[jblow]

What do you mean "way to make a valid criticism"? The criticism IS valid and that is obvious. This is a tiny and light rocket, and any VTOL system that would work for a big heavy rocket would be very different from this one and a much harder thing to engineer.

You are saying SpaceX lost a 'first' here to BO but that is not really true and that's Elon's entire point. This is not the first VTOL rocket landing either, maybe it is the first rocket to officially reach space and then subsequently VTOL land but that is not as big of a 'first' as most people are thinking it is.

Which is not to diminish what BO just did, it is just to see it in an accurate context.

[jacquesm]

It's not a valid criticism because BO has entirely different goals than SpaceX and the context musk provided applies to SpaceX, not to BO.

[rst]

Blue Origin has announced an orbital booster, and will be using at least the engine from New Shepard for its upper stage (presumably with some tweaks for improved efficiency at high altitude). They've hinted at much grander plans, although not with the specificity of SpaceX's "we're going to Mars". So it's reasonable to grade them on the same curve.

For suborbital space tourism, BTW, that New Shepard engine is phenomenally over-engineered. Even the fuel choice is surprising; liquid hydrogen is the highest-energy chemical fuel you can get, but it is nasty stuff to handle. (For starters, it diffuses right through the crystal grids of many metals, making your piping brittle and creating an invisible fire hazard outside of it.) So even the design of the current vehicle hints at building tooling for a much grander vision; if a large suborbital sounding rocket was all they wanted, they could have gotten it much more quickly and easily than by building what they have.

[jacquesm]

The liquid hydrogen is one reason you'll never see me near this thing, let alone on board. One facility that I know about that was used for liquid hydrogen production was basically built on the assumption that it would explode, and not just once...