| > It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. They are actually falling behind faster then they are catching up. > I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit. This such a strange thing to consider. The logic that if you just go super slow for long enough, then once you start you will automatically go super fast? Why would that be the case? Of course once they put one kg into orbit, they will put more kg into orbit faster then SpaceX did in 2008. But that is strange definition of 'pay off', in fact its the opposite, its that you didn't get 'pay off' for 10+ years. Believing that once they finally launch something after 20+ years of moving incredibly slowly, it will simply take of like crazy and they will launch some huge number is just not how the rocket industry works. SpaceX has scaled faster then literally any space company ever, and is increasing the speed of its scaling over time. funds. SpaceX has the highest reliability of basically any rocket, no other rocket is human rated, rated for all DoD and NASA flights and has the lowest insurance cost in the industry. The simply fact is, BO and SpaceX have existed for the same amount of time. BlueOrigin had massive amounts of money put in it, literally billion, many, many billions and they will invest a number of extra billions before they get to their first orbital launch, or probably first significant revenue. Basically all paid of of pocket by Bezos. SpaceX started with an investment from Musk on the order of 80M and everything since then has been raised threw revenue and private investment. This race has started 20 years ago, it doesn't start when BO put 1kg into orbit. In fact, I would argue Bezos whole strategy has been an utter disaster. BO was started to test out landing things, but before they ever even tested orbital landing, SpaceX has already mastered it. Bezos could have invested in SpaceX around 2010 and put the rest of his money into what is need in-space and he would be 10x further along in his plans. If Bezos goal was millions of people living in space, it would make way more sense to take all those billions he invest in New Glenn, into building moon water mining system. Rather then being a slow copy of SpaceX that is always 10 steps behind. Together they could achieve so much more, but apparently another heavy lift launcher in a market that already has to many is what he wants to spend money on. |