throwawayX1

It's notable that non of your quotes concern SpaceX.

One should definitely be wary of Musks often inflated / over-optimistic claims, but Starship has a good chance of holding true to most of what was promised.

The only thing I don't love about this is that it's Intel and not Ryzen 5000.

But if the promises hold true, this will definitely be my next laptop.

Sure, my point is that nothing about Blue Origin implies a lean, cost conscious way of operating or that New Glenn will be cheap to build and fly.

The money has to come from somewhere.

Either it's from Bezos, or it's from launches with a price that won't make it easy to win many customers in the very small market of large payloads.

That's an interesting thing to consider.

Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.

Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.

It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.

Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.

I really hope that SpaceX gets some serious competition by another partially reusable rocket. We need multiple viable launch providers in the market.

I don't think this will happen, but that announcement reads a lot like delay announcements that shadow a future cancellation. ('we continue to remain committed ...', 'persuing other opportunities', 'growing market ...' (it isn't) ...)

There are two aspects here:

A) With the way Blue Origin operates, I highly doubt New Glenn can be competitive with Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy financially, at least without heavy discounts funded by Bezos. More so once Falcon Heavy gets the upgraded fairing they are developing for government launches.

Blue might still get some business from the US government and from Starlink competitors that don't want to help fund Spacex, but the market seems very limited. We are already at a point where Falcon 9 can handle most payloads, and there are no commercial use cases for larger payloads on the horizon.

Which brings me to the second point:

If Musks claims for Starship regarding cost and reusability come true, no one will be remotely competitive with that rocket. It's in a whole different league with a huge payload capacity and full (1st + 2nd stage) reusability.

Starship has a chance of reaching orbit maybe late this year, but more likely in 2021. The question is if Bezos will be willing to pump billions into Blue Origin for the 4+ years until they can catch up with their own second generation rocket, currently nicknamed New Armstrong.

A first New Glenn launch would probably mean start of scheduled service in late 2023, at which point Starship might already be launching regularly.