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Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was. And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has bu
by jmyeet 2y ago
Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink.
For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone.
So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole. Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyou spent 10% of your NW on a ski season pass?
- philipwhiuk 2y agoIt's going to replace ULA as the secondary option for DoD launches. That's a multi-billion dollar contract. It'll put price pressure on SpaceX who have been able to charge increasingly large amounts without the competition from ULA recently.
- Perceval 2y agoSpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin will all three be on Space Force's National Security Space Launch Phase III Lane 2 IDIQ. Blue Origin won't replace ULA on that contract, but will compete head to head with SpaceX and ULA to win launch task orders.
- adolph 2y agoI think the parent comment refers to ULA being on life support. The new contracts won't be as flush as the company was designed to need, and there won't be 3x launch cadence. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/investing-in-space-how-bankers-read-a-potential-ula-sale.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/investing-in-space-how-banke... Here is a deeper history/analysis of ULA and how they were propped up by maintenance fees to retain launch capacity even when there were no payloads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyxLAezc9k0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyxLAezc9k0
- philipwhiuk 2y ago> Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was. And Ford Motor Companies was founded in 1903 and still hasn't gotten above the Karman line. Wow, they're a massive failure as a company. Blue wasn't aiming for an orbital rocket for years.
- imeron 2y agoSo what they were aiming for in the last 24 years if not to get into space?
- ceejayoz 2y agoIn part, being a ULA supplier so they could get to space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4
- bryanlarsen 2y agoBlue Origin's goal has been to move heavy industry into space, to realize the vision of Gerard O'Neill. For its first 5 years it was a think tank, trying to figure out the best way to get there. Neal Stephenson was one of the employees, and you can see echoes of their work in his writing. Only after 5 years did they transition to becoming a rocket company, having decided that lowering the cost of access to space was the most important first step to realizing O'Neill's vision. And they were right, it's just that SpaceX realized the same thing at about the same time and were much more successful at it. Going from 0 to a large oxygen rich staged combustion engine and a heavy class rocket in 19 years is actually pretty good by industry standards. SpaceX is the exception, not Blue Origin.
- arijun 2y agoDidn't BO have a change in leadership in 2023 precisely because they were slow compared to SpaceX? Edit: New Glenn was announced in 2016, compared to Starship's 2019, and they're approaching the finish line at around the same time. And I would say Starship was a far more ambitious project.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dr4kn 2y agoNew Glenn has a payload size that is comparable to that of starship. Falcon Heavy can launch much heavier stuff than 9, but it uses the same fairing. If you want to launch things that can't fit into Falcon 9s fairing, then your only options are SLS, New Glenn and in a few years Starship. Especially Space Station Parts and Spy satellites can be quite huge. So there is an established and growing market for larger payloads
- gangstead 2y agoThe extended Falcon fairing was spotted recently on one of the Falcon launches at the Cape. They are designing that for DoD payloads I think but it's advertised as available for payloads. It's not any wider but it is 18.7 m tall instead of 13.2m. Source: [Falcon User Guide](https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf)
- nprateem 2y agoIn a fair market this'd be bad news for SpaceX, but from next week he'll have nothing to worry about for at least the next 4 years/until donnie dies.
- thehappypm 2y ago> As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy Citation needed
- jmyeet 2y agoThere have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches (as I said in my comment) in the almost 6 years since the first flight (February 2018), roughly 2 per year. There were almost 150 Falcon 9 launches in 2024 alone. What else would you call this than "not a lot of demand"?
- thehappypm 2y agoWhy are you conflating demand with launch cadence? Falcon Heavy is in R&D mode, which is why there have been fewer launches. That has no bearing on the demand for it.
- stetrain 2y agoI think you may be confusing Starship and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a production launch vehicle that has launched payloads for NASA, DoD, etc. at this point.
- ceejayoz 2y agoAnd if Starship succeeds, a complete dead end.
- thehappypm 2y agoFalcon Heavy has done far too few launches to accurately predict the demand.
- stetrain 2y agoIt does as many launches as customers buy. If more customers bought Falcon Heavy launches SpaceX would launch more. It’s been launching operational payloads for 6 years now.