[Retric]

Blue Origin arguably did the first verticals landing from “space” as defined by 100km of altitude in 2015. Though the lunar lander is perhaps the more famous vertical landing from space in 1969, following earlier soft landings like Luna 9 1966, and a lot of earlier VTVL rocket research at the time.

SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015. I don’t mean to dump on Blue Origin but their achievements are really just around the definition of space as 100km which is completely arbitrary, their effectively just publicity stunts.

It’s possible that Blue Origin will create a useful system for space exploration, but based on past progress their years if not decades from that point.

[SahAssar]

> SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015

I'm not sure how important/big the difference is, but IIRC spaceX only lands boosters that never actually reach orbital velocity. They help boost things into orbital velocity, sure, but the things that land under powered flight never actually reach orbital velocity, right?

I'm aware that the crew dragon was supposed to do this, but AFAIK it never has.

[bpodgursky]

It's still a dramatically different and faster trajectory than straight up-and-down. There's a reason SpaceX has drone ships out in the middle of the ocean -- they travel laterally hundreds of miles.

[Retric]

Yes, but what I was getting at was the safety factor. As part of the first stage of an orbital rocket SpaceX was stuck with a ~20% safety factor if they wanted to get significant cargo to orbit, where Blue Origin could seriously over engineer the rocket without any obvious problems.

I am not saying they fudged things or that it was easy, just that it wasn’t the kind of litmus test you see on an actual orbital rocket.