Since this story came out a few days ago, does anyone know if Amazon has commented on whether or not they plan to launch these 'themselves' / with Blue Origin?
SpaceX isn't resting on its laurel either, with their R&D effort on Starship.
He says this during a keynote with the US Air Force about 4 months ago. He also says a ton of other interesting things as well.
Since they already had achieved this, Bezos tweeted "Welcome to the club" when Elon Musk's SpaceX had their first successful rocket landing. If that's appropriate is subject for debate, as the conditions experienced are not comparable.
Blue Origin also tried to patent landing a rocket booster on a boat while SpaceX was planning to exactly do that which lead to some bad blood.
Any real payload would be launched with "New Glenn": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn
The GTO market, long the stable of many big rockets, is slowing and not gone pick up.
At the same time every government tries to prop up its domestic industry. One the few commercial launches, beating SpaceX on price is just not gone happen unless you simply fly with a massive lost, you need a couple of years ramp at least.
The other big thing it government launches, SpaceX and ULA are very established and its pretty unlikely that Blue will get deep into these anytime soon. SpaceX is gone continue to have most commercial Space Station buissness. ULA and SpaceX will likely again be selected for the military over the next couple years.
One of the reason SpaceX does Starlink is that it is an amazing driver for scale and re-usability for their rocket buissness. This year alone SpaceX without Starlink does only a few launches, not enough, and this is a year where most others did very few launches.
Blue and Bezos will have made the same calculation, you simply can't New Glenn sized rockets without that.