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Nothing wrong with Blue Origin per se, redundancy is great (and pretty essential to become a spacefaring civilization -- as demonstrated by the back-to-back Ant
by Denvercoder9 6y ago
Nothing wrong with Blue Origin per se, redundancy is great (and pretty essential to become a spacefaring civilization -- as demonstrated by the back-to-back Antares and Falcon failures a couple of years ago).
However, saying SpaceX, the established company, should relocate to be next to Blue Origin, the new start-up that hasn't shown much yet, for unspecified reasons just doesn't make any logical sense.
Also, I think part of the reason space enthusiasts don't like Blue Origin is that it has had a terrible return-on-investment so far. There's a limited amount of money that will put into space, and it's great that Jeff Bezos wants to spend a billion a year on it. It would just be great if there was more to show in return for that money. For example, Elon Musk claims SpaceX has spend about a billion on reusability for the Falcon 9. Just imagine such a leap forward every year.
Another reason Blue Origin gets a bad rep is that they don't exactly try to play fair. As mentioned by a sibling comment, they tried to patent something (landing on a ship) that's at best just common sense. When NASA wanted to lease LC-39A to commercial providers, Blue Origin tried to block NASA from leasing it exclusively to SpaceX on the basis that it'd be unfair to them, even though they hadn't flown anything that could use the pad yet (and still haven't). They landed their New Shepherd after a suborbital flight to 100.5 km just weeks before SpaceX landed their first Falcon 9 booster -- claiming to be the first to land a rocket propusively. That would be fine, except Bezos then tweeted "Welcome to the club" to Musk, ignoring the fact that orbital rockets are much, much harder (as evidenced by the fact that they still haven't launched, let alone landed one, 5 years later).