Everything SpaceX is successfully launching today was similarly delayed during development. It's too early to write off Blue Origin, especially since Bezos just got involved in it full time.
At this point Bezos might be better off starting over with a new team.
BE-4 has been delayed, true, but if it were looking like a failure, ULA would have dropped them a long time ago.
I think 2022 will clear up lots of things for everyone. SLS, BE-4, New Glenn, etc... Till then there is no sense of dooming anything.
SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015. I don’t mean to dump on Blue Origin but their achievements are really just around the definition of space as 100km which is completely arbitrary, their effectively just publicity stunts.
It’s possible that Blue Origin will create a useful system for space exploration, but based on past progress their years if not decades from that point.
I'm not sure how important/big the difference is, but IIRC spaceX only lands boosters that never actually reach orbital velocity. They help boost things into orbital velocity, sure, but the things that land under powered flight never actually reach orbital velocity, right?
I'm aware that the crew dragon was supposed to do this, but AFAIK it never has.
I am not saying they fudged things or that it was easy, just that it wasn’t the kind of litmus test you see on an actual orbital rocket.
The first stage is far from orbital velocities when it reaches MECO and starts down, even though I strongly agree with you: SpaceX is in an entire other league.
Apollo LM was the first to land vertically.
> if it were looking like a failure, ULA would have dropped them a long time ago
That seems to be assuming that they have a choice. Given the fuel difference between AR-1 and BE-4, they've been committed to BE-4 for quite some time, no matter how much progress BO is doing (or not doing) on BE-4.
Many rockets did soft landing on earth before that point, but none of them had been in space.
Sorry, but the McDonnell Douglas DC-X did the rocket straight up & down vertical landing in 1993. New Shepard frankly wasn't particularly different. It went higher and longer sure, but for orbital rocketry the challenge isn't height so much as speed and everything that comes with that. The Falcon 9 flight 20 at the end of 2015 that marked its first landing was a vastly bigger achievement given that it was an orbital class rocket booster. It was going much, much faster and had to descend on a much more complicated arc through the atmosphere. And it pathfinded for actual rapid reuse, which is a whole different set of skills. That New Shepard did a suborbital jump a mere one month earlier 2015 honestly just isn't great.
Since then, F9 has done over 100 more flights, to orbit, including crewed ones, and set ever growing records on cadence, reuse of boosters and refurb speed, satellite launch records, etc. NS has done... what? 5 test flights over 6 years? Then that silly little PR stunt? It's ludicrous. And it's long since stopped serving any useful purpose in terms of learning because it avoids so many of the true challenges in going orbital which involve 9+km/s of delta-v.
The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos. What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design. It was a massive display of faith in his engineering team.
Musk didn't do that. Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
As for the BO rocket being totally automated, that was the original intent of the Mercury missions, until the astronauts objected. Nobody called them joyriders or ludicrous.
It's a good thing. I've also always been happy to fly on a 757. (I worked on the design of flight critical parts for it.)
Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.
Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.
> most boring
Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.
Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.
Doesn't matter what the excuses were. It was supposed to work, it failed, and Armstrong took over and saved the mission.
> Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs
Most every software bug today, once rooted out, looks like a mistake only an incompetent programmer would make. Except the best programmers make these mistakes, because humans are fallible.
If I recall correctly, SpaceX had some unintended disassemblies from software problems, too.
I honestly think you have it backwards: the media has been very kind to both Bezos and Branson, particularly the latter. This isn't surprising because the media doesn't really get orbital dynamics any more than they get most technical topics. Nevertheless a lot of them act as if Branson's and Bezos' flight were some big technical achievements or progress forward, as if they can just evolve the designs around the current limitations.
They cannot. Hybrid engines have garbage ISP, the entire design of the Unity is completely worthless for high speed period let alone reentry, every $ spent on it is pointless beyond a quick joyride that will relatively soon be obsoleted by real space tourism. NS is at least vaguely sort of more useful for BO, it has a hydrolox engine so it's not doing anything for them on that front but they got to work on their landing a bit somewhat more easily.
But the value of space comes from actually getting to orbit and then beyond, and that's a fantastically more difficult problem due to the delta-v needed, the rocket equation, our material science, etc. SpaceX's approach of focusing on the real hard problem which delivers serious revenue and opportunity then working backwards on economics, always with focus on orbit as their lodestone, has clearly been much more effective. BO is older than SpaceX and has yet to even once get to orbit or deal with reentry. At all. It's hard not to look at so much of NS and just see such a waste of years and dollars.
>What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design.
I guess? It had been flown and landed multiple times and it had a lot of margin to work with since it's just a big sounding rocket. They did a hyperconservative work-on-the-first-launch Old Space development process.
>Musk didn't do that.
You think Musk wasn't puckered launching 6 astronauts and tens of billions of dollars worth of other people's precious cargo to space? Musk didn't do that because it wouldn't have proved anything and been a pure waste and distraction from the actual serious mission.
>Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
Branson is a daredevil and that design is garbage on a host of levels.
>As for the BO rocket being totally automated
So is Dragon 2. So will Starship. That's normal and good, it's manual that's bad. But it's also not a special achievement that justified 6 years after first launch and landing.
A whole 5 times. The space shuttle flew many times before the Challenger.
> You think Musk wasn't puckered
It's a whole lot different when your own ass is the one that will die.
> Branson is a daredevil
And yet he still didn't dare to take the first manned flight.
> it's also not a special achievement
It's untried and very complex software. We know how that often goes.
Elon was probably more invested earlier and was paying more attention to what was going on is for sure though. Im not convinced Bezos personal attention is going to do much to help his space company though. Nothing about him seems like it would help other than his wealth. And he hasnt shown a willingness to throw a significant part of his fortune into his space venture. Nothing about this strikes me as anything more than what is a hobby that one of the richest persons in the world is passionate about
"While at Princeton, Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars and ran the campus chapter of “Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.” Through Blue Origin, which he has called his “most important work,” Bezos is developing detailed plans to realize O’Neill’s vision." - [0]
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/04/16/documentary-featur...