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 :-)).
> slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
True. But given the far-lower demand for the Heavy's payload capabilities (vs. Falcon 9), and the costs of the alternatives launch providers for such payloads - slapping a bunch of Falcons together looks like an excellent corporate engineering strategy choice.
The individual Falcon turn-around is slow (months of refurb), and the record half-month ones swapped some engines. B1067's 30-reuse is a ship of Theseus rebuilt over 4+ years.
Feh, swapping engine is not an option for the first few initial Mars trips, unless its payload also contains engines (can't imagine the scissor-lift payload either that needs to go with).
The head of SDI formed the Mars Society with Zubrin. He was originally going to run SpaceX as Chief Engineer (cite: Liftoff) but he instead got appointed NASA admin and directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX. This same SDI head then formed something called SDA in 2017 under Trump which is the platform for Golden Dome, or "the SDI 2.0".
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
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?
^ Be aware that a large number of accounts in this thread are throwaway sockpuppets which are obviously linked. It's a problem that they're pretending to be a crowd of unrelated people; it's an inauthentic attack trying (I don't know why) to manipulate HN sentiment.
It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
The pro-Musk propaganda on X is truly staggering as of late. Pretty sure talking about his Golden Dome connections, which have been widely reported by Reuters, WSJ, etc.. is at least the opposite of that.
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.
This is only a problem when you look at the micro level of cultures or individual states. Sure, some culture may die out, but that's been happening forever.
There's 8 billion humans on this planet, and we're still fucking like we always have been. The human race will be safe from prosperity.
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.
I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
Population decline is predicted or currently happening in some poor countries too. It's not a prosperity driven effect. Children don't die young anymore even in poor countries. There's just generally less pressure to spawn your own gang of supporters. Elon excepted I guess.
"Prosperity" implies that the problem is folks smart enough to not have children beyond the means to raise them into a similar or better lifestyle.
I prefer "Precarity" induced fertility collapse. Down here in the mud I guess I have a different view with my 1 child and wife with a heart condition who would likely die from a 2nd pregnancy.
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.
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.
tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system
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.
The first version was supposed to launch 150 tons to LEO. In reality it was something like 15 tons. Even the new V3 (significantly taller) only aims for 100 tons, and whether they achieve it is still an open question.
Falcon Heavy has been successfully flown 11 times. Falcon Heavy can lift 67 tons to orbit. Starship has only lifted a fraction of that. SpaceX claims the price per kilogram to orbit for Falcon Heavy is even less than Falcon 9.
Every attempt at building products that are better faster cheaper more capable than your own existing successful products is extremely difficult.
Vaporware is "late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled" [1].
Starship is late, so you're pedantically correct. But so is New Glenn, and it started being developed when Falcon 9 made its first trip to the ISS. (2012.)
And Blue Origin was incorporated a few years prior to SpaceX. They’ve been working on this problem significantly longer than SpaceX, so they were more confident in their approach.
"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"
It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available, but only thing it'll share with original announced product is a name. Nowhere close on the cost/features/scale/etc.
Only things that were shown so far are prototypes that are many iterations away from being anywhere close to a product.
New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps.
> It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available
Did you miss Falcon 9 and Heavy? (New Glenn competes with them, not Starship. Falcon Heavy can launch more mass than New Glenn, currently, for cheaper.)
> New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps
This is literally the first time they've successfully recovered New Glenn. Recovered. No reuse. It's the second time they've every flown the damn thing. It's impressive. But it's not "just going through final validation."
I have a background in aerospace engineering, specifically astronautics. It's wild to see armchair engineers shoot shit at major accomplishments like this.
I'm reading this thread and there are a few things that come to mind.
My sense is that SpaceX's goals with Starship are significantly more ambitious than what is being tried with New Glenn. I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of what Blue is facing with New Glenn, but if we take that "rapid reusability" goal seriously the problem set seems significantly larger and not so "been there, done that". This makes the development programs much more difficult to compare.... certainly on the surface of the public optics at the very least.
While it's one thing to talk about rockets, it's another altogether to look and the engineering and practices going into the manufacture process of those rockets. I'm not an engineer, but I do work in manufacturing and, at least looking from the outside, SpaceX seems to be dedicating some significant amount of effort into building a scalable manufacturing process. Many other efforts have always appeared to be more about "bespoke" production even if the designs of each unit produced are constant. I could be wrong and maybe it's just SpaceX is a lot more transparent (willingly or otherwise)... but looking in from the outside, they seem to be developing a very mass-production oriented rocket factory.
And if New Glenn is just finalizing things and Starship is just vaporware... well New Glenn still has to land a couple more boosters and re-fly one (or two?) to catch up to those vaporware numbers. :-) Sure, New Glenn has now flown a paying customer... but I think we'll see Starlink launches on Starship pretty soon... well before it gets to "final validation".
> yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things
You're wrong, but I'm curious for the sources that lead you to think this.
> Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes
"Following the launch, New Glenn’s first stage attempted a landing on the recovery vessel Jacklyn, also known as Landing Platform Vessel 1, which was positioned 620 km downrange from LC-36. However, controllers lost telemetry from the stage sometime after the entry burn started and Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost" [1].
Yeah, the SS just don't make a lot of sense at this point. The mail slot design was always dubious, and that orange stain was really uninspiring as well.
> nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship
If it can get its mass into orbit, it delivers what it sold. I'd currently put my money on a successful orbital launch of Starship before New Glenn re-flies a booster for a paying customer.
US government didn't pay for getting its mass into orbit.
Getting Starship to the orbit means that they have something called Starship in the orbit. It doesn't mean product that they sold isn't vaporware - what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit.
