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Comment by anonisko | Hacker News Reader

I've got a feeling that Elon is the kind of person who would only be happy with death on a battlefield, bested by a worthy opponent.

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He started out trying to blow some money to get a green house to Mars. His goal was to get enough interest to start another space race to Mars. If someone else gets there first I think he has achieved his original goal.

Rocket Lab is an excellent company that makes innovative rockets: flying electric pump fed engines, carbon fiber frames and 3D printed Inconel engines all the way to orbit. They've achieved a high flight rate and a nice niche for themselves in a area where SpaceX themselves have moved away from.

Rocket Lab deserves the praise it receives. More so than Blue Origin, an older company whith grander ambitions but has been unable to execute on anything beyond a few small scale suborbital hops. Their methalox BE-4 engine is admittedly pretty cool though.

It seems Blue Origin has gone almost full SLS with their New Glenn. So different from SpaceX. The approaches could not be more different: 1. spend a lot of money on first-time-right, making no money in the process and having all risk at the end (while trying to lower it on paper). Big kudos to BO if sticks the first landing (my bet is that the first will not land OK)

2. Design for first-time-close enough, spend a lot of money on many relatively cheap-ish prototypes that get blown up but improve each time. While making money with a less (but still) ambitious design

But BO has some beautiful factories built for New Glenn, whereas SpaceX is building Starship in tents. Elon says that the factory is 10-100x as hard as the prototype, so New Glenn must be way ahead of Starship, right? /s

Beautiful empty factories, it seems.

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