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Comment by signatoremo | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX couldn’t manage the first Falcon 9 landing until 2015. The first Falcon 9 reuse wasn’t until 2018, so 3 years to achieve reusability. The Chinese prototype hasn’t yet succeeded at sub-orbital landing. I wouldn’t be surprise if it’d take them longer than 3 years to have a reusable rocket. Starship would have been routine at that time.

Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.

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I’m not saying they stole the plans through industrial espionage, I’m just wiggling my eyebrows suggestively while glancing in the direction of the suspiciously similar looking booster.

Is this the same company that had their booster fly into the air when they were trying to static fire test it?

They must have forgotten to steal the plans for the hold down clamps.

Well, that kinda shows a potentially another speed "advantage" - less paperwork and reduced safety requirements.

I promise you the fancy technology is in the electronics, software, and implementation, and not the fact that the cylinder with legs looks like another cylinder with legs

It’s a literal clone of starship, down to the flaps and grid fins.

Chinese startups have historically been the only ones to be able to move as fast as Musk. One very underrated ability of Tesla is they can develop new products in 2-3 years from conception to market. The only other car companies to do it at scale is BYD, Nio and Xpeng. The company he is talking about is probably LandSpace. They got from conception to hop test in what seems to be 5, maybe 4 years. SpaceX took 7.

I think China has about 5 companies working on reusable launch and it is part of a national government strategy. People can argue about the timeline but it is inevitable.

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