None of them were cancelled. But none of them exist in any form or shape remotely reassembling the product - therefore - vaporware. It's that simple.
But also, since you're telling me there had been no material impacts to the customers timelines, sorry, I don't think you're arguing in good faith, so I'm not going to engage here anymore.
In this thread your pedantic definition of vaporware seems to hinge on a compatibility between spec and delivery that has not existed once in the history of frontier engineering, so I'm not sure good faith is in high supply here in any case.
wow, given the recent starship milestones that were reached, this is a really strange comment (well, they are behind schedule, but that's Elon Musk way of working).
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.
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.
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.
Starlink was not that amazing as a business decision.
If one expects to generate orders of magnitude more supply of a good (launch capacity), then one needs to expect the existing (conservative, long lead-time) market will have insufficient demand.
So one needs to generate additional demand.
So one needs to find a profit-generating business that's limited by mass in space / launches, where each component is inexpensive enough that its loss doesn't bankrupt the company.
Space-based telecommunications falls out pretty obviously from those requirements, given the pre-Starlink landscape (limited, exquisite assets serving the market at high premiums).
In small irony, it's also the exact same possibility space optimization that led to Amazon starting with books: Bezos didn't give a shit about books specifically, but he did like that they were long-tail, indefinitely warehouse-able, and shaped for efficient shipping.
In novel logistics spaces, it's better to find the business that matches capabilities than the other way around, because the company's core competency and value is their novel logistics solution.
Well, sure, agree that there is a natural logic to the idea, but to actually go through with something that no one has done before and actually execute it (which as we all from the tech/sci industries here know), and also do it on a large scale and be very successful is an entirely different matter. Yeah, the number of things that need to go right is still pretty high, and at least to me, was extremely impressive. But to each his own.
It was an obvious market, that was visible years before the project was announced. I don't think any one was surprised, it was not like Apple launching iPod or the iPhone.
What was impressive is at that they solved a lot of hard problems like satellite manufacturing at scale, phased array dishes, or fleet management of thousands of satellites or laser interconnects between satellites, and so on, for basically a side project to increase their primary product demand enough to justify the reuse being a useful feature.
Hmm, don't know, easy to say it was obvious in hindsight. But over the years, Google project Loon and other similar attempts at increasing internet coverage (think Facebook tried too at one point) have not been nearly as successful. Yeah, still not convinced it was obviously going to be successful, but maybe am missing some aspect you're seeing.
Market was obvious, solutions weren’t as you cite there were many tech failures, it was just a logical extension to their business that is not really hindsight.
It was not the same kind of new market entry Apple did with the iPhone or even the iPod , or Amazon doing AWS, which if we claim today as obvious would be hindsight
It was also a great move because they could take more risks launching their own Starlink satellites and prove out the reliability of the Falcon 9 to others. They also are very had to compete with when they build, launch, and deploy the system all in house.
Was thinking this too. It reminds me of how TSMC's fab has a lot more volume than Intel's, because TSMC has outside customers and high-volume is what is needed to perfect a chip fabrication process (getting many more chances to fix any problems, and once you finally do, have the volume necessary to make it profitable). What a great idea it was:)
Hard to draw super hard conclusions. Could also be that the bets made on Falcon turned out to be particularly good, vs a more methodical approach Blue Origin took. The highly iterative approach _may_ be faster, but I don't see any evidence yet that it will _always_ be faster. Just depends on how good your bets are and how much in-flight testing you happen to have to do based on a design.
Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.
Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)
Rocket Lab is also taking a more methodical and less iterative approach with Neutron, which should be ready some time next year. If they make that work well, that will be another point in favor of a methodical approach.
There should be an in depth academic study on their two approaches, it seems like it'd be valuable.
To me at least, given the (probably) positive affects iterative dev has (overall) had on software development, my personal feeling is it'd be useful for most other types of engineering. But (as someone else also pointed out) iterative is much more expensive in hardware fields, given the high cost of materials, and you need to have a lot more funds to build hardware this way.
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:)
It'd be a win for me, probably not for him. Or investors, sadly, at least not in the short term. I would turn off the non-Amazon sales platform. It might be feasible to save the brand, but of course the immediate effect would be a loss of that revenue stream from all the random Chinese "brands" that flood it with cheap garbage and counterfeits.
Or at least make a persistent toggle switch in the UI where you can say "I never want to see a single product that is not shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon." And end commingling with any product that Amazon itself sells, if that is occurring.
That's why they don't let morons like me run big business :). I care about things that only matter when you are a small business apparently.
Ah, focus on quality of products being listed. And, maybe that means there is room for a high-end competitor to Amazon eventually (am not seeing this anytime soon, but maybe in a couple decades??)
Yes, but it's also a harder problem, aiming to reuse everything instead of just the first stage.
And they have at least reached orbital velocity on several occasions, so they could have physically orbited. They just purposely chose a trajectory that wasn't an actual orbit.
Agreed. And even if they don't ever fully reuse the second stage, they still could use this gigantic working rocket as a (probably still) very cost effective to transport things 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.
It would be a waste of time to develop right now, if it isn't on starship it would be a dead end in terms of progress. So they are better off just waiting until starship can be sent.
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.
Why wouldn't they make it for external payload if they get the cost per kg lower than F9?
Running starship only is going to be cheaper than running both rockets, except if the economics of starship are worse (in which case, it would not be used for starlink either).
... but alone. We don't want some Expanse-like scenario down the line with fascist part of mankind completely unhinged. Once he is over then colonize all you want.
12% odds for 3 years seems fairly resonable for a manned landing.
Your statement of "Starship will never go to Mars. It's very unlikely it will go to the Moon" which sounds like it includes even unmanned test landnings is a quite different beast.
There are more possible bets on manifold, you do you.
