[bryanlarsen]

All we can really compare Musk to is to Bezos. Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017 after they blew up a test stand. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're developing rockets. You just have to accept it and move on. It'll cost you millions and many months, but if you want to develop rockets... After the test stand incident Bezos fired the CEO, brought in an incompetent one and brought in a "no mistakes" type of culture that doesn't get anything done.

In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.

But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.

Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?

Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.

[inglor_cz]

"Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017"

This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident.

BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years).

It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps dragging itself on, because it can rely on basically unlimited funding.

[bryanlarsen]

For the first part of its existence Blue Origin was basically a think tank. For a while its only employee was a science fiction author. Neal Stephenson is great, but he's not a rocket designer. As a think tank it was highly successful -- they successfully identified VTVL reusability as the future of space independently from SpaceX and similarly chose methalox. By 2017 Blue Origin was basically about a decade old as a "real" company. And progress was reasonable. New Shepherd was real and successful and looked like it could launch humans at any time. New Glenn was ambitious and BE-4 looked close.

Expecting them to reach orbit as quickly as SpaceX or Rocket Lab is unfair since SpaceX & Rocket Lab had an orbital rocket as their first product, and Blue Origin didn't.

It's unfair to compare everybody to SpaceX -- their success is exceptional. Pre-2017 Blue Origin wasn't as functional as SpaceX but I wouldn't call them dysfunctional. Post-2017 Blue Origin is dysfunctional.

This is all based on heresay, so take from it what you will.

[inglor_cz]

Thank you for providing context that I wasn't aware of.

That said, they are backed by Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet, so I think it is fair to expect some real achievements from them.

[bryanlarsen]

Very fair.

It almost seems a dream to a space nerd. A O'Neill protoge with a long term vision of "moving heavy industry into space to enable the Earth to turn into a garden planet" and uninterested in short term profits investing a billion dollars a year to pursue that vision.

They then successfully identified the first two steps along that road. 1: dramatically reduce the price of access to space through reusability. 2: return to the moon for exploration on the path to exploiting its resources to enable the space industry that's the long term goal. 3: LEO space station.

That SpaceX beat them to the first two goals should be cause for celebration and partnership and a move on to the next goal. Instead they've been fighting SpaceX with dirty tricks that luckily have failed.