Blue Origin lands New Glenn rocket booster on second try
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.
New Glenn Falcon 9
Height 96m 70m
Payload 45 tons 22.8 tons
Fairing 7m 5m
True. But given the far-lower demand for the Heavy's payload capabilities (vs. Falcon 9), and the costs of the alternatives launch providers for such payloads - slapping a bunch of Falcons together looks like an excellent corporate engineering strategy choice.
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
That should concern everyone.
When SpaceX got started, clearly with the focus on Mars he tried to pick up well known experts. Griffin among them, again this isn't surprising. And when SpaceX did that it was not at all clear that Griffin would be able to be NASA Administrator. And because Griffin as a very opinionated person he didn't get along super well with Musk and instead went to In-Q-Tel. But he knew that SpaceX was serious and Musk had the financed to put more money into SpaceX then most other companies.
Also you will see the Griffin was also at Orbital Sciences as CEO. So he had some links to both competitors in the COTS competition and likely knew or worked with many others over his career.
And if you do the research on COTS instead of just saying 'directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX' is just a major oversimplification. COTS started by other people inside NASA who were sick of the old practices.
The first round of COTS were selected May 2006. SpaceX launched the first Falcon 1 in March 24, 2006. So during COTS SpaceX was not some 'nobody' company, NASA was aware of them and while today 'private company close to launching Orbital rocket' isn't impressive anymore, back then it was very much so. SpaceX had done more already then many other companies in the competition.
Also, if you know anything about NASA processes, the Administrator can not just 'pick' whoever he wants. There is process that is guided by lots of requirements and so on. Unless you have any actual evidence that this process was somehow corrupt and that Griffin conspired to give money to SpaceX above everybody, then you better show some evidence for that. And 'worked for few month with Musk' isn't evidence. And in fact SpaceX was selected because many of the NASA people who did the selection were impressed with SpaceX as many have talked about in interviews over the years.
Given that SpaceX was selected and was successful, its hard to argue that NASA made the wrong choice. NASA selected 3, SpaceX, Kistler and Orbital, and 2 of those were successful. So it seems the program wasn't run by idiots.
Literally the whole 'evidence' for 'theory' is Mike Griffin likes missile defense and he has been in the Space industry for many, many decades and knows everybody. That's it, that's your evidence. Griffin and others like him never made secret of what they wanted. That doesn't mean that when he worked at NASA missile defense was the only thing he ever thought about and that all his actions at NASA were only with the singular goal of missile defense.
If you want to make the argument that orbital missile defense is a bad idea, that's fine, you don't need need to make up a bunch of conspiracy theory where non exists. You just make yourself look silly.
It was well known in those circles that Mars Society leadership was from Team B and Citizens' Advisory Council (which were the two groups that originally conceived Reagan's SDI, the Golden Dome predecessor). Max Hunter was the force behind reusable rockets with the DC-X. As mentioned, Griffin was effectively SpaceX's early chief engineer leading the guys he poached from the nearby McDonald Douglass Huntington Beach DC-X site (Chris Thompson, Tim Buzza, John Garvey, etc..) The other half of the DC-X team went to Blue Origin of course.
Funny how well the Mars mania took hold and people forget this basic history. It's the only way to make heads or tails of what's going on with Elon these days. He truly believes in SDI, but God help us all if he's in charge of it. It was recently reported he wanted to make Golden Dome a subscription service!
One question for you since your worked at SpaceX. Starship v4 is supposed to be able to bring 200 metric tons to LEO vs 35 metric tons for v2. Do you have any guesses on the finally amount that New Glenn will be able to bring up when it reaches its version/block 4?
*In fully reusable first AND second stage configuration.
An expendable starship would double the tonnage.
The design process at SpaceX sounds hilarious.
Physics: exists
Engineer: "hehehehe, lets add struts"
<object actually goes to space as designed>
Their payload fairing volume is a new capability.
But it will probably take a while for the "steamroller" to get going. For the next year or two it will seem to ULA as if everything is fine. And then they'll get flattened.
Which is to say that instead of leveraging SV, military funding went through the primes.
The Steve Blank piece from Tuesday had a good summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887699
tl;dr: a strategic military recognition that relying exclusively on full-custom, military-spec weapon systems is unaffordable (on either a dollar or time-to-develop basis), when your competitor is a vertically-integrated Chinese civilian+military procurement system
[1] https://spacenews.com/evolution-of-a-plan-ula-execs-spell-ou...