I'm not really a betting man, but given the HLS budget is spent and most of technology is not nearly developed I'd say even an unmanned Moon landing is at least 5 years and $10 billion away and Mars is pure fantasy.
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.
If you have legs harpooned to the deck on touchdown, presumably you can use much shorter legs (and therefore lower mass), as you're no longer depending on their length to prevent toppling?
It’s not the best choice for an high-budget high-performance expendable multi-stage rocket. Using kerolox/SRBs in the first stage and hydrolox in the second stage gives better overall performance.
Metholox is better for re-use, using the same engine in multiple stages lowers costs and complexity, and you can produce the fuel on Mars.
LandSpace, the company behind Zhuque-3, might be the most advanced Chinese rocket startup.
They said they are even designing a larger rocket with 10m diameter, which is more than Starship (9m). My question is though where they are planning to get the required money from. Unlike the organization behind the Changzheng ("long march") rockets, which is already developing a 10m rocket as well, LandSpace is not state funded. And they don't have a billionaire at the top like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
On the other hand, they were only founded in 2015, and it's impressive what they have achieved since then, no doubt with quite limited funds. They also have some experience with designing methane engines.
Hold up—where do you get the assessment that LandSpace "is not state funded" and that these startups have "quite limited funds"? My understanding is the diametric opposite. Here's WSJ:
> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."
> LandSpace raised 900 million yuan ($120 million) in December from a state-owned fund focussed on advanced manufacturing, while in 2020 it raised 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million), Chinese corporate databases showed.
They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
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.
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.
"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.
You’d expect the “unreasonable man” of Europe to be behind but stable and decent, whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability.
There’s also an argument to be made that China is putting in a very solid performance in a very reasonable manner. See: methodical capture of global EV+energy markets, soft power expansion into the global south, cold-eyed deflation of financial bubbles, 5 year plans, and so on. At this rate, I’m not sure that the freedom and unreason loving “man” that is the US will be able to compete either.
> whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability
Those are the side effects of Europe trying to offset its fertility rate with immigration, yet failing to explicitly address the enculturation tension.
It's remarkably how people so smart in one area (demographic issues and solutions) can flounder so badly in another (addressing cultural friction with immigrants).
Especially considering history has "a few" examples of exactly this same thing, although possibly Americans have more experience in modernity.
The cultural friction is not a real issue except for the extreme right. The real issues are the same as everywhere: standard of living is going down for younger people while wealth is being concentrated in fewer individuals. Those wealthy individuals are the ones who benefit from promoting this immigration/cultural friction theory.
It is a real issue, because it's human nature. Groups don't like outsiders.
Pretending that isn't human nature is why anti-immigrant parties keep attracting surprising support in elections.
And that tension shouldn't be swept under the rug and ignored via the 'it's just the far right' excuse.
It's a thing. It needs to be addressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean implementing anti-immigrant policies, but does at least mean some form of address (e.g. government support for enculturation, advertising benefits of immigration, etc).
i mean the building data centers is kind of a bummer, yeah. but if Europe misses out on AI and space travel, well, so be it. i could name 20 more important issues than these buzzhypes.
This is obviously subjective, but I think both AI and space launch are hugely important technologies.
AI unlocks a new class of automation that will lead to productivity increases. In some cases, it literally saves lives, as Waymo-class autonomous vehicles are much safer than human drivers.
Cheap space launch unlocks LEO constellations like Starlink, which Europe is already trying to build. Even without fanciful uses like space datacenters and asteroid mining, access to space gives us a host of communications, imaging, and location services.
I think the EU dropped the ball on reusability. But Ariane 5 was an excellent expendable heavy-lift launcher and Ariane 6 follows on the same track.
Not great for mass commercial launches, but good enough for sovereignty and science missions. Why compete with SpaceX? They can already provide more than what the market demands, so much that they have to create their own demand in the form of Starlink.
Europe could join the space race but it is an extremely expensive endeavor and the EU has other priorities. Now the question is which ones. As a French, I am all for nuclear technology, for which France was at the forefront and it seems to get back some traction after decades of neglect.
Yeah it doesn't seem worth it to try and compete with SpaceX at this point, at least in countries allied with the US. Makes more sense to take the future NASA approach and focus on specialized payloads, not launchers.
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.
The space race ended 50 years ago, all that is left is those who didn't win to finally cross the finish line. Dropping out is your best bet. The only reward was bragging rights, so you need to find something else to brag about. If indeed you need to brag, there is nothing wrong with modesty. Even if you do need to brag, it isn't clear what you can work on today that will get bragging rights - you might finish at the same time as something else and that something else gets the rights.
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).
Starlink prints money, SpaceX is absolutely launch mass constrained right now. They literally spent $17 billion on spectrum to make Starlink better and more efficient because of how constrained they are on the launch side until Starship is fully operational and reusable, which may not be until 2027 even for Starlink launches.
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.
Saying there's no market demand for cheaper launchers, when the company with the cheapest large launchers has cornered the market makes no sense. That was my only point.
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?
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.
No one doubts the technical prowess of SpaceX or the skill of the team. So I'm unsure why you felt the need to write that?
What's in doubt is a wanker CEO who may, or may not, do something strategically ridiculous - perhaps because an advertising executive looked at him the wrong way.
I don't care if the alternative is a Soviet jalopy propelled to the sky with compressed fart power.
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
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.
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.
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.
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??)
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.
Very interesting:) And as much as I like the ideas behind starship, think having a strong second launch provider is a good thing. Hope Blue Origin catches up even more
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.
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
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.
The "buffering" message looks like they are using the wrong streaming technology though. They should use a fault tolerant real-time video codec, transmitted via UDP, which produces glitches during brief interruptions but not complete aborts with a "buffering" message.
