

News
SpaceX vs. Blue Origin: The bickering titans of new space
In the past three years, SpaceX has made incredible progress in their program of reusability. In the practice’s first year, the young space company led by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has performed three successful commercial reuses of Falcon 9 boosters in approximately eight months, and has at least two more reused flights scheduled before 2017 is out. Blue Origin, headed and funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, is perhaps most famous for its supreme confidence, best illustrated by Bezos offhandedly welcoming SpaceX “to the club” after the company first recovered the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket in 2015.
Blue Origin began in the early 2000s as a pet project of Bezos, a long-time fan of spaceflight and proponent of developing economies in space. After more than a decade of persistent development and increasingly complex testbeds, Blue Origin began a multi-year program of test flights with its small New Shepard launch vehicle. Designed to eventually launch tourists to the veritable edge of Earth’s atmosphere in a capsule atop it, New Shepard began its test flights in 2015 and after one partial failure, has completed five successful flights in a row. The space tourism company has subtly and not-so-subtly belittled SpaceX’s accomplishments over the last several years, and has engendered a fair bit of hostility towards it as a result.
Admittedly, CEO Elon Musk nurtured high expectations for the consequences of reuse, and has frequently discussed SpaceX’s ambition to reduce the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 10 to 100. However, after several reuses, it is clear that costs have decreased no more than 10-20%. What gives?
Well, Musk’s many comments on magnitudes of cost reduction were clearly premised upon rapid and complete reuse of both stages of Falcon 9, best evidenced by a concept video the company released in 2011.
The reality was considerably harder and Musk clearly underestimated the difficulty of second stage reuse, something he himself has admitted. COO Gwynne Shotwell was interviewed earlier this summer and discussed SpaceX’s updated approach to complete reusability, and acknowledged that second stage reuse was no longer a real priority, although the company will likely attempt second stage recovery as a validation of future technologies. Instead of pursuing the development of a completely reusable Falcon 9, SpaceX is instead pushing ahead with the development of a much larger rocket, BFR. BFR being designed to enable the sustainable colonization of space by realizing Musk’s original ambition of magnitudes-cheaper orbital launch capabilities.
Competition on the horizon?
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s only near-term competitor interested in serious reuse has made gradual progress over the last several years, accelerating its pace of development more recently. Blue Origin’s second New Shepard vehicle, designed to serve the suborbital space tourism industry, conducted an impressive five successful launches and landings over the course of 2016 before being summarily retired. NS2’s antecedent suffered a failure while attempting its first landing and was destroyed in 2015, but Blue learned quickly from the issues of Shepard 1 and has already shipped New Shepard 3 to its suborbital launch facilities near Van Horn, Texas. While NS3 is aiming for an inaugural flight later this year, NS4 is under construction in Kent, Washington and could support Blue’s first crewed suborbital launches in 2018.
More significant waves were made with an announcement in 2016 that Blue was pursuing development of a partially reusable orbital-class launch vehicle, the massive New Glenn. On paper, New Glenn is quite a bit larger than even SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and appears to likely be more capable than the company’s “world’s most powerful rocket” while completely recovering its boost stage. In a completed, manufactured, and demonstrably reliable form, New Glenn would be an extraordinarily impressive and capable launch vehicle that could undoubtedly catapult Blue Origin into position of true competition with SpaceX’s reusability efforts.
- The New Shepard booster. (Blue Origin)
- Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule could carry passengers as high as 100km in 2018. (Blue Origin)
- A render of Blue Origin’s larger New Glenn vehicle. (Blue Origin)
However, while Blue Origin executives brag about “operational reusability” and tastelessly lampoon efforts that “decided to slap some legs on [to] see if [they] could land it”, the unmentioned company implicated in those barbs has begun to routintely and commercially reuse orbital-class boosters five times the size of Blue’s suborbital testbed, New Shepard.
Apples to oranges
The only point at which Blue Origin poses a risk to SpaceX’s business can be found in a comparison of funding sources. SpaceX first successes (and failures) were funded out of Elon Musk’s own pocket, but nearly all of the funding that followed was won through competitive government contracts and rounds of private investment. To put it more simply, SpaceX is a business that must balance costs and returns, while Blue Origin is funded exclusively out of billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos’ pocket.
As a result of being completely privately funded, Bezos’ deep pockets could render Blue more flexible than SpaceX when pricing launches. If Blue chooses to aggressively price New Glenn by accounting for booster reusability, it could pose a threat to SpaceX’s own business strategy. If SpaceX is unable to recoup its investment in reusability before New Glenn is regularly conducting multiple commercial missions per year, likely no earlier than 2021 or 2022, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 pricing could be rendered distinctly noncompetitive.
