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Comment by angelgonzales | Hacker News Reader

This is wonderful. It’s increasingly obvious that commercial spaceflight programs are going to get the most mass and people to the Moon, Mars/Venus and Europa/Enceladus. It’s really nice to see motivated and competent people get together to push the boundaries of human achievement.

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Hopefully, but it's early days. Only SpaceX have achieved much yet.

Boeing and Blue Origin aren't doing great (yet?).

Hopefully Boeing Starliner can start shipping astronauts to, and more importantly, from the ISS.

Hopefully Blue Origina can fly, eventually.

There's a bunch more companies, Sierra Space with Dreamchaser, a space plane that will dock with ISS or whatever replaces it. But there's Gravity, Rocket Lab, Astra, Relativity, Stoke etc. It's never been such a vibrant sector.

Blue Origin seems to be a vanity project for Bezos. While he seems to be taking it more seriously than Branson does Virgin galactic, he hasn't seemed to try all that hard to make as serious a competitor as Elon has with SpaceX. Elon wants SpaceX to be more than just a glorified suborbital tour-bus and is making actual progress on commercially exploiting space for more than taking millionaires and celebrities up to see freefall for a few seconds. Boeing... well Boieng is lucky if their planes don't fall apart on take off or fly themselves into the ground this decade and their spacecraft show early signs of being victim of the same systemic issues from Boeings cost saving measures like not bothering to test their shit properly first or attach all of the nuts a bolts that are supposed to be there, or make vehicles that don't autopilot straight down unless you buy the deluxe package

I'm not sure that's a fair assessment of Blue Origin. You seem to be ignoring New Glenn, their heavy lift vehicle with a reusable first stage, which will be the first non-SpaceX offering of a reusable vehicle. It may launch this year!

Bezos' only mistake, as far as I can tell, is trusting his old space experts as to the necessity of moving slowly and minimizing risk. Still, they have made fantastic progress.

Blue Origin is basically the Scotty Pippen of launch companies. It's hard to judge them objectively due to their proximity to the GOAT. If it weren't for SpaceX, they'd be the hottest company in lift tech.

Looks serious: https://www.youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut

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