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.
"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.)
This isn't just first to market it's been 10 years and SpaceX is still innovating. I applaud Bezos for at least offering some sort of competition though it will keep SpaceX from becoming complacent.
It happens. I don't think we'll know the winner (if there even winds up being a single one) of this race for a decade or more, and I think Bezos's fortune is a lot safer.
It is a decade late. By now, SpaceX's own landings are totally routine and happen once a week, and even Starship got first stage reusability.
Still, good to see that someone other than SpaceX is serious about reusability and capable of pulling off a landing. The performance of "old space" has been nothing short of embarrassing. I'm no fan of Blue Origin, but the teams there pulled off one of the hardest feats in all of spaceflight.
The two launches scheduled for today (Nov. 14th 2025) are both on the East coast and are scheduled to be within an hour (22:08 EST and 22:55 EST according to Spaceflight Now) from: Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
If those launches go on schedule, that will mean 4 launches (New Glenn, Atlas 5, and two Falcon 9s) in 31 hours from the Cape Canaveral area in Florida.
Who did it first doesn't matter. What matters is who can do it the cheapest. Blue Origin has now destroyed SpaceX's cost advantage. That's good for humanity because you don't want a megalomaniac like Elon Musk to be the only one launching satellites and the only with a satellite internet service.
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.
> 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?
While the weapons systems work for an adversary is itself a little problematic, IMHO it is his role supervising work done with slave labor under horrendous conditions in concentration camps while rising through the ranks of the SS that makes him a completely unsuitable choice as a namesake.
At best it indicates a callous willingness to tolerate the extreme abuse of others in the direct pursuit of his personal advancement.
There's nothing humanitarian in building weapons for the nazi cause, even if they didn't kill people at the time. The nazi project itself planned (and executed) for the elimination of millions, and Von Braun was involved in it.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)).
> slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
True. But given the far-lower demand for the Heavy's payload capabilities (vs. Falcon 9), and the costs of the alternatives launch providers for such payloads - slapping a bunch of Falcons together looks like an excellent corporate engineering strategy choice.
Also falcon heavy use the same fairing as falcon 9 which limits payload size for heavy
And don't forget New Glenn uses Methane which solves the coking problem for reusability. Coke buildup plagues Falcon more than people realize.
I think some Falcon 9 lower stages have already been reused 30 times, which suggests coking is not a major problem.
The individual Falcon turn-around is slow (months of refurb), and the record half-month ones swapped some engines. B1067's 30-reuse is a ship of Theseus rebuilt over 4+ years.
Feh, swapping engine is not an option for the first few initial Mars trips, unless its payload also contains engines (can't imagine the scissor-lift payload either that needs to go with).
Don't take the Mars story at face value, SpaceX has always been for the military industrial complex. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ga3fjq/comment/...
That post really does not make that case. Of course SpaceX will enthusiastically cooperate with a deep-pocketed customer, but that's all it shows.
Did you miss the 2001 part?
No, I just understand that traveling with the former head of SDI does not mean the company’s stated mission is a cover story.
The head of SDI formed the Mars Society with Zubrin. He was originally going to run SpaceX as Chief Engineer (cite: Liftoff) but he instead got appointed NASA admin and directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX. This same SDI head then formed something called SDA in 2017 under Trump which is the platform for Golden Dome, or "the SDI 2.0".
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
That should concern everyone.
And?
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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?
The numbers for payload beyond v3 are aspirational at best.
Interesting, and sounds like Elon:)
>200 tons to LEO
*In fully reusable first AND second stage configuration.
An expendable starship would double the tonnage.
Thanks:)
> It turned out that slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
The design process at SpaceX sounds hilarious.
IDK why you're getting downvoted. There's something very endearing about using the Kerbal Space Program workflow in real life and making it work.
Physics: exists
Engineer: "hehehehe, lets add struts"
<object actually goes to space as designed>
> New Glenn isn't bringing any new capabilities to the table
Their payload fairing volume is a new capability.
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...
^ Be aware that a large number of accounts in this thread are throwaway sockpuppets which are obviously linked. It's a problem that they're pretending to be a crowd of unrelated people; it's an inauthentic attack trying (I don't know why) to manipulate HN sentiment.
> I don't know why
It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
The pro-Musk propaganda on X is truly staggering as of late. Pretty sure talking about his Golden Dome connections, which have been widely reported by Reuters, WSJ, etc.. is at least the opposite of that.
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.
> Prosperity induced fertility collapse
This is only a problem when you look at the micro level of cultures or individual states. Sure, some culture may die out, but that's been happening forever.
There's 8 billion humans on this planet, and we're still fucking like we always have been. The human race will be safe from prosperity.
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.
I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
income correlates with fertility in for example Sweden where the highest income bracket has 2.1 children.
It’s not a linear effect. Once you have enough money to afford family planning it’s more like a level shift.
Maybe in that country, everywhere else in the world increases in prosperity mean fewer children.
Population decline is predicted or currently happening in some poor countries too. It's not a prosperity driven effect. Children don't die young anymore even in poor countries. There's just generally less pressure to spawn your own gang of supporters. Elon excepted I guess.
Every poor country is dramatically wealthier than they were 70 years ago.
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?
2.1 is replacement.
Sweden’s over all fertility rate looks to be around 1.8.
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Is 2.1 high or low relative to the rest of Sweden?
"Prosperity" implies that the problem is folks smart enough to not have children beyond the means to raise them into a similar or better lifestyle.
I prefer "Precarity" induced fertility collapse. Down here in the mud I guess I have a different view with my 1 child and wife with a heart condition who would likely die from a 2nd pregnancy.
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.
