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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea that Blue Origin vertically landed their rocket (New Shepard) on 2015-11-23, before SpaceX did on 2015-12-21. In addition, New Shepard rockets have already been reused.

On the other hand, New Shepard is suborbital, even though it's reached the altitude of 100km.

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I was gearing up to try to explain how substantial the difference between what Blue Origin and SpaceX have achieved is, but luckily I found that Randall Munroe has already explained it quite well[0].

Long story short -- a vertical takeoff and landing, reaching 100km with zero velocity, is a vastly simpler (and lower energy) problem than what the Falcon 9 is doing.

[0]: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Compared to an orbital launch, Blue Origin's flight so far are more like a tech demo. But they're one heck of a tech demo!

It's a smart strategy. Take the shortest, cheapest possible route to profitability by selling flights to space tourists, all the while building experience with operating and maintaining a reusable rocket. Then build on that expertise to develop a reusable orbital launch system. I think they're by far the most interesting of SpaceX's competitors.

I mean, technically spacex vertically landed a rocket in 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

If you're willing to count a 40 meter hop, then 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PEXLODw9c

C'mon, this has been done before by both private and government funded projects

DC-X 1991: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXcTFfV3Ls

Yeah... For some reason everyone who is interested in this stuff is SpaceX fanboy and when Blue Origin released their success after SpaceX's failure(s) everyone just seemed to be little them. Then SpaceX did theirs and everyone went nuts over it.

They're not comparable. Blue Origin's work is commendable, but landing a sub-orbital rocket, even re-using one, is not on the same scale as what SpaceX has done, the engineering is just on a different level. The X-15 program was landing sub-orbital vehicles, and re-using them, that had gone above 100km decades ago. The difference between Blue Origin's efforts and the X-15 is primarily the landing.

In addition to the enormous difference in difficulty, there's a correspondingly enormous difference in utility. Suborbital is good for some light tourism and brief science experiments, but not a whole lot. Orbital is extremely useful for things like communications satellites, to the point that a lot of people will willingly pay hundreds of millions of dollars just to put something up.

Blue Origin's vehicle is basically a fancy toy, while SpaceX is opening up space.

Of course, Blue Origin is working on opening up space too, they just haven't got there yet. Once they start putting things into orbit, I'll be tremendously excited for them too.

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