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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.

Competition does improve products.

New Glenn's engines are quite a bit less efficient than those at SpaceX. Lower chamber pressures, lower thrust:weight ratio, and they're partial flow staged combustion.

I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.

Spacex's work is out there ( and I am grateful for the excitement that generates ) but BO work in the shadows, surprising us sometimes with major advances.

I suspect BO not as far behind as you think.

They'll remain behind as long as they keep copying SpaceX's concepts since they need to wait and see before they can copy.

I am glad there is competition and BO clearly do enough novel work that calling them copycats is simply incorrect.

That would surprise me, given how much trouble they had supplying engines for Vulcan.

That doesn't make the BE-4 not impressive. It isn't a full flow staged combustion engine like Raptor, but it's still a highly efficient, high thrust, relightable and deeply throttleable rocket engine. These things don't often come in the same package when it comes to rocket engines.

They’re amazing too. That’s my point. The legacy launch providers were doing zero innovation, limping along shuttle era designs and literally buying the most critical parts from our biggest competitor. The people who hate Elon have no concept how revolutionary the Merlin engine was given this context. It doesn’t matter if SpaceX is successful or not, they revived the entire US space industry. That’s what matters.

I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.

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