And Blue Origin was incorporated a few years prior to SpaceX. They’ve been working on this problem significantly longer than SpaceX, so they were more confident in their approach.

“Late” should not be included in the definition. Whoever did messed up.

> It's not available and it's going to be the same as all products coming from their CEO - it maybe one day available

Did you miss Falcon 9 and Heavy? (New Glenn competes with them, not Starship. Falcon Heavy can launch more mass than New Glenn, currently, for cheaper.)

> New Glenn is actual product that's just going through final validation steps

This is literally the first time they've successfully recovered New Glenn. Recovered. No reuse. It's the second time they've every flown the damn thing. It's impressive. But it's not "just going through final validation."

I have a background in aerospace engineering, specifically astronautics. It's wild to see armchair engineers shoot shit at major accomplishments like this.

I'm reading this thread and there are a few things that come to mind.

My sense is that SpaceX's goals with Starship are significantly more ambitious than what is being tried with New Glenn. I don't mean to underplay the difficulty of what Blue is facing with New Glenn, but if we take that "rapid reusability" goal seriously the problem set seems significantly larger and not so "been there, done that". This makes the development programs much more difficult to compare.... certainly on the surface of the public optics at the very least.

While it's one thing to talk about rockets, it's another altogether to look and the engineering and practices going into the manufacture process of those rockets. I'm not an engineer, but I do work in manufacturing and, at least looking from the outside, SpaceX seems to be dedicating some significant amount of effort into building a scalable manufacturing process. Many other efforts have always appeared to be more about "bespoke" production even if the designs of each unit produced are constant. I could be wrong and maybe it's just SpaceX is a lot more transparent (willingly or otherwise)... but looking in from the outside, they seem to be developing a very mass-production oriented rocket factory.

And if New Glenn is just finalizing things and Starship is just vaporware... well New Glenn still has to land a couple more boosters and re-fly one (or two?) to catch up to those vaporware numbers. :-) Sure, New Glenn has now flown a paying customer... but I think we'll see Starlink launches on Starship pretty soon... well before it gets to "final validation".

SpaceX is only space company that does hardware rich development. Blue Origin takes much more traditional approach of linear design.

Blue Origin may fail (I couldn't care less about them or SpaceX), but yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things.

Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes.

> yes, they're in final validation steps, as that's just how they develop things

You're wrong, but I'm curious for the sources that lead you to think this.

> Starship is at the stage of putting random ideas on the rocket and seeing if it explodes

"Following the launch, New Glenn’s first stage attempted a landing on the recovery vessel Jacklyn, also known as Landing Platform Vessel 1, which was positioned 620 km downrange from LC-36. However, controllers lost telemetry from the stage sometime after the entry burn started and Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost" [1].

[1] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2025/01/new-glenn-launch/

I mean, technically v2 could launch sats at this point as we've seen the successful deployment of dummies.

This said they've moved on to v3 and will begin testing that soon.