> It seems like BO's engines are smaller and/or have deeper throttle capabilities, so they actually do hovering and controlled descent. Blue Origin only uses o

> It seems like BO's engines are smaller and/or have deeper throttle capabilities, so they actually do hovering and controlled descent. Blue Origin only uses one engine for New Shepard, so it's actually proportionately much larger than the Merlin engines on Falcon 9. The reason they can hover is that New Shepard is fundamentally a MUCH lower performance vehicle than Falcon 9. This allows them to land with a larger fraction of their launch mass, decreasing the amount of throttling required. The single BE-3 engine used by New Shepard can throttle from 490KN to 89KN, about 18%. The 9 Merlin 1D engines on a Falcon 9 first stage can throttle to 39%, but 8 of them can be shut down during landing for a total throttle capacity of 4.33%. The fact that New Shepard can hover with 18% throttle but Falcon 9 can only do a suicide burn with 4.33% should tell you everything you need to know about the relative performance (and use cases!) of the two rockets.