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Comment by lai-yin | Hacker News Reader

I've heard Bezos' approach with Blue Origin compared to the 'tortoise and the hare' allegory. Slow and steady may work when your talented opponent is taking naps along the racetrack, it doesn't work when they are as driven as the SpaceX team.

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But it’s not necessarily a race with a winner and a loser.

The second or third or tenth company to develop reliable reusable rockets will get plenty of business in the coming decades.

I have a lot of faith in SpaceX and not a whole lot in Blue Origin but that’s also because I don’t know anything about them. Their success doesn’t depend upon my faith in any case.

Will they get plenty of business? I think that's questionable, with the exception of US policy supporting multiple launcher availability for national security reasons. Otherwise, I think that if BO doesn't start demonstrating reusable orbital rockets in the next 2 years, SpaceX will gut them on cost.

BO doesn't have the same publicly stated goals as SpaceX so it seems kind of silly to compare them. AFAIK their primary goal is to enable space tourism with reusable rockets with rapid turnaround. This is much different than SpaceX, who want to jumpstart a Mars colony. Their technological needs are worlds (planets?) apart.

So SpaceX, which is planning on flying a rich artist around the Moon isn't interested in space tourism? And we do know some of BO's goals; they want to have a Starlink like system. That's in direct competition with SpaceX, and SpaceX is far and away the leader in this field.

If you look at it in terms of capabilities, SpaceX checks all the boxes; reusable rockets, rapid turnaround, lowest cost. Once Starship is usable for payloads, no other launch provider will be able to compete.

I mean Blue Origin doesn't even have a fully reusable rockets on the (publicly known) drawing books. Unless they suddenly pull a surprise and announce that New Glenn second stage will actually land back on the ground, there's no competition really.

Yeah, I'd just say that tortoise and the hare comparison is flat out inapplicable here. In the allegory the hare gives up after an initial burst of energy and is eventually overtaken by the slow and steady tortoise. That is not remotely what is happening with SpaceX -- far from giving up, they're doing the opposite, and becoming even faster and more ambitious over time.

I think a different comparison is more apt here -- slow racers lose to fast ones.

It's more like a tortoise versus a rocket, and frankly, I don't think the tortoise stands a chance at this point.

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