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)
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.
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.
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.