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Vaporware is "late, never actually manufactured, or officially canceled" [1].
Starship is late, so you're pedantically correct. But so is New Glenn, and it started being developed when Falcon 9 made its first trip to the ISS. (2012.)
"a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"
It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available, but only thing it'll share with original announced product is a name. Nowhere close on the cost/features/scale/etc.
Only things that were shown so far are prototypes that are many iterations away from being anywhere close to a product.
New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps.
Did you miss Falcon 9 and Heavy? (New Glenn competes with them, not Starship. Falcon Heavy can launch more mass than New Glenn, currently, for cheaper.)
> New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps
This is literally the first time they've successfully recovered New Glenn. Recovered. No reuse. It's the second time they've every flown the damn thing. It's impressive. But it's not "just going through final validation."
I have a background in aerospace engineering, specifically astronautics. It's wild to see armchair engineers shoot shit at major accomplishments like this.
My sense is that SpaceX's goals with Starship are significantly more ambitious than what is being tried with New Glenn. I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of what Blue is facing with New Glenn, but if we take that "rapid reusability" goal seriously the problem set seems significantly larger and not so "been there, done that". This makes the development programs much more difficult to compare.... certainly on the surface of the public optics at the very least.
While it's one thing to talk about rockets, it's another altogether to look and the engineering and practices going into the manufacture process of those rockets. I'm not an engineer, but I do work in manufacturing and, at least looking from the outside, SpaceX seems to be dedicating some significant amount of effort into building a scalable manufacturing process. Many other efforts have always appeared to be more about "bespoke" production even if the designs of each unit produced are constant. I could be wrong and maybe it's just SpaceX is a lot more transparent (willingly or otherwise)... but looking in from the outside, they seem to be developing a very mass-production oriented rocket factory.
And if New Glenn is just finalizing things and Starship is just vaporware... well New Glenn still has to land a couple more boosters and re-fly one (or two?) to catch up to those vaporware numbers. :-) Sure, New Glenn has now flown a paying customer... but I think we'll see Starlink launches on Starship pretty soon... well before it gets to "final validation".
Blue Origin may fail (I couldn't care less about them or SpaceX), but yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things.
Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes.
You're wrong, but I'm curious for the sources that lead you to think this.
> Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes
"Following the launch, New Glenn’s first stage attempted a landing on the recovery vessel Jacklyn, also known as Landing Platform Vessel 1, which was positioned 620 km downrange from LC-36. However, controllers lost telemetry from the stage sometime after the entry burn started and Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost" [1].
[1] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2025/01/new-glenn-launch/
This said they've moved on to v3 and will begin testing that soon.
absolutely. Majestic 6000 tons of glowing hot vapor every launch.
There's nothing even remotely reassembling what was advertised to the public (and sold to the government) as Starship.
It's Duke Nukem Forever.
If it can get its mass into orbit, it delivers what it sold. I'd currently put my money on a successful orbital launch of Starship before New Glenn re-flies a booster for a paying customer.
Getting Starship to the orbit means that they have something called Starship in the orbit. It doesn't mean product that they sold isn't vaporware - what was sold with a name of Starship included much more things than getting stage 2 into orbit.
...what was it? Are you talking about HLS? Propellant transfer? (The latter is absolutely "getting its mass into orbit.")
Which of those has been either officially cancelled or had its delays materially impact the customer's timeline?
But also, since you're telling me there had been no material impacts to the customers timelines, sorry, I don't think you're arguing in good faith, so I'm not going to engage here anymore.