How come Blue Origin with earlier start with richer founder is so behind?
vs SpaceX ? Bezos became richer earlier and Blue Ocean founded 2 years earlier. We don't even know what they're doing at this point. How is the gap so big?
After all of that (and capturing a huge amount of the market) SpaceX began development of a truly radical system that promises much better capabilities and lower cost.
Blue Ocean has made the mistake that many entrants in this market have made by developing a super high tech system (reusable from the start) rather than taking minimal steps.
The market for orbital flights is real, the market for sub-orbital flights is not. Really some university team should try making a reusable sounding rocket because people launch a bunch of those, but rocket companies promising suborbital flight, like Virgin, chronically disappoint because it is a ride to nowhere. There's more of a market for a theme park ride like Disney's "Rocket to the Moon" than there is for a $100,000+ suborbital flight that might just blow you up.
Musk himself is quoted as believing that SpaceX's success is in large part owed to him getting involved with the technical minutiae, whereas Bezos has other people making decisions.
even the internal tech emails of him saying "what did you get done this week?" brings chills to my spine.
Why is the market for suborbital flights not real? Is it because it's more of an expensive recreational thing?
Also, do you recommend any interesting resources to learn more about this?
There aren't really that many commercial uses for unmanned suborbital flights. For instance if you just want to test something in zero gravity for a short time maybe you can do your experiment faster in a drop tower.
Manned suborbital flights are so expensive that the market is this tiny intersection of people who can afford it and who want to do it. If it was $500 you would get lots of people to sign up, but at current prices I think there's no way to sell enough seats to pay back the development costs of the machine.
Eric Berger wrote a great book on SpaceX
https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac...
There are a lot of government reports on the subject from the 1980-2000 range where people were considering the needs of launching for the strategic defense initiative, this is a typical one
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CSAT/documents/O...
but not the one I was really looking for. I would say follow up the references on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle
and try to dig up more of the same.
Among Musk's successful customs in running his businesses is going above and beyond in recruiting. He is very personal and direct with every hire he goes after, as he seems to understand or at least recognize the substantial difference in the 5-year out outcome of a company between getting someone who is 99.9th percentile vs 99.99th+ percentile.