However, this concern seems almost entirely misplaced. SpaceX has half a decade of experience mass-producing orbital-class (reusable) rockets, (reusable) fairings, and propulsion systems, whereas Blue Origin at best has minimal experience manufacturing a handful of suborbital vehicles over a period of a few years. Blue has a respectable amount of experience with their BE-3 hydrolox propulsion system, and that will likely transfer over to the BE-3U vacuum variant to be used for New Glenn’s third stage. The large methalox rocket engine (BE-4) that will power New Glenn’s first stage also conducted its first-ever hot-fire just weeks ago, a major milestone in propulsion development but also a reminder that BE-4 has an exhaustive regime of engineering verification and flight qualification testing ahead of it.
First hotfire of our BE-4 engine is a success #GradatimFerociter pic.twitter.com/xuotdzfDjF
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 19, 2017
Perhaps more importantly, the company’s relative success with New Shepard’s launch, recovery, and reuse has not and cannot move beyond small suborbital hops, and thus cannot provide the experience at the level of orbital rocketry. New Shepard is admittedly capable of reaching an altitude of 100km, but the suborbital vehicle’s flight regime does not require it to travel beyond Mach 4 (~1300 m/s). The first stage of Falcon 9, however, is approximately four times as tall and three times the mass of New Shepard, and boosters attempting recovery during geostationary missions routinely reach almost twice the velocity of New Shepard, entering the thicker atmosphere at more than 2300 m/s (1500-1800 m/s for LEO missions). Falcon 9’s larger mass and velocity translates into intense reentry heating and aerodynamic forces, best demonstrated by the glowing aluminum grid fins that can often be seen in SpaceX’s live coverage of booster recovery. Blue Origin’s New Glenn concept is extremely impressive on paper, but the company will have to pull off an extraordinary leap of technological maturation to move directly from suborbital single-stage hops to multi-stage orbital rocketry. Blue’s accomplishments with New Shepard are nothing to scoff at, but they are a far cry from routine orbital launch services.
SpaceX’s future fast approaches
Translating back to the new establishment, Falcon 9 will likely remain SpaceX’s workhorse rocket for some five or more years, at least until BFR can prove itself to be a reliable and affordable replacement. This change in focus, combined with the downsides of second stage recovery and reuse on a Falcon 9-sized vehicle, means that SpaceX will ‘only’ end up operationally reusing first stages and fairings from the vehicle. The second stage accounts for approximately 20-30% of Falcon 9’s total cost, suggesting that rapid and complete reuse of the fairing and first stage could more than halve its ~$62 million price. Yet this too ignores another mundane fact of corporate life SpaceX must face. Its executives, Musk included, have lately expressed a desire to at least partially recoup the ~$1 billion that was invested to develop reuse. Assuming a partial 10% reduction in cost to reuse customers and profit margins of 50% with rapid and total reuse of the first stage and fairing, 20 to 30 commercial reuses would recoup most or all of SpaceX’s reusability investment.
Musk recently revealed that SpaceX is aiming to complete 30 launches in 2018, and that figure will likely continue to grow in 2019, assuming no major anomalies occur. Manufacturing will rapidly become the main choke point for increased launch cadence, suggesting that drastically higher cadences will largely depend upon first stage reuse with minimal refurbishment, which just so happens to be the goal of the Falcon 9’s upcoming Block 5 iteration. Even if the modifications only manage a handful of launches without refurbishment, rather than the ten flights being pursued, each additional flight without maintenance will effectively multiply SpaceX’s manufacturing capabilities. More bluntly: ten Falcon 9s capable of five reflights could do the same job of 50 brand new rockets with 1/5th of the manufacturing backend.
- BulgariaSat-1 was successfully launched 48 hours before Iridium-2, and marked the second or three successful, commercial reuses of an orbital rocket. (SpaceX)
- SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory routinely churns out one to two complete Falcon 9s every month. (SpaceX)
- Falcon 9 B1040 returns to LZ-1 after the launch of the USAF’s X-37B spaceplane. (SpaceX)
Assuming that upcoming reuses proceed without significant failures and Falcon 9 Block 5 subsumes all manufacturing sometime in 2018 or 2019, it is entirely possible that SpaceX will undergo an extraordinarily rapid phase change from expendability to reusability. Mirroring 2017, we can imagine that SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory will continue to churn out at least 10 to 20 Block 5 Falcon 9s over the course of 2018. Assuming 5 to 10 maintenance-free reuses and a lifespan of as many as 100 flights with intermittent refurb, a single year of manufacturing could provide SpaceX with enough first stages to launch anywhere from 50 to 2000 missions. The reality will inevitably find itself somewhere between those extremely pessimistic and optimistic bookends, and they of course do not account for fairings, second stages, or expendable flights.