What do you mean here? I was under the impression that it was increasing each new version. Is that incorrect?
(Naturally, getting Starlinks to work is critical for cash flow, but still, it’s an issue for the launch platform business.)
I read that buried in the middle of an article on moon landing mission architecture: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/what-would-a-simplifie...
Every attempt at building products that are better faster cheaper more capable than your own existing successful products is extremely difficult.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
And only "somewhat," because new glenn seemed to take forever compared to starship. It does go to show, maybe the highly iterative approach that spacex takes really is faster (or, it could just be spacex has more highly skilled engineers, but I for one can't tell what the reasons are).
Fortunately it was challenged and the USPTO invalidated patent 8,678,321: https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-08-...
... although, just to play a little devil's advocate, Bezos doesn't get enough credit for jump starting private spaceflight companies. Blue Origin was started 2 years before SpaceX. Am sure Blue Origin racked up a ton of patents.
Unless you mean to say spaceX somehow benefited from the patents blue origin filed previously. I don't see how that would be the case though.
Iterations in hardware businesses are far more expensive, particularly for early stage (by revenue not age) companies like Blue Origin. Outside of the Vulcan engine sales, joy rides and NASA grants they don't have much inflow and depend on equity infusion.
SpaceX also would find it tough without Starlink revenue to fund iterations for Starship. Similarly the early customer revenue ( plus the generous NASA grants) contributed to iterate on F9 be it Block V or for landing etc.
Beyond money, it also requires the ability to convince customers to be okay with the trade-offs and risks of constantly changing configurations, designs.
It is not that people do not know iterative testing with real artifacts is quicker, but most are limited in their ability to fund it or cannot convince customers, regulators to allow them.
And to come back to you point, yeah, I do see, you need the funds first to be able to support such a cash hungry way of development - which, on a tangent, kind of disappointed me (and a few others online) when Stoke Space decide to build their own 1st stage instead of just focusing on their unique 2nd stage. Like many in the past have mentioned, it seems like they'd be getting to space a lot quicker if they had just designed their 2nd stage to fit on a Falcon 9.
If one expects to generate orders of magnitude more supply of a good (launch capacity), then one needs to expect the existing (conservative, long lead-time) market will have insufficient demand.
So one needs to generate additional demand.
So one needs to find a profit-generating business that's limited by mass in space / launches, where each component is inexpensive enough that its loss doesn't bankrupt the company.
Space-based telecommunications falls out pretty obviously from those requirements, given the pre-Starlink landscape (limited, exquisite assets serving the market at high premiums).
In small irony, it's also the exact same possibility space optimization that led to Amazon starting with books: Bezos didn't give a shit about books specifically, but he did like that they were long-tail, indefinitely warehouse-able, and shaped for efficient shipping.
In novel logistics spaces, it's better to find the business that matches capabilities than the other way around, because the company's core competency and value is their novel logistics solution.
What was impressive is at that they solved a lot of hard problems like satellite manufacturing at scale, phased array dishes, or fleet management of thousands of satellites or laser interconnects between satellites, and so on, for basically a side project to increase their primary product demand enough to justify the reuse being a useful feature.
Especially avoiding the gold-plate-it tendency and remaining laser focused on economies of scale.
It was not the same kind of new market entry Apple did with the iPhone or even the iPod , or Amazon doing AWS, which if we claim today as obvious would be hindsight
For launch perhaps, but what about for Moon and/or especially Mars landing?
With limited Mars launch windows, probably faster to have less attempts with more modelling, than vice versa
For off world missions, the best examples are the Soviet Venus missions of how iterating and sticking with the goals helped do some incredible research which would be hard to replicate even today .
The benefit of not doing quick and dirty is why we got out The longevity of voyager or some of the mars rovers or ingenuity.
It is matter of tradeoffs and what you want
Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.
Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)
I think people just don't understand what an absurd amount of cash burn Blue had for the last 10+ years.
So when it comes to iterative vs methodical, this is a perfectly clear case. SpaceX did it faster and for an amount of money that is so much less then Blue that its hard to even compare the numbers.
Go back and just look at how many people worked at Blue, and then do the math on what their cash burn rate was just for people.