So that's how they Make America Great Again! With say, only 50 million casualties at home, we can win this war! Yay!
Except, they're just doing it to get their hands on those trillions of dollars of tax money. They don't really care if it's infeasible.
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...
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Who will think of the billionaires!
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The future's most inconvenient truths always get the most downvotes
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.
Amazon and SpaceX--now the two biggest defense contractors... Silicon Valley is sure returning to its military roots.
The fact that SV was divorced from military spending for so long (80s-20s?) was really the anomaly.
Which is to say that instead of leveraging SV, military funding went through the primes.
The Steve Blank piece from Tuesday had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887699
tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system
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...
The first version was supposed to launch 150 tons to LEO. In reality it was something like 15 tons. Even the new V3 (significantly taller) only aims for 100 tons, and whether they achieve it is still an open question.
Starship v3 is slightly smaller than previous versions (not much).
False, it's larger.
Sorry, I meant to say smaller in terms of payload capacity, larger in terms of overall size
Perhaps in payload volume, though the difference is likely not large.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1960812698037518540/photo/1
Falcon Heavy has been successfully flown 11 times. Falcon Heavy can lift 67 tons to orbit. Starship has only lifted a fraction of that. SpaceX claims the price per kilogram to orbit for Falcon Heavy is even less than Falcon 9.
Every attempt at building products that are better faster cheaper more capable than your own existing successful products is extremely difficult.
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> Starship is vaporware
Vaporware is "late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled" [1].
Starship is late, so you're pedantically correct. But so is New Glenn, and it started being developed when Falcon 9 made its first trip to the ISS. (2012.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
And Blue Origin was incorporated a few years prior to SpaceX. They’ve been working on this problem significantly longer than SpaceX, so they were more confident in their approach.
“Late” should not be included in the definition. Whoever did messed up.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporware
"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"
It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available, but only thing it'll share with original announced product is a name. Nowhere close on the cost/features/scale/etc.
Only things that were shown so far are prototypes that are many iterations away from being anywhere close to a product.
New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps.
> It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available
Did you miss Falcon 9 and Heavy? (New Glenn competes with them, not Starship. Falcon Heavy can launch more mass than New Glenn, currently, for cheaper.)
> New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps
This is literally the first time they've successfully recovered New Glenn. Recovered. No reuse. It's the second time they've every flown the damn thing. It's impressive. But it's not "just going through final validation."
I have a background in aerospace engineering, specifically astronautics. It's wild to see armchair engineers shoot shit at major accomplishments like this.
I'm reading this thread and there are a few things that come to mind.
My sense is that SpaceX's goals with Starship are significantly more ambitious than what is being tried with New Glenn. I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of what Blue is facing with New Glenn, but if we take that "rapid reusability" goal seriously the problem set seems significantly larger and not so "been there, done that". This makes the development programs much more difficult to compare.... certainly on the surface of the public optics at the very least.
While it's one thing to talk about rockets, it's another altogether to look and the engineering and practices going into the manufacture process of those rockets. I'm not an engineer, but I do work in manufacturing and, at least looking from the outside, SpaceX seems to be dedicating some significant amount of effort into building a scalable manufacturing process. Many other efforts have always appeared to be more about "bespoke" production even if the designs of each unit produced are constant. I could be wrong and maybe it's just SpaceX is a lot more transparent (willingly or otherwise)... but looking in from the outside, they seem to be developing a very mass-production oriented rocket factory.
And if New Glenn is just finalizing things and Starship is just vaporware... well New Glenn still has to land a couple more boosters and re-fly one (or two?) to catch up to those vaporware numbers. :-) Sure, New Glenn has now flown a paying customer... but I think we'll see Starlink launches on Starship pretty soon... well before it gets to "final validation".
SpaceX is only space company that does hardware rich development. Blue Origin takes much more traditional approach of linear design.
Blue Origin may fail (I couldn't care less about them or SpaceX), but yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things.
Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes.
> yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things
You're wrong, but I'm curious for the sources that lead you to think this.
> Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes
"Following the launch, New Glenn’s first stage attempted a landing on the recovery vessel Jacklyn, also known as Landing Platform Vessel 1, which was positioned 620 km downrange from LC-36. However, controllers lost telemetry from the stage sometime after the entry burn started and Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost" [1].
[1] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2025/01/new-glenn-launch/
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I mean, technically v2 could launch sats at this point as we've seen the successful deployment of dummies.
This said they've moved on to v3 and will begin testing that soon.
Yeah, the SS just don't make a lot of sense at this point. The mail slot design was always dubious, and that orange stain was really uninspiring as well.
>Starship is vaporware
absolutely. Majestic 6000 tons of glowing hot vapor every launch.
</sarcasm>? If not, why do you think Starship is vaporware?
There are prototype that are called Starship.
There's nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship.
It's Duke Nukem Forever.
> nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship
If it can get its mass into orbit, it delivers what it sold. I'd currently put my money on a successful orbital launch of Starship before New Glenn re-flies a booster for a paying customer.
US government didn't pay for getting its mass into orbit.
Getting Starship to the orbit means that they have something called Starship in the orbit. It doesn't mean product that they sold isn't vaporware - what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit.
> what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit
...what was it? Are you talking about HLS? Propellant transfer? (The latter is absolutely "getting its mass into orbit.")
Which of those has been either officially cancelled or had its delays materially impact the customer's timeline?
None of them were cancelled. But none of them exist in any form or shape remotely reassembling the product - therefore - vaporware. It's that simple.
But also, since you're telling me there had been no material impacts to the customers timelines, sorry, I don't think you're arguing in good faith, so I'm not going to engage here anymore.
