[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.