To me at least, given the (probably) positive affects iterative dev has (overall) had on software development, my personal feeling is it'd be useful for most other types of engineering. But (as someone else also pointed out) iterative is much more expensive in hardware fields, given the high cost of materials, and you need to have a lot more funds to build hardware this way.
Spacex tends to "build rocket factories" instead of building one rocket. So they can launch and reuse hundreds a year. They're repeating this with starship.
It's hard to know what BO is doing because they're so quiet all the time, but to what degree is this scaling true for them also?
Or at least make a persistent toggle switch in the UI where you can say "I never want to see a single product that is not shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon." And end commingling with any product that Amazon itself sells, if that is occurring.
That's why they don't let morons like me run big business :). I care about things that only matter when you are a small business apparently.
And they have at least reached orbital velocity on several occasions, so they could have physically orbited. They just purposely chose a trajectory that wasn't an actual orbit.
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
Blue Origin got patents on landing on a drone ship a decade ago. Until today they'd never done it.
Not sure what your point is, other than hatred.
More than happy to be proven wrong. I mean they are still progressing but it is just a case of figuring out how long their runway is (economics).
https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoon/nasa-lands-on-the-moon/moo...
Your statement of "Starship will never go to Mars. It's very unlikely it will go to the Moon" which sounds like it includes even unmanned test landnings is a quite different beast.
I'm not really a betting man, but given the HLS budget is spent and most of technology is not nearly developed I'd say even an unmanned Moon landing is at least 5 years and $10 billion away and Mars is pure fantasy.
What does that mean? Starship is basically self-funded by SpaceX and the amount of money they got for the HLS contract is something they blew way past even before the contract, that doesn't make much sense.
It was likely one of the simplest things involved, but SpaceX never did this. It seems far simpler than SpaceX's OctaGrabber. I think you can buy something similar at Home Depot? (edit: I just meant the explosive nail gun)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/iheyXgtG7EI?si=zXnZ_lMAEoWjzpzg...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240092508A1/en
They have also included a way to disconnect the stud from the leg afterwards, such that the deck can be tidied up conveniently after the rocket had been removed. This is a neat idea -- the damage to the deck should very localized, and the rocket gets secured quickly and without putting human welders at risk.
BTW, while the pyrotechnic welding bolts are kinda neat, I do hope they come up with something else (electromagnets ?) eventually as it could be quite a hassle tneeding to cut the booster from the deck every time you land. :)
However, for an alternative that would be wild to see from a rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beartrap_(hauldown_device)
Also, shifting compressive loads to tension ones
Does anybody know if there is also a video with only the engineering live audio?
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/... ("China's 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight")
It's a good compromise, however, as well as being cheap and easy to simulate the combustion of.
I understand why Raptors use methalox, as it can be produced on Mars. But many of these new rockets are not destined to be refueled on Mars.
It’s not the best choice for an high-budget high-performance expendable multi-stage rocket. Using kerolox/SRBs in the first stage and hydrolox in the second stage gives better overall performance.
Metholox is better for re-use, using the same engine in multiple stages lowers costs and complexity, and you can produce the fuel on Mars.
They said they are even designing a larger rocket with 10m diameter, which is more than Starship (9m). My question is though where they are planning to get the required money from. Unlike the organization behind the Changzheng ("long march") rockets, which is already developing a 10m rocket as well, LandSpace is not state funded. And they don't have a billionaire at the top like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
On the other hand, they were only founded in 2015, and it's impressive what they have achieved since then, no doubt with quite limited funds. They also have some experience with designing methane engines.
> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra...
This is a national security priority for the Chinese state, which is why it's rational to expect a heavy amount of state support.
https://www.reuters.com/science/chinas-landspace-launches-im...
They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
Sadly, I think the disadvantages will compound. Europe doesn't have a Google-type company with expertise building data centers, and are now behind on AI scaling. Without cheap access to orbit, they have missed out on building Starlink-like LEO constellations.
I wish I knew why this is and how to fix it.
They make the best photolithography machines, for me, it is simply the most advanced piece of tech humanity has created, look it up, everything about EUV lithography is insane.
In a sense all modern tech goes back to them, including AI. They make the machines that make the chips that make AI.
I suspect that Europe is much more "reasonable", in this sense, than the US and China.
