, here's a great clip of SpaceX's Starship landing: https://youtu.be/Hkq3F5SaunM
Yeah I haven't seen a really good/stable video of the landing; there's slightly better footage a bit later when they replay it though: https://www.youtube.com/live/ecfxcTEl-1I?si=V2kfTlvUA2PuZP39...
Back in the day SpaceX used to struggle with this during drone ship landings as well. All the vibration and heat and whatnot is rough on the transmission. Usually they'd upload better (stored) footage a couple days after the fact, and I'd expect something similar from Blue Origin.
Today's airborne tracking shot (from downrange) all the way from space to the clouds was amazing though. Never seen anything like that before.
SpaceX's landing footage has only been decent for the past few years. If I recall, they were able to fix it once Starlink reached a reasonable level of performance. Before that, their sea landings looked about the same as this BO one.
The cause seems to be the heat from the landing burn messing with normal wireless signals.
Beautiful launch and landing.
I still can't stand the public relation heavy official stream... but even with all that static the rocket itself cut through.
agreed, they need to pick more engineer focused people who love building rockets rather than impersonal PR people. Sometimes, the broadcast felt like a standard business seminar.
Full launch video and images of the landing: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Competition is good. SpaceX is de-facto Amazon of space logistics.
We are witnessing the birth of the age of Rocket Tycoons. Who will be the first to publish this video game?
There's a game called "EarthX" which is basically that. It's more "SpaceX Tycoon" than rockets in general, but it's similar.
agreed, new glenn will only make the space industry as a whole better
How big/small is it compared to Falcon 9?
Go Limp Go!
For all the engineers that say management doesn't matter, I give you David Limp.
Management doesn't matter until it does.
I worked under Dave Limp for multiple years in Amazon's Consumer Devices group (like way under, I think he was my manager's skip manager?). I like him personally. But:
(1) His management in the Consumer Devices group did not lead to success, I feel we (and especially the consumer robotics group) basically floundered for 7 years :(
(2) He only left Devices to join Blue Origin like 2 years ago. 2 years is a decent length of time, but far too short for us to credit this success to him -- there have been many other forces building Blue Origin to what it is today. Maybe he gets 30% credit?
p.s. no offense to Mr. Limp, I must emphasize that he was a kind, polite, caring person, and certainly had the capacity for great decisions. It is unfortunate that Consumer Devices and CoRo hasn't had great success, and success may yet be just around the corner.
What makes you believe it was his management specifically instead of other factors? AFAICT he has been at Blue Origin for only a few years, so the root of their success may have been laid much earlier and they succeeded either because or despite his influence.
Not saying he's a bad manager, just that the fact this one launch was a success is not proof of his skills. Luck is definitely still a possibility. And as a sibling comment mentions, it's not like he has a flawless track record.
He was brought in to fix Blue's culture and try to speed things up, since the former Honeywell guy was taking forever to do anything.
I think it can be safely argued that since the fixes between attempt 1 and 2 happened entirely under him and faster than we're used to seeing from BO, he may have played a role.
It's more like Bob Smith was extraordinarily bad and David Limp is a reversion to the mean.
"on second try" sounds like the rocket did a go-around :-) (the current techcrunch title is "Blue Origin sticks first New Glenn rocket landing and launches NASA spacecraft" and doesn't mention the previous failure until the first paragraph.)
Anyone know more about the explosive landing feet anchors at T+9:55?
Potentially welding the feet to the deck detailed in this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240124165A1/en
Headline misses that this is a mars mission, on its way to the red planet. Awesome achievement.
I was just admiring the beautiful design of this rocket. This looks like something Apple/Jobs would send to space. It's quite an elegant machine.
It looks like a giant…
Dick, take a look out of starboard. Oh my god, it looks like a huge...
Rockets as Rorschach tests...
Fantastic news! I hope to live long enough to see LEO become more accessible to everybody.
What do you think they’ll call the next barge? I’m hoping for Wernher. Or Kurt.
After von Braun and Debus? Who were both members of the SS? (Yes, that SS.)
There's a LOT of important people who worked on space programs who were not also literal Nazis.... Why are you hoping for those two, specifically?
