More bad news for the Blue Origin team, but at least they've got pockets deep enough to absorb the delay to revenue.
Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
But ya, definitely challenging.
To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Blue has any plans (at least in public) for full re-usability.
Though New Glenn is a beast, it's not that much more powerful than Falcon Heavy, and both of those platforms still throw away the 2nd stage.
The push to scale up and become an operational launch company has only ramped up in the past several years.
They still move somewhat slowly and are fiercely private, but those early years were targeting different goals.
SpaceX mocked up a plan to reuse the second stage of Falcon 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE These plans were scrapped to concentrate on Starship.
If the Falcon 9 is big enough to have enough margin to support second stage reuse, New Glenn definitely does too.
However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy.
Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
[0]: https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-...
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-fi...
The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant.
Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan!
We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.