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No box shifting, no Buck Rogers. Bezos-backed Blue Origin blasts off once again

rg287

As far as I can see they spend a lot of money and have achieved very little so far

The one place they are enjoying success is with the BE-4 engine which has been selected by Boeing for their new Vulcan rocket. So they have income for engine sales and aren't purely selling launches like SpaceX.

However, it's hard to ignore the fact that BO are burning a billion dollars a year from Bezos (plus anything Boeing are punting their way for BE-4 dev) and have yet to reach orbit.

SpaceX developed Falcon 1, sent it to orbit and then scaled and launched their first Falcon 9 for less than $1Bn. The original version of F9 was a "good enough" effort that got them in at the bottom of the market and was much less performant than the current Block 5.

Presumably BO's theory was they could develop income with their sub-orbital fairground ride, but Musk is crashing launch prices so hard that - as Virgin Galactic are finding - this market is rapidly shrinking. The price difference for NASA to send experiments to actual space (instead of a few minutes of zero-g) is narrowing and anyone with that much money is wondering whether a Bigelow space hotel might actually be within sight.

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