[Veedrac]

> Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade

Not to claim a false SpaceX-Blue equivalence here, but this is misleading. Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue.

It is true that Blue has taken much longer to get to orbit, but they're starting with effectively a Saturn V class vehicle (a bit smaller, but partially reusable), whereas SpaceX started their orbital ambitions with the vastly smaller Falcon 1.

The gap in technical competence and effectiveness is still huge, but it's not as stark as the money-to-orbit metric would have it seem. New Sheppard could have reached orbit long ago, if it was designed to be orbital; it's just there's no money (in a Bezos sense) in small launch, and that wasn't the tech it was designed to prove out, so it wasn't.

[crakenzak]

> Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue.

Seriously doubt this, please provide sources for these claims.

[Veedrac]

Here's an older sheet with revenue numbers not made by me: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1O7nXhhKqfy5aVOn-Fsys...

My preferred way to estimate this is with employee counts instead, and the difference there is also stark, and then in the early days it's also possible to prove on first principles since Bezos wasn't rich enough at the time to compete with SpaceX's early NASA contracts.

Blue has ramped up a lot recently, as in the last couple of years, but you can also check SpaceX's recent investment rounds and they are burning money like crazy (a lot of this will be Starship and Starlink, since the former is a cost sink and the latter is still a ways off breaking even).

There is an argument to be made that the nature of this money was different, but SpaceX has always done the Amazon thing of reinvesting every penny they make, and certainly in the early days their costs were especially R&D dominated.