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Comment by rhubarbtree | Hacker News Reader

Someone on HN care to explain where BO are on their journey, relative standing to SpaceX. If SpaceX ceases to exist, how well served will we be by BO as an alternative?

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They’re roughly 25 years old, they now have the largest operational orbital rocket ever built even if it’s likely SpaceX soon blows them out of the water with Starship and Super Heavy. They’ve taken a long time to get to orbit and haven’t quite cracked partial reusability but they’re now an active player and reaching orbit on their first try is impressive. The iterative error tolerant development philosophy of SpaceX has resulted in far faster innovation and Blue Origin has benefited from SpaceX being a major forcing function to move the US Space program primarily to private launch/space craft providers and proving orbital booster reuse was possible in the first place. Finally Blue Origin doesn’t have an operational orbital crew capsule or cargo spacecraft. Losing SpaceX would mean the US would at least temporarily lose its crew launch capability entirely and some of its ISS resupply capabilities, launch cadence would fall off a cliff, and overall industry innovation would suffer.

The rocket BO sent up today is bigger than SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy!? If I understood correctly, that's really impressive. It would also explain why it appeared slow to rise at the start of the launch.

No, starship/superheavy is bigger. But it hasn’t technically reached orbit yet.

Thanks for clarifying.

Also, crucially, this was an operational test by BO whereas Starship and Super Heavy are still in developmental testing. New Glenn will now start launching commercial payloads assuming the outcome doesn’t reveal any problems with the overall launch.

I'm not sure that's a crucial difference. SpaceX doesn't operate the way the rest of the launch industry does. They could keep launching any of the last few iterations if they wanted, and it would be perfectly capable of reaching orbit and carrying a payload. Unclear what size payload from the info we have.

Is it actually capable of carrying a payload? Have they confirmed that? The fuel graphs they show during launcheshave always shown the ship being full on launch, empty by the end, it's not clear to me how they would carry cargo in addition to what they're showing now.

All those reentry tiles, reentry & burn back fuel, and header tanks add up to a lot of launch weight that wouldn't be needed in an expendable mission profile.

Sure, but that's not what this is about. The quoted capacity of Starship is supposed to be for a fully rapidly reusable Starship

So the question remains: is the current Starship design capable of carrying a commercial payload to at least LEO, and then come back safely down as they demonstrated?

I don't see how that is relevant? Surely you'd be comparing against other launch vehicles, which are all expendable.

Not just that, they would have launched RocketLab's ESCAPADE on their first flight, if they hadn't missed the launch window.

No, it's much smaller (though still a huge rocket). It appears to rise slowly because it accelerates more slowly than Starship (~1.2g vs ~1.5g when clearing the launch tower).

People are saying things about Starship not yet being an orbital rocket because of technicalities. The reality is we have two huge rockets, made by American companies, that can now reach orbit, and that's pretty amazing.

Starship is an orbital rocket, and will achieve actual orbit in few months, but I don’t think they are ready for a customer anytime soon, particularly an external one.

That is entirely by choice, they want to focus their attention on iteration now, which is sensible as falcon 9 and heavy are more than enough to compete today.

For a buyer in next two years it is either falcon heavy or new glen if they want heavy lift today.

Bigger than Falcon 9, smaller than Falcon Heavy. Smaller than Starship/Super Heavy.

I'm comparing here on payload capacity to LEO

Falcon Heavy is operational, and bigger than New Glenn

Falcon Heavy: 65t to LEO

New Glenn: 45t to LEO

True FH has better LEO performance but NG has better GEO/GTO performance (the main difference coming from the more powerful LH2 upper stage). The difference in fuel in the NG will probably mean a higher cost for NG (amongst a host of other reasons), but the question is by how much. FH also has to fully discard all the Stage 0/1 boosters to achieve 65t LEO. SpaceX on the other hand get much better economies of scale as they launch far more frequently.

Okay, but you forgot to mention these caveats:

- 65t is the fully expendable configuration

- 57t is the core-expendable, side-booster only reuse configuration

- 28t is the all booster reuse configuration

- the payload adapter is the same as falcon 9 and therefore can only carry 18 tons

- there are no plans to build payload adapters to launch payloads heavier than 18 tons

And on the Blue Origin side:

- Blue Origin intends to reuse the booster on every flight

- Future payloads need the full 45 ton payload capacity

Their rocket is closest to capabilities to a falcon-heavy [1], but to get to the space-x level, they need to demonstrate reusability, turn around times, and the ability to produce second stages once every 2&3 days, whilst maintaining an operational lunch tempo of 1 lunch every 2 days [2]

1: https://youtu.be/xKt0hn4R_uU?si=kE2bTotS1r08RYBm

2: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/spacex-is-superb-at-re...