You’d expect the “unreasonable man” of Europe to be behind but stable and decent, whereas these days much of Europe can’t maintain living standards or political stability.
There’s also an argument to be made that China is putting in a very solid performance in a very reasonable manner. See: methodical capture of global EV+energy markets, soft power expansion into the global south, cold-eyed deflation of financial bubbles, 5 year plans, and so on. At this rate, I’m not sure that the freedom and unreason loving “man” that is the US will be able to compete either.
Those are the side effects of Europe trying to offset its fertility rate with immigration, yet failing to explicitly address the enculturation tension.
It's remarkably how people so smart in one area (demographic issues and solutions) can flounder so badly in another (addressing cultural friction with immigrants).
Especially considering history has "a few" examples of exactly this same thing, although possibly Americans have more experience in modernity.
Pretending that isn't human nature is why anti-immigrant parties keep attracting surprising support in elections.
And that tension shouldn't be swept under the rug and ignored via the 'it's just the far right' excuse.
It's a thing. It needs to be addressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean implementing anti-immigrant policies, but does at least mean some form of address (e.g. government support for enculturation, advertising benefits of immigration, etc).
AI unlocks a new class of automation that will lead to productivity increases. In some cases, it literally saves lives, as Waymo-class autonomous vehicles are much safer than human drivers.
Cheap space launch unlocks LEO constellations like Starlink, which Europe is already trying to build. Even without fanciful uses like space datacenters and asteroid mining, access to space gives us a host of communications, imaging, and location services.
Not great for mass commercial launches, but good enough for sovereignty and science missions. Why compete with SpaceX? They can already provide more than what the market demands, so much that they have to create their own demand in the form of Starlink.
Europe could join the space race but it is an extremely expensive endeavor and the EU has other priorities. Now the question is which ones. As a French, I am all for nuclear technology, for which France was at the forefront and it seems to get back some traction after decades of neglect.
so Ariane 5 was far to big, and while for very large GEO multi sat launches that was ok, they had a very low launch rate and couldn't compete for many missions.
Arianespace always launch more Soyuz then Ariane 5s. To me, if your European launch provider launches more Russian then European craft, its not good.
Ariane 5 was lucky that Progress and other Russian rockets were so mismanaged. They basically didn't have competition.
And Ariane 6 is just a slightly punched up Ariane 5 and in relative to market terms, its even worse. Basically everything that has been learned in the market for the last 15 years is ignored on Ariane 6.
> but good enough for sovereignty and science missions.
Ariane 6 was designed EXPLICITLY WITH STRONG FOCUS ON competing with SpaceX.
Its only now after the 5 billion EUR were spend that people way 'it was all about sovereignty'.
If sovereignty was the only goal, other ways to go about it would have been better. No need to give European Tax $ to Amazon just so they launch on European rocket. They didn't want to give money to SpaceX, so instead they are giving it to Amazon.
I agree with you, Europe should have just embraced SpaceX (or whoever does the launch cheapest) and invested into sats and innovation like space nuclear. That would have actually made sense.
For the cost of Ariane 6 they could have built a reusable nuclear tug and a nuclear reactor for moon/mars.
A space race.
Heh. I like your optimism.
Did you mean to say nah? Mba actually means just that in at least one language I know.
2020 Amazon’s Project Kuiper is more than the company’s response to SpaceX (95 points, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209940
2021 Amazon's Kuiper responds to SpaceX on FCC request (72 points, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26056670
2023 Amazon launches Project Kuiper satellite internet prototypes (75 poins, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813711
2025 Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites in bid to take on Starlink (58 points, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827083
It's actually the current biggest commercial launch customer, Starlink is internal to SpaceX, but Kuiper/Leo has bought many launches with ULA, SpaceX and Arianespace (and Blue Origin, of course).
I don't think that changes anything because... there's demand for Starlink. Both commercial and non-commercial.
SpaceX in 2025 has launched 134 times. Everyone else in the entire world has launched 115 times combined, including other US companies. SpaceX launches a lot of stuff very often.
EDIT: Originally meant to do 2024 but accidentally read the wrong bar. Regardless, this holds for most years.
SpaceX makes 50%+ margins on its launches, which are booked out years in advance, for a reason.
How so ?
F9 launches are available anytime a customer wants them. SpaceX will bump down a Starlink launch to accommodate a paying customer, All they would really need would be the payload assembly time?