Ey calm down now. They were some of the most visible members of the US space program, and many people like them for providing that service. That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
> Ey calm down now
I don't think anyone here is not calm?
I'm suggesting the set of names to draw from is large. There's tons and tons of names that could be chosen. The of the potentially dozens or hundreds of names that are hugely influential, the first two picked were from the SS?
You could name it Neil, Alan, John, Yuri, Valentina, Katherine, Konstantin, Buzz, Mae, Sally, Sergei, Maxime, Margaret, Katherine, or Mary.
All of whom are well established critical figures in rocketry history. And not members of the SS.
> Not everything is about nazism
Of course not! But sometimes it does involve literal Nazis, in which case it's not not about nazism.
> That may be the only reason they are hoping for a barge naming. Not everything is about nazism.
Even with the good faith assumption that is not why these names were suggested, I don't think it is appropriate to commemorate these people by naming stuff after them.
Von Braun had a history of bending the truth to minimize his membership in the Nazi party and climb up the ranks of the SS. It is hard to take him at his word that he did so purely to advance his career.
It is also worth noting that the career that led to him being promotoed 3 times by Himmler had as it's key accomplishment the development of the novel V2 rocket weapons that killed an average of 2 civilians per launch. Von Braun oversaw production in slave labor camps that killed even more people building the rockets than the rockets killed on impact.
There's many heroes of the space industry to name stuff after who weren't also literal nazis who directly used slave labor to advance their career.
It killed many more concentration camp workers during production. Von Braun was an active member of an evil system.
Can't be von Braun, he didn't care where they came down[1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
Operation paperclip was a disgrace and I’ll do what I can to not let anyone forget it. The fact that the new US space figurehead does salutes on TV while covering himself in the stars and stripes makes it only more pertinent.
Von Braun had thousands of concentration camp inmates work on his rockets under horrible conditions. He should have been tried for crimes. Maybe we can name it New Himmler or New Goebbels.
Same accomplishment as SpaceX but with a lot less hullabaloo. This is Jeff Bezos's style.
Landing (the booster) on their second launch is nice...but I'm more impressed by them being (probably...) 2-for-2 on their very first couple orbital launch attempts.
(Yes, SpaceX's Falcon reached that milestone back in 2010.)
Was thinking about that. It is interesting how they got so much working in just two launches compared to SpaceX, which works so incrementally.
Still, am wondering though if SpaceX's highly iterative approach is a better way, because with Blue Origin's more standard approach of getting everything right the first time, you may need to over engineer everything, which seems like it may take longer.
On the flipside, SpaceX's approach might tax the engineers, because they have to deal with launching so often, and maybe if they had done less launches, they might have actually gotten falcon and starship out quicker...
...But, then again maybe at Spacex, the "launch" engineers are really the ones that have to deal with getting the rockets ready for launch, while the core design engineers can focus on building the latest version. And all the launches are used to test out different ideas and gather real life data). Hmm, for my part, am leaning towards the spacex way of doing things.
(maybe SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers could share their thoughts if they're reading this??)
I think the key difference, to some approximation, is that Blue Origin is designing a rocket while SpaceX is designing a rocket factory.
Good point, this is probably the right way to go, to have a factory that is able to build a lot of your rockets quickly and cheaply. Yeah, during development, this would allow for quicker build and launches, to test your vehicles. And afterwards, with a usable rocket, allows for a high number of rockets available for real missions.
A lot of SpaceX employees went over to Blue Origin over the years, so there also was a lot of knowledge transfer and Blue could capitalize on the iterations of SpaceX.
Blue Origin beats SpaceX to Mars.
Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
Congrats but it's kinda like a company, releasing in 2030, an LLM equivalent to the first version of chatGPT. SpaceX did this 10 years ago.
Or like Apple releasing an MP3 player?
No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame.
That aged well. Six years later it turned into the iPhone.
I think this is more like the Fire phone vs the iPhone.
Maybe! The point, though, is that first to market isn’t automatically the same as the final winner.
And NASA put a man on the moon in the 60s.
What is your point?