If we assume that the proportional cost of Falcon 9’s many components very roughly approximates the amount of manufacturing backend needed to produce them, downsizing Falcon 9 booster production by a factor of two or more could free a huge fraction of SpaceX’s workforce and floor space to be repurposed for fairing and second stage production, as well as the company’s Mars efforts. Such a phase change would also free up a considerable fraction of the capital SpaceX continually invests in its manufacturing infrastructure and workforce, capital that could then be used to ready SpaceX’s facilities for production and testing of its Mars-focused BFR and BFS.
“Gradatim ferociter”
It cannot be overstated that the speculation in this article is speculation. Nevertheless, it is speculation built on real information provided over the years by SpaceX’s own executives. Rough estimates like this offer a glimpse into a new launch industry paradigm that could be only a year or two away and could allow SpaceX to begin aggressively pursuing its goal of enabling a sustainable human presence on Mars and throughout the Solar System.
Blue Origin’s future endeavors shine on paper and their goal of enabling millions to work and live space are admirable, but the years between the present and a future of routine orbital missions for the company may not be kind. The engineering hurdles that litter the path to orbital rocketry are unforgiving and can only be exacerbated by blind overconfidence, a lesson that is often only learned the hard way. Blue Origin’s proud motto “Gradatim ferociter” roughly translates to “Step by step, ferociously.” One can only hope that some level of humility and sobriety might temper that ferocity before customers entrust New Glenn with their infrastructural foundations and passengers entrust New Shepard with their lives.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s new Robotaxi geofence shape is an FU by Elon Musk to the competition
Maybe it’s all pareidolia. But maybe it’s not. After all, Tesla embraced the first geofence expansion for what it appeared to be.

Tesla expanded its Robotaxi geofence in Austin once again early Sunday morning. The new shape seems to be somewhat of a proverbial, and potentially literal, middle finger to the competition.
If you thought the first expansion was a message to the competition and doubters of the company’s ride-hailing service, you probably will believe the second expansion is an even stronger gesture.
Tesla’s first expansion did not go unnoticed, as its shape was particularly recognizable. The company has always operated with a sense of humor, and it embraced what it did. Some, including me, took it as a message to competitors: We can expand in any direction, in any size, at any time. We’ll prove it.”
They picked a shape and went with it:
Tesla’s Robotaxi expansion wasn’t a joke, it was a warning to competitors
It is evident that Tesla is keeping its humor up to continue to show a few things. The first is that it really can expand in any direction it wants and that’s how it is choosing to show it.
The second, well, maybe it’s an edgier way to show doubters that it is really executing on Robotaxi:
Tesla has expanded the Austin RoboTaxi network.
Looks like a giant middle finger.
Giant F U to the competition? 🤷🏻♂️ pic.twitter.com/tcaIxdQk10
— Farzad (@farzyness) August 3, 2025
all I see is Tesla giving the middle finger pic.twitter.com/P4otjxSCQm
— Daniel Harding (@ArchamusDK) August 3, 2025
Maybe it’s all pareidolia. But maybe it’s not. After all, Tesla embraced the first geofence expansion for what it appeared to be. This might be a similar occurrence, and it might be sending another message to the competition, critics, and doubters.
The expansion was a near-doubling of the geofence Tesla offered previously. After the initial geofence covered just about 20 square miles, Tesla was able to more than double it to 42 square miles with the first growth. This new geofence shape was just under double, and is about 80 square miles.
Tesla’s rapid expansion has impressed many, especially considering the service area has roughly doubled for the second time in well under two months. The Robotaxi service was first offered on June 22.
Elon Musk
Tesla executes ‘a must’ with Musk as race to AI supremacy goes on: Wedbush
Dan Ives of Wedbush says Tesla made the right move getting Elon Musk his pay package.

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) executed what Wedbush’s Dan Ives called “a must” this morning as it finalized a new pay package for its CEO Elon Musk.
The move helped give Musk his first meaningful compensation at Tesla since 2017, when the company offered a pay package that was based on performance and proven growth. That package was approved by shareholders on two separate occasions, but was denied to Musk both times by the Delaware Chancery Court.