Yes, China. But would also love to see Honda step it up a bit for Japan. (NSX edition!)
What's in doubt is a wanker CEO who may, or may not, do something strategically ridiculous - perhaps because an advertising executive looked at him the wrong way.
I don't care if the alternative is a Soviet jalopy propelled to the sky with compressed fart power.
We need an alternative.
Im pretty impressed at how simple that idea is compared to SpaceX's solution which is to have a robot drive underneath and grab the booster
I still can't stand the public relation heavy official stream... but even with all that static the rocket itself cut through.
For all the engineers that say management doesn't matter, I give you David Limp.
Management doesn't matter until it does.
Not saying he's a bad manager, just that the fact this one launch was a success is not proof of his skills. Luck is definitely still a possibility. And as a sibling comment mentions, it's not like he has a flawless track record.
I think it can be safely argued that since the fixes between attempt 1 and 2 happened entirely under him and faster than we're used to seeing from BO, he may have played a role.
(1) His management in the Consumer Devices group did not lead to success, I feel we (and especially the consumer robotics group) basically floundered for 7 years :(
(2) He only left Devices to join Blue Origin like 2 years ago. 2 years is a decent length of time, but far too short for us to credit this success to him -- there have been many other forces building Blue Origin to what it is today. Maybe he gets 30% credit?
p.s. no offense to Mr. Limp, I must emphasize that he was a kind, polite, caring person, and certainly had the capacity for great decisions. It is unfortunate that Consumer Devices and CoRo hasn't had great success, and success may yet be just around the corner.
(Yes, SpaceX's Falcon reached that milestone back in 2010.)
Still, am wondering though if SpaceX's highly iterative approach is a better way, because with Blue Origin's more standard approach of getting everything right the first time, you may need to over engineer everything, which seems like it may take longer.
On the flipside, SpaceX's approach might tax the engineers, because they have to deal with launching so often, and maybe if they had done less launches, they might have actually gotten falcon and starship out quicker...
...But, then again maybe at Spacex, the "launch" engineers are really the ones that have to deal with getting the rockets ready for launch, while the core design engineers can focus on building the latest version. And all the launches are used to test out different ideas and gather real life data). Hmm, for my part, am leaning towards the spacex way of doing things.
(maybe SpaceX and Blue Origin engineers could share their thoughts if they're reading this??)
It seems like multiple video feeds glitch out right as it's about to land. There's even a black screen saying "buffering..." encoded into the video.
Still early days though, and I'm sure they're working to improve, but they're missing a huge opportunity here by not having high-quality footage like SpaceX. For comparison, here's a great clip of SpaceX's Starship landing: https://youtu.be/Hkq3F5SaunM
The cause seems to be the heat from the landing burn messing with normal wireless signals.
Back in the day SpaceX used to struggle with this during drone ship landings as well. All the vibration and heat and whatnot is rough on the transmission. Usually they'd upload better (stored) footage a couple days after the fact, and I'd expect something similar from Blue Origin.
Today's airborne tracking shot (from downrange) all the way from space to the clouds was amazing though. Never seen anything like that before.
- Oh! Where?
- Wait, that's not a woodpecker. It looks like someone's...
That aged well. Six years later it turned into the iPhone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-bill...
It happens. I don't think we'll know the winner (if there even winds up being a single one) of this race for a decade or more, and I think Bezos's fortune is a lot safer.
What is your point?
Still, good to see that someone other than SpaceX is serious about reusability and capable of pulling off a landing. The performance of "old space" has been nothing short of embarrassing. I'm no fan of Blue Origin, but the teams there pulled off one of the hardest feats in all of spaceflight.
Three times a week. They may have two launches at the same times today, from West and East coast.
If those launches go on schedule, that will mean 4 launches (New Glenn, Atlas 5, and two Falcon 9s) in 31 hours from the Cape Canaveral area in Florida.
Who did it first doesn't matter. What matters is who can do it the cheapest. Blue Origin has now destroyed SpaceX's cost advantage. That's good for humanity because you don't want a megalomaniac like Elon Musk to be the only one launching satellites and the only with a satellite internet service.
I think you’re a touch premature saying they’ve destroyed the cost advantage.
In 5 or 10 years if they’re launching three times a week, maybe.
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.