New Glenn significantly increases the capacity to Low Earth Orbit, which is what this first phase of the space race has always been about (for Golden Dome, and to a lesser extent commercial internet constellations). All eyes on Starship now.
Falcon Heavy does up to ~64 tons to LEO and has been available for a while. New Glenn isn't bringing any new capabilities to the table. It is still a very welcome alternative.
64 tons is if Falcon Heavy is fully expended (nothing recovered) configuration. Even with smaller payload, the center core is generally a lost cause. Falcony Heavy is extremely difficult to launch as I learned when I worked at SpaceX. It turned out that slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
I'll defer to your experience on this, however Falcon Heavy is the comparable platform so what you're saying is that New Glenn might be able to out compete Falcon Heavy given it was designed from the start for this space? (Not trying to put words in your mouth, just keeping my launch services portfolio up to date :-)).
> slapping a bunch of Falcons together was not structurally reasonable design choice.
True. But given the far-lower demand for the Heavy's payload capabilities (vs. Falcon 9), and the costs of the alternatives launch providers for such payloads - slapping a bunch of Falcons together looks like an excellent corporate engineering strategy choice.
The individual Falcon turn-around is slow (months of refurb), and the record half-month ones swapped some engines. B1067's 30-reuse is a ship of Theseus rebuilt over 4+ years.
Feh, swapping engine is not an option for the first few initial Mars trips, unless its payload also contains engines (can't imagine the scissor-lift payload either that needs to go with).
The head of SDI formed the Mars Society with Zubrin. He was originally going to run SpaceX as Chief Engineer (cite: Liftoff) but he instead got appointed NASA admin and directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX. This same SDI head then formed something called SDA in 2017 under Trump which is the platform for Golden Dome, or "the SDI 2.0".
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
The US space industry isn't that big. The same people are all over the place and many have been in the industry for many, many decades and had many positions. And many of the people interested in Mars are also interested in space in general and in military space in general, this isn't surprising.
When SpaceX got started, clearly with the focus on Mars he tried to pick up well known experts. Griffin among them, again this isn't surprising. And when SpaceX did that it was not at all clear that Griffin would be able to be NASA Administrator. And because Griffin as a very opinionated person he didn't get along super well with Musk and instead went to In-Q-Tel. But he knew that SpaceX was serious and Musk had the financed to put more money into SpaceX then most other companies.
Also you will see the Griffin was also at Orbital Sciences as CEO. So he had some links to both competitors in the COTS competition and likely knew or worked with many others over his career.
And if you do the research on COTS instead of just saying 'directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX' is just a major oversimplification. COTS started by other people inside NASA who were sick of the old practices.
The first round of COTS were selected May 2006. SpaceX launched the first Falcon 1 in March 24, 2006. So during COTS SpaceX was not some 'nobody' company, NASA was aware of them and while today 'private company close to launching Orbital rocket' isn't impressive anymore, back then it was very much so. SpaceX had done more already then many other companies in the competition.
Also, if you know anything about NASA processes, the Administrator can not just 'pick' whoever he wants. There is process that is guided by lots of requirements and so on. Unless you have any actual evidence that this process was somehow corrupt and that Griffin conspired to give money to SpaceX above everybody, then you better show some evidence for that. And 'worked for few month with Musk' isn't evidence. And in fact SpaceX was selected because many of the NASA people who did the selection were impressed with SpaceX as many have talked about in interviews over the years.
Given that SpaceX was selected and was successful, its hard to argue that NASA made the wrong choice. NASA selected 3, SpaceX, Kistler and Orbital, and 2 of those were successful. So it seems the program wasn't run by idiots.
Literally the whole 'evidence' for 'theory' is Mike Griffin likes missile defense and he has been in the Space industry for many, many decades and knows everybody. That's it, that's your evidence. Griffin and others like him never made secret of what they wanted. That doesn't mean that when he worked at NASA missile defense was the only thing he ever thought about and that all his actions at NASA were only with the singular goal of missile defense.
If you want to make the argument that orbital missile defense is a bad idea, that's fine, you don't need need to make up a bunch of conspiracy theory where non exists. You just make yourself look silly.
Actually I recall their were a number of anomalies with Griffin's contracts at NASA. It was widely reported he was chasing away the bigger companies from the COTS program he formed. Saying himself that he assigned the decision-making to Doc Horowitz... Mike Griffin, Doc Horowitz and Elon Musk were close friends and the most prominent founding members of the Mars Society other than Zubrin. In the end all the money went to Griffin's own small company Orbital and Musk's newfound SpaceX.
It was well known in those circles that Mars Society leadership was from Team B and Citizens' Advisory Council (which were the two groups that originally conceived Reagan's SDI, the Golden Dome predecessor). Max Hunter was the force behind reusable rockets with the DC-X. As mentioned, Griffin was effectively SpaceX's early chief engineer leading the guys he poached from the nearby McDonald Douglass Huntington Beach DC-X site (Chris Thompson, Tim Buzza, John Garvey, etc..) The other half of the DC-X team went to Blue Origin of course.
Funny how well the Mars mania took hold and people forget this basic history. It's the only way to make heads or tails of what's going on with Elon these days. He truly believes in SDI, but God help us all if he's in charge of it. It was recently reported he wanted to make Golden Dome a subscription service!
One question for you since your worked at SpaceX. Starship v4 is supposed to be able to bring 200 metric tons to LEO vs 35 metric tons for v2. Do you have any guesses on the finally amount that New Glenn will be able to bring up when it reaches its version/block 4?
^ Be aware that a large number of accounts in this thread are throwaway sockpuppets which are obviously linked. It's a problem that they're pretending to be a crowd of unrelated people; it's an inauthentic attack trying (I don't know why) to manipulate HN sentiment.
It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
The pro-Musk propaganda on X is truly staggering as of late. Pretty sure talking about his Golden Dome connections, which have been widely reported by Reuters, WSJ, etc.. is at least the opposite of that.
I figure evolution will solve that. The kind of people who don’t have kids while living in prosperity will die out. The ones who reproduce will stick around.
We’ll build mirror life to assist us so we keep not needing children before evolution has a chance to fix anything. I postulate it is coming this century.
This is only a problem when you look at the micro level of cultures or individual states. Sure, some culture may die out, but that's been happening forever.
There's 8 billion humans on this planet, and we're still fucking like we always have been. The human race will be safe from prosperity.
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.
I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
Population decline is predicted or currently happening in some poor countries too. It's not a prosperity driven effect. Children don't die young anymore even in poor countries. There's just generally less pressure to spawn your own gang of supporters. Elon excepted I guess.
"Prosperity" implies that the problem is folks smart enough to not have children beyond the means to raise them into a similar or better lifestyle.
I prefer "Precarity" induced fertility collapse. Down here in the mud I guess I have a different view with my 1 child and wife with a heart condition who would likely die from a 2nd pregnancy.
Literally Dr. Strangelove (Edward Teller). This whole thing is a decades-old Heritage Foundation scheme to beat MAD game theory so they can start and win a nuclear war.
Really? They knew about Project 2025 when they started development and were 100% certain that Trump would return and green light such a project in 20205?
The "dream" of such a system was there for a long time, waiting for the proper tools to build it. Even without that plan though, once you have a hammer you'll find plenty of nails. Putting heavy stuff in space was always going to catch the eye of the deep-pocketed military.
