Blue Origin successfully launched—and partially landed—its New Glenn rocket on Thursday. The achievement marks a major step forward in the company’s bid to rival SpaceX as a reliable provider of reusable rockets for NASA and other government agencies.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blue-origin-nasa-launch-mars-shot-across-the-bow-for-elon-musk-spacex/
12 Comments
Good. We need some viable competition in the modern commercial space launch arena.
Partially landed makes it sound like they only kinda landed the booster. The landed the rocket in the same sense spacex lands falcon 9.
This is great! Basically ends up as a falcon heavy competitor.
Hopefully this means SpaceX can drop the Falcon Heavy so it can focus on Starship
It was really great watching that booster land intact on the stream. The first non-SpaceX orbital rocket to make a successful propulsive landing after a live mission.
Rocket Lab built satellites will get to Mars before SpaceX
well, NASA has always made clear that they want to maintain more than one commercial launch provider so they’re not dependent on just a single company. So this shouldn’t have come as a surprise (or maybe it did because Musk is high out of his fucking gourd on Ketamine or something).
Watching it live was epic, I will for sure remember that for a while.
Demonstrated as operationally useful with real payload: New Glenn
Not demonstrated as operationally useful with real payload nor even simulated payload in a sustainable orbital insertion: Starship
You all think NASA wasn’t paying attention? Now you know why NASA reopened the HLS contract.
With the latest SpaceX failures and Elon’s behavior which may put future relations with US government at risk it’s great that there’s an alternative company so the space progress of humanity will not stop
I’m happy for BO and space exploration in general, but I feel like yesterday’s launch is being blown up too much.
The first F9 booster landed successfully 10 years ago and nearly 600 times since.
NG has a lift capacity near Falcon Heavy, which is great, but the market for the capacity hasn’t been there, which is why we’ve seen very few FH launches.
I know there are other advantages to NG and I’m truly happy to see the competition. I’m just not seeing NG as a game changer.
Great job Blue Origin on getting to orbit and back to earth, however, let’s not be misleading. Rocket lab is taking us to Mars.
I would call it healthy competition, not a shot across the bow. Let’s wait until BO launches three times a week.