Intermittent fasting?

People can attempt to explain it, but it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

SpaceX have a much more agile approach, and Blue Origin are following a more traditional waterfall style approach, to put it in software engineering project terms. While it may seem obvious that one is better than the other, I think it’s hard to say conclusively.

The different approaches mean that while SpaceX might have more milestones under their belt, Blue Origin could leapfrog them on some aspects. The fact this first launch went as well as it did is an amazing feat, SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.

What we can say however is that the endgame of Starship will be far more capable than the endgame of New Glenn. If or when either reaches that point remains to be seen.

> SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.

That is incorrect. Both F9 and FH have successfully launched on the first try, with full primary mission success.

F1 (20 years ago) had 3 failed flights and succeeded on the 4th flight.

Starship hasn't had an operational flight yet.

I see your point but disagree in the conclusion. F1 and F9 are a clear lineage, same engines, scaled up somewhat. It's fairly clear that their experience with F1's failures directly contributed to F9's early successes.

FH is again part of that same lineage. So much of that was a known quantity already. I know that it took way longer to build because it turned out to be way harder than expected, but it was still so much closer than SpaceX's other vehicles.

Also, where F9 built on F1's failures, it also built on its own failures to land, and took a very iterative approach to re-use.

Starship hasn't had an operational flight, no, but neither has New Glenn, and yet NG jumped straight to a flight somewhat equivalent to Starship's flight test 4?

My gut feeling is that SpaceX are far ahead of Blue Origin, but it's hard to compare because of the radically different approaches.

If Falcon 1 is to be thrown into the ring for consideration due to engine similarity, then we'd have to figure out where Vulcan fits. It already flew the same kind of engines that powered New Glenn.

Just a thought.

Very fair point. In some ways that would make NG a more iterative approach, but Vulcan is another example of, at least mostly, a waterfall approach.

SpaceX is way ahead of everyone. Falcon 9 has launched 425 times (127 in 2024 alone), and landed the first stage successfully in 398 of 410 attempts (most of their flights are with reused boosters). New Glenn has higher lift capacity than Falcon 9, but much lower than SpaceX's Starship, which has reached orbital velocity (didn't yet try for actual orbit) and whose Super Heavy booster has had a partially successful landing.

If SpaceX suddenly vanished, along with all its people and knowledge, Blue Origin could catch up to SpaceX's current capabilities, but it would take many years. If SpaceX shut down but Blue Origin and RocketLab hired all their people, things would progress much faster.

> partially successful landing

Outsiders like myself were too blown away by the 'chopsticks' catch to notice imperfections. What were they? (I noticed there was fire at the bottom of the booster for some time after the catch)

The booster was too damaged to fly again. The chopstick catch was amazing though.

They seem to be focused on different things at the moment. SpaceX has the Falcon and Falcon Heavy for Earth orbit payloads. New Glenn is meant for a similar commercial set of missions. Starship is meant for interplanetary missions and is very different. It has twice the thrust as New Glenn, can carry more than 2x the payload to LEO, and is fully reusable. New Glenn has only a reusable first stage. New Glenn is trying to land on boats, while SpaceX achieved this in 2016. In terms of payload to LEO and mission profile, the New Glenn is more like the Falcon Heavy, which had its maiden flight in 2018. So it’s probably fair to say that Blue Origin is 5-10 years behind SpaceX.

12 years passed between SpaceX's first orbital flight (2008) and their first orbital flight with humans aboard (2020). SpaceX will probably reach Mars orbit before 2030.

Blue Origin is likely at least a decade behind, though they haven't taken the same path and have the benefit of not being first.

Curious to see how this moves forward. Tesla (arguably) launched the first mass-appeal electric vehicles, but there are highly competitive alternatives now, despite the massive headstart Tesla had. Hopefully this will be true for rockets too.

I’d also be interested to understand what Blue Origin’s proposition is?

Does it have a capability advantage over SpaceX? A cost advantage?

A cost advantage?

Over Falcon Heavy? very likely. Over Starship? Probably not.

Capability advantage?

Over Falcon Heavy and Starship? As far as I know, Starship will not have an expendable fairing, nor is a larger payload door a priority and the internal reinforcement cuts into the payload shape, so if you want to launch voluminous payloads, the 7 meter diameter fairing of New Glenn fills that niche.

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