In this thread your pedantic definition of vaporware seems to hinge on a compatibility between spec and delivery that has not existed once in the history of frontier engineering, so I'm not sure good faith is in high supply here in any case.
wow, given the recent starship milestones that were reached, this is a really strange comment (well, they are behind schedule, but that's Elon Musk way of working).
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).
Do you know about Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge and Delta Clipper?
True, a lot of rockets have done vert take off and landing.
Do you know about XCOR and Andrew Beal?
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.
> 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.
Are you talking about USSR Venera program or the US Apollo program? Your statement could apply to either one.
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.
Starlink was not that amazing as a business decision.
If one expects to generate orders of magnitude more supply of a good (launch capacity), then one needs to expect the existing (conservative, long lead-time) market will have insufficient demand.
So one needs to generate additional demand.
So one needs to find a profit-generating business that's limited by mass in space / launches, where each component is inexpensive enough that its loss doesn't bankrupt the company.
Space-based telecommunications falls out pretty obviously from those requirements, given the pre-Starlink landscape (limited, exquisite assets serving the market at high premiums).
In small irony, it's also the exact same possibility space optimization that led to Amazon starting with books: Bezos didn't give a shit about books specifically, but he did like that they were long-tail, indefinitely warehouse-able, and shaped for efficient shipping.
In novel logistics spaces, it's better to find the business that matches capabilities than the other way around, because the company's core competency and value is their novel logistics solution.
Well, sure, agree that there is a natural logic to the idea, but to actually go through with something that no one has done before and actually execute it (which as we all from the tech/sci industries here know), and also do it on a large scale and be very successful is an entirely different matter. Yeah, the number of things that need to go right is still pretty high, and at least to me, was extremely impressive. But to each his own.
It was an obvious market, that was visible years before the project was announced. I don't think any one was surprised, it was not like Apple launching iPod or the iPhone.
What was impressive is at that they solved a lot of hard problems like satellite manufacturing at scale, phased array dishes, or fleet management of thousands of satellites or laser interconnects between satellites, and so on, for basically a side project to increase their primary product demand enough to justify the reuse being a useful feature.
Absolutely! The engineering delivery and pace of execution was super impressive.
Especially avoiding the gold-plate-it tendency and remaining laser focused on economies of scale.
Hmm, don't know, easy to say it was obvious in hindsight. But over the years, Google project Loon and other similar attempts at increasing internet coverage (think Facebook tried too at one point) have not been nearly as successful. Yeah, still not convinced it was obviously going to be successful, but maybe am missing some aspect you're seeing.
Market was obvious, solutions weren’t as you cite there were many tech failures, it was just a logical extension to their business that is not really hindsight.
It was not the same kind of new market entry Apple did with the iPhone or even the iPod , or Amazon doing AWS, which if we claim today as obvious would be hindsight
It was also a great move because they could take more risks launching their own Starlink satellites and prove out the reliability of the Falcon 9 to others. They also are very had to compete with when they build, launch, and deploy the system all in house.
Was thinking this too. It reminds me of how TSMC's fab has a lot more volume than Intel's, because TSMC has outside customers and high-volume is what is needed to perfect a chip fabrication process (getting many more chances to fix any problems, and once you finally do, have the volume necessary to make it profitable). What a great idea it was:)
Hard to draw super hard conclusions. Could also be that the bets made on Falcon turned out to be particularly good, vs a more methodical approach Blue Origin took. The highly iterative approach _may_ be faster, but I don't see any evidence yet that it will _always_ be faster. Just depends on how good your bets are and how much in-flight testing you happen to have to do based on a design.
Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.
Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)
Rocket Lab is also taking a more methodical and less iterative approach with Neutron, which should be ready some time next year. If they make that work well, that will be another point in favor of a methodical approach.
There should be an in depth academic study on their two approaches, it seems like it'd be valuable.
To me at least, given the (probably) positive affects iterative dev has (overall) had on software development, my personal feeling is it'd be useful for most other types of engineering. But (as someone else also pointed out) iterative is much more expensive in hardware fields, given the high cost of materials, and you need to have a lot more funds to build hardware this way.
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:)
It'd be a win for me, probably not for him. Or investors, sadly, at least not in the short term. I would turn off the non-Amazon sales platform. It might be feasible to save the brand, but of course the immediate effect would be a loss of that revenue stream from all the random Chinese "brands" that flood it with cheap garbage and counterfeits.
Or at least make a persistent toggle switch in the UI where you can say "I never want to see a single product that is not shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon." And end commingling with any product that Amazon itself sells, if that is occurring.
That's why they don't let morons like me run big business :). I care about things that only matter when you are a small business apparently.
Ah, focus on quality of products being listed. And, maybe that means there is room for a high-end competitor to Amazon eventually (am not seeing this anytime soon, but maybe in a couple decades??)
Sadly, Bezos already turned over the job to a new CEO.
His loss :)
this belongs at the top; early culture was straight Mcdonell Douglas reportedly, and extremely ineffective.
The jury is still out on Starship, it has all chances take even more time from development start to orbit.
Yes, but it's also a harder problem, aiming to reuse everything instead of just the first stage.
And they have at least reached orbital velocity on several occasions, so they could have physically orbited. They just purposely chose a trajectory that wasn't an actual orbit.
Agreed. And even if they don't ever fully reuse the second stage, they still could use this gigantic working rocket as a (probably still) very cost effective to transport things into space.
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
It would be a waste of time to develop right now, if it isn't on starship it would be a dead end in terms of progress. So they are better off just waiting until starship can be sent.
I guess they haven't had a customer who has wanted to send something to Mars yet. If they have sent something to Europa it's not like Mars is harder.
Blue Origin got patents on landing on a drone ship a decade ago. Until today they'd never done it.
Not sure what your point is, other than hatred.
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).
