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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

Are they going to go with just one of them? If so, that looks bad for SpaceX. They may have caught wind of it early and let go of some people in anticipation. I just can't see the federal government giving a mega deal to a "small" less-connected SpaceX over industry favorite Boeing. Tell me I'm wrong. I really want to be wrong.

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SpaceX looks to me like a software startup, that can clue a cheap, working hack from existing products. But Boing is a mega corp like Microsoft, Google, Intel that can create revolutionary new products from the ground up.

SpaceX is making rockets that come back and land like a 50s sci-fi wet dream at what look like they'll be drastically lower prices than ever before. Boeing is making an Apollo successor. I think you've got which one's innovative backwards.

Agree, it's hard to say when was the last time Boeing did something innovative - on the scale of SpaceX - in space technology.

In 12 years SpaceX roughly managed to build two rockets and one space freighter cheaply - economical "first", to produce stages with e.g. high (comparing to industry standard) dry-to-wet-mass ratio, to produce a kerosene engine with, again, pretty high thrust-to-weight - and run a development program on vertical landing for the first stage.

Don't see anything comparable to that from Boeing.

Not just run a development program for vertical landing but figure out a way to make customers pay for much of the testing, too. Part of what's so brilliant about their reusability system is that it can be included on many regular launches without any additional risk to the payload. So instead of having to make expensive special launches just for the test program, they get to fire satellites into orbit and carry out testing on a flight the customer purchased.

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