| I'm not an expert in the field, but I do work with the space industry and closely follow a lot of the developments from all of the different groups attempting commercial rocket endeavours. The big thing that keeps coming up around Blue Origin is that still to date they're entirely unproven for any real flights. They're older than SpaceX and most of their lives have been exclusively focused on sub-orbital flights, and most of that was centered around the "space tourism" business. They switched in 2014 to targeting orbital missions and from the outside it looks like that was only done for a contract with ULA (specifically this is the creation of the BE-4 engine). After that they started taking orbital options seriously, proposing the New Glenn as its own orbital launch vehicle the following year. It may also now be worth pointing out that the BE-4 wasn't independently designed to work with the New Glenn or for any specific mission characteristics that Blue Origin had planned. It is supposed to be a drop in replacement for the RD-180 engines we were purchasing from Russia for the Atlas V which is a major design constraint. You're also right that they haven't been performing as much PR as SpaceX but I don't think that's by choice. Every time they've had a success or an attempt at success they've done very large PR campaigns and even taunt Elon publicly but those are few and far between. They have absolutely had successes but they've also missed all of their target deadlines they've announced publicly and with their contracts. They have yet to have a successful payload to orbit and now they're talking about using a non-existent platform to launch 1,618 satellites to orbit by 2026. If they get the same density of satellites as Starlink (56/mission I believe, didn't look this up) that is about 27 launches. I hate to toot SpaceX's horn, but they're currently the gold standard on rapid development of rocketry so it's worth comparing their time line to this one proposed by Blue Origin. As a starting point Blue Origin has not launched their BE-4 rocket into orbit yet much less with a payload so they haven't reached the beginning of it yet: * September 2008: SpaceX successfully gets their rocket into orbit * July 2009: SpaceX successfully gets first commercial payload into orbit * June 2010: The Falcon 9 v1.0 platform has its first launch * 2010-2013: SpaceX launches 7 missions * 2014: SpaceX launches 6 missions * 2015: SpaceX launches 7 missions * July 2016: SpaceX launches its 27th mission * January 2017: SpaceX launches its 27th successful mission So at least in my opinion Blue Origin may not entirely be vaporware, but their time line seems unreasonable. To be successful in this endeavour using exclusively Blue Origin rockets, while taking on no additional launches, they would have to be more than twice as fast at development as SpaceX while using hardware that was designed for another purpose, in an market segment that they didn't start in. |