Can you provide your logic for this conclusion?
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.
Why wouldn't they make it for external payload if they get the cost per kg lower than F9? Running starship only is going to be cheaper than running both rockets, except if the economics of starship are worse (in which case, it would not be used for starlink either).
Cmon. Don’t kill my dream. I dream of Elon musk flying to Mars. And staying there.
Oops. Earth's space connection to X just went down. We expect service to resume in about one martian lifetime.
He hasn't even been to orbit.
i would be sooooooo sad if we get a challenger #2 while sending musk up. depends on if he's the only one on board.
... but alone. We don't want some Expanse-like scenario down the line with fascist part of mankind completely unhinged. Once he is over then colonize all you want.
Have you bet on that on some betting market? I'd like to take that bet.
I have not, but I just checked and the odds for HLS moon landing before 2028 are at 12%.
https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoon/nasa-lands-on-the-moon/moo...
12% odds for 3 years seems fairly resonable for a manned landing.
Your statement of "Starship will never go to Mars. It's very unlikely it will go to the Moon" which sounds like it includes even unmanned test landnings is a quite different beast.
There are more possible bets on manifold, you do you.
I'm not really a betting man, but given the HLS budget is spent and most of technology is not nearly developed I'd say even an unmanned Moon landing is at least 5 years and $10 billion away and Mars is pure fantasy.
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.
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.
The weight of the landing legs is what made spacex go for the grab-tower
If you have legs harpooned to the deck on touchdown, presumably you can use much shorter legs (and therefore lower mass), as you're no longer depending on their length to prevent toppling?
Also, shifting compressive loads to tension ones
Oh, finally a video without the screeching in the background. Many thanks!
Does anybody know if there is also a video with only the engineering live audio?
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.
Another advantage is that it burns clean. That doesn't matter for expendables, but it's a big help if you want to reuse your rocket a bunch of times.
> Why did nobody use it before the Raptor?
It’s not the best choice for an high-budget high-performance expendable multi-stage rocket. Using kerolox/SRBs in the first stage and hydrolox in the second stage gives better overall performance.
Metholox is better for re-use, using the same engine in multiple stages lowers costs and complexity, and you can produce the fuel 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.
LandSpace, the company behind Zhuque-3, might be the most advanced Chinese rocket startup.
They said they are even designing a larger rocket with 10m diameter, which is more than Starship (9m). My question is though where they are planning to get the required money from. Unlike the organization behind the Changzheng ("long march") rockets, which is already developing a 10m rocket as well, LandSpace is not state funded. And they don't have a billionaire at the top like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
On the other hand, they were only founded in 2015, and it's impressive what they have achieved since then, no doubt with quite limited funds. They also have some experience with designing methane engines.
Hold up—where do you get the assessment that LandSpace "is not state funded" and that these startups have "quite limited funds"? My understanding is the diametric opposite. Here's WSJ:
> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra...
( https://archive.is/Ukmoa )
This is a national security priority for the Chinese state, which is why it's rational to expect a heavy amount of state support.
> LandSpace raised 900 million yuan ($120 million) in December from a state-owned fund focussed on advanced manufacturing, while in 2020 it raised 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million), Chinese corporate databases showed.
https://www.reuters.com/science/chinas-landspace-launches-im...
They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
Rocket Labs https://www.space.com/space-exploration/rocket-lab-delays-de...
Will be great if they're next
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.
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.
Excellent example.
"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.
It’s a neat quote but it’s not a clean fit.
You’d expect the “unreasonable man” of Europe to be behind but stable and decent, whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability.
There’s also an argument to be made that China is putting in a very solid performance in a very reasonable manner. See: methodical capture of global EV+energy markets, soft power expansion into the global south, cold-eyed deflation of financial bubbles, 5 year plans, and so on. At this rate, I’m not sure that the freedom and unreason loving “man” that is the US will be able to compete either.
> whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability
Those are the side effects of Europe trying to offset its fertility rate with immigration, yet failing to explicitly address the enculturation tension.
It's remarkably how people so smart in one area (demographic issues and solutions) can flounder so badly in another (addressing cultural friction with immigrants).
Especially considering history has "a few" examples of exactly this same thing, although possibly Americans have more experience in modernity.
The cultural friction is not a real issue except for the extreme right. The real issues are the same as everywhere: standard of living is going down for younger people while wealth is being concentrated in fewer individuals. Those wealthy individuals are the ones who benefit from promoting this immigration/cultural friction theory.
It is a real issue, because it's human nature. Groups don't like outsiders.
Pretending that isn't human nature is why anti-immigrant parties keep attracting surprising support in elections.
And that tension shouldn't be swept under the rug and ignored via the 'it's just the far right' excuse.
It's a thing. It needs to be addressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean implementing anti-immigrant policies, but does at least mean some form of address (e.g. government support for enculturation, advertising benefits of immigration, etc).
i mean the building data centers is kind of a bummer, yeah. but if Europe misses out on AI and space travel, well, so be it. i could name 20 more important issues than these buzzhypes.
This is obviously subjective, but I think both AI and space launch are hugely important technologies.
AI unlocks a new class of automation that will lead to productivity increases. In some cases, it literally saves lives, as Waymo-class autonomous vehicles are much safer than human drivers.
Cheap space launch unlocks LEO constellations like Starlink, which Europe is already trying to build. Even without fanciful uses like space datacenters and asteroid mining, access to space gives us a host of communications, imaging, and location services.
I think the EU dropped the ball on reusability. But Ariane 5 was an excellent expendable heavy-lift launcher and Ariane 6 follows on the same track.
Not great for mass commercial launches, but good enough for sovereignty and science missions. Why compete with SpaceX? They can already provide more than what the market demands, so much that they have to create their own demand in the form of Starlink.