On Monday, Tesla announced on X that it had created a new package that would give 96 million shares of restricted stock to Musk to compensate him for the “immense value generated for Tesla and all our shareholders.”
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla has announced that its Board has unanimously approved a recommendation from the Special Committee of the Board to grant Elon an award of restricted stock equal to approximately one-third of the compensation he earned under the 2018 CEO Performance Award.
The… https://t.co/g7RKrTymDL pic.twitter.com/dnvkILlz6H
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 4, 2025
The details of the pay package are designed to retain Musk, who has voiced some concerns about his control of Tesla, as “activist shareholders” have used lawsuits to disrupt the previously approved package.
You can read all the details of it here:
Tesla rewards CEO Elon Musk with massive, restricted stock package
Ives says Musk’s retention is ‘a must’
Ives said in a note to investors on Monday that with the raging AI talent war that Tesla made a smart move by doing what it could to retain Musk.
He wrote:
“With the AI talent war now fully underway across Big Tech, we believe this was a strategic move to keep TSLA’s top asset, Musk, would stay focused at the company with his priority being to bolster the company’s growth strategy over the coming years. With this interim award increasing Musk’s voting rights upon this grant, which Musk honed in on and mentioned was increasingly important to incentivize him to stay focused on the matters at hand, this was a strategic move by the Board to solidify Musk as CEO of Tesla over the coming years with this framework for Musk’s pay package and greater voting control removing a major overhang on the story.”
He went on to say:
“While the groundwork is now in place for the next few years, it will be critical for the Tesla Board of Directors to get this long-term compensation strategy in place prior to the company’s November 6th shareholder meeting which would address the elephant in the room and remove a significant overhang on the stock.”
Wedbush maintained its Outperform rating and its $500 price target on the stock.
Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reveals ideal timeline for insane self-driving feature
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has extremely optimistic expectations for Full Self-Driving progress by the end of 2025.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed his ideal timeline for what would likely be the most insane self-driving feature: the ability for drivers to play video games at the wheel.
There are a handful of videos out there of drivers already performing this task. Nobody using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite should perform these activities, as the company maintains the system is not fully autonomous.
Drivers are responsible for the vehicle and should be prepared to take over.
Tesla has put a lot of faith in its development of Full Self-Driving and has made tremendous strides over the past few years. Capabilities have gotten more refined and accurate through various methods, including data collection and hardware improvements.
Tesla kicks Robotaxi geofence expansion into high gear in Austin
It has gotten so good that Tesla launched a Robotaxi platform in Austin, Texas, on June 22. Passengers can hop in the back of a Model Y and will be transported around the city in a confined geofence that is about 90 square miles in size. There is nobody in the driver’s seat, but there is a Safety Monitor in the passenger’s seat.
Tesla launched a similar experience in California’s Bay Area last week, but the company has placed the Safety Monitor in the driver’s seat for that region for the time being.
Eventually, Tesla will get to a point where no monitor is needed, and the vehicles will be able to drive themselves. Many believe that it is a few years away, but Musk believes Tesla could achieve it very soon.
After a video of someone playing Grand Theft Auto in their Cybertruck while operating Full Self-Driving was shared on the social media platform X, Musk said this capability would be available in “probably 3 to 6 months, depending on regulatory approval in your city and state.”
Probably 3 to 6 months, depending on regulatory approval in your city and state
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2025
It is important to remember that Musk has been very optimistic regarding autonomy timelines with Tesla projects. We heard for many years that the company would have self-driving vehicles “by the end of the year,” and those projects did not come to fruition.
While there was progress, there were no fully autonomous vehicles or software versions for customers.
With that being said, Tesla has made tremendous strides in its quest for autonomous vehicles this year, and launching a Robotaxi platform was a huge step in the right direction.
-
News1 week ago
Tesla hints a smaller pickup truck could be on the way
-
Elon Musk2 weeks ago
Elon Musk gives key update on plans for Tesla Diner outside of LA
-
Investor's Corner2 weeks ago
LIVE BLOG: Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2025 earnings call updates
-
Elon Musk2 weeks ago
Elon Musk’s Neuralink posts massive update with new milestone
-
Elon Musk2 weeks ago
Tesla Supercharger Diner officially opens: menu, prices, features, and more
-
News2 weeks ago
Tesla sells 3 million Model 3 since 2017, one in every 1.5 minutes
-
News2 weeks ago
Tesla rolls out update to Robotaxi service that makes pickups so much better
-
Investor's Corner2 weeks ago
Tesla analyst says this stock concern is overblown while maintaining $400 PT