In article ,
says...

Jeff Findley wrote:

In article ,
says...
Note that Musk figures that in the next few years SpaceX will capture
half of the entire satellite launch business. In the face of that and
BFR, NASA's 'lunar orbiting space station' makes even less sense (and
it made very little in the first place - what's it for, exactly?).

Possibly. But Blue Origin isn't sitting still either, so SpaceX could
have some competition. Real competition is a good thing.


True, but New Glenn appears to me to be on a slower track than Falcon
Heavy, which is its direct competition. I don't think Blue Origin has
anything like BFR in their pipeline.

The follow-on to New Glenn is envisioned to be New Armstrong. I doubt
it's "in the pipeline" since they've yet to actually launch anything to
orbit (one step at a time). Here is a cite:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...es-details-of-
its-monster-orbital-rocket/

From above:

Moreover, New Glenn is also, as Bezos repeated Tuesday, "the
smallest orbital rocket Blue Origin will ever build." In the
future, even larger boosters are coming, such as the previously
teased New Armstrong rocket. The tech mogul has recently said
that lunar exploration is the next logical step for human
activity in space.

Bezos has grand visions for his launch vehicles as well. Since Bezos
does steadily fund Blue Origin and since SpaceX has been known to be a
bit overoptimistic with schedules, we may eventually see some actual
commercial competition in US between launch vehicles in the SLS class
and larger. This encourages me more than anything else.


The real problem here is that all we have about New Armstrong is the
name. BFR (which doesn't have a 'real' name) seems much, much further
along. New Glenn seems to sort of be pacing Falcon Heavy, but I think
it's a couple years behind. New Armstrong isn't pacing anything
because so far as we know it doesn't even exist as napkin drawings
while BFR has engines and is close to bending metal with a (very
aggressive) schedule. The one place Blue Origin seems to have it
better than SpaceX is that Bezos can sell a billion dollars worth of
stock every year (which is what he's been doing) to fund things while

I completely agree. And if you believe the rumors, Blue Origin doesn't
work their engineers "to death" like SpaceX seems to do. But then
again, how many Apollo/Saturn engineers put in their 40 hours a week and
clocked out without another thought to the Space Race? I'm guessing the
people who complain about SpaceX's working conditions have no real clue
what conditions were like in the 1960s.

SpaceX appears poised to change history with BFR. That's got to be
exiting work for the engineers, especially compared to the decades that
ULA did nothing more than fly existing designs and the engineers did a
lot of paper pushing (some of them published). I'm sure ULA engineers
worked a lot less during those years due to lack of motivation since
upper management wasn't funding any new development.

Jeff
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