Europe could join the space race but it is an extremely expensive endeavor and the EU has other priorities. Now the question is which ones. As a French, I am all for nuclear technology, for which France was at the forefront and it seems to get back some traction after decades of neglect.
Yeah it doesn't seem worth it to try and compete with SpaceX at this point, at least in countries allied with the US. Makes more sense to take the future NASA approach and focus on specialized payloads, not launchers.
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.
The space race ended 50 years ago, all that is left is those who didn't win to finally cross the finish line. Dropping out is your best bet. The only reward was bragging rights, so you need to find something else to brag about. If indeed you need to brag, there is nothing wrong with modesty. Even if you do need to brag, it isn't clear what you can work on today that will get bragging rights - you might finish at the same time as something else and that something else gets the rights.
It's not a race if the other party is not willing/able to participate.
> 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.
>Mbah
Did you mean to say nah? Mba actually means just that in at least one language I know.
I meant what I wrote, which was a transition from the universal reflective 'mmm' to the French whatever 'bah'.
[dead]
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).
>> Most of which was for Starlink.
I don't think that changes anything because... there's demand for Starlink. Both commercial and non-commercial.
You're telling us that if things were different, then things would be different? Bold claim.
Starlink prints money, SpaceX is absolutely launch mass constrained right now. They literally spent $17 billion on spectrum to make Starlink better and more efficient because of how constrained they are on the launch side until Starship is fully operational and reusable, which may not be until 2027 even for Starlink launches.
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.
Saying there's no market demand for cheaper launchers, when the company with the cheapest large launchers has cornered the market makes no sense. That was my only point.
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?
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.
No one doubts the technical prowess of SpaceX or the skill of the team. So I'm unsure why you felt the need to write that?
What's in doubt is a wanker CEO who may, or may not, do something strategically ridiculous - perhaps because an advertising executive looked at him the wrong way.
I don't care if the alternative is a Soviet jalopy propelled to the sky with compressed fart power.
We need an alternative.
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?
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.
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
Full launch video and images of the landing: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
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.
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.
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.
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??)
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.
Very interesting:) And as much as I like the ideas behind starship, think having a strong second launch provider is a good thing. Hope Blue Origin catches up even more
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.
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
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.
The "buffering" message looks like they are using the wrong streaming technology though. They should use a fault tolerant real-time video codec, transmitted via UDP, which produces glitches during brief interruptions but not complete aborts with a "buffering" message.
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.
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.
"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.)
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...
- Pecker!
- Oh! Where?
- Wait, that's not a woodpecker. It looks like someone's...
Rockets as Rorschach tests...
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.
This isn't just first to market it's been 10 years and SpaceX is still innovating. I applaud Bezos for at least offering some sort of competition though it will keep SpaceX from becoming complacent.
Gates was about a decade ahead of the game on tablets, too. iPad came and cleaned up the market.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-bill...
It happens. I don't think we'll know the winner (if there even winds up being a single one) of this race for a decade or more, and I think Bezos's fortune is a lot safer.
And NASA put a man on the moon in the 60s.
What is your point?
NASA never created rapidly reusable rockets, which is what we are talking about here.
Fantastic news! I hope to live long enough to see LEO become more accessible to everybody.
How big/small is it compared to Falcon 9?
Much larger than Falcon 9. Comparable to Falcon Heavy, much smaller than Starship.
Same accomplishment as SpaceX but with a lot less hullabaloo. This is Jeff Bezos's style.
It is a decade late. By now, SpaceX's own landings are totally routine and happen once a week, and even Starship got first stage reusability.
Still, good to see that someone other than SpaceX is serious about reusability and capable of pulling off a landing. The performance of "old space" has been nothing short of embarrassing. I'm no fan of Blue Origin, but the teams there pulled off one of the hardest feats in all of spaceflight.
> By now, SpaceX's own landings are totally routine and happen once a week
Three times a week. They may have two launches at the same times today, from West and East coast.
The two launches scheduled for today (Nov. 14th 2025) are both on the East coast and are scheduled to be within an hour (22:08 EST and 22:55 EST according to Spaceflight Now) from: Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
If those launches go on schedule, that will mean 4 launches (New Glenn, Atlas 5, and two Falcon 9s) in 31 hours from the Cape Canaveral area in Florida.
> It is a decade late.
Who did it first doesn't matter. What matters is who can do it the cheapest. Blue Origin has now destroyed SpaceX's cost advantage. That's good for humanity because you don't want a megalomaniac like Elon Musk to be the only one launching satellites and the only with a satellite internet service.
Bo have launched twice.
I think you’re a touch premature saying they’ve destroyed the cost advantage.
In 5 or 10 years if they’re launching three times a week, maybe.
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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.
> 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.
While the weapons systems work for an adversary is itself a little problematic, IMHO it is his role supervising work done with slave labor under horrendous conditions in concentration camps while rising through the ranks of the SS that makes him a completely unsuitable choice as a namesake.
At best it indicates a callous willingness to tolerate the extreme abuse of others in the direct pursuit of his personal advancement.
It killed many more concentration camp workers during production. Von Braun was an active member of an evil system.
There's nothing humanitarian in building weapons for the nazi cause, even if they didn't kill people at the time. The nazi project itself planned (and executed) for the elimination of millions, and Von Braun was involved in it.
> 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.
Can't be von Braun, he didn't care where they came down[1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
well, it isn't his department...
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.
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.
Deranged. I can find clips of dozens of politicians doing this 'salute' but I bet you won't declare them to be Nazis....
Sure, in Germany during the 30s and 40s. After it, I'm pretty sure none did it like Musk. Feel free to post the clips.
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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.
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