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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
SpaceX Starship gets FAA nod for ninth test flight
The FAA has given the green light for Starship’s ninth test flight.

SpaceX has received FAA approval for the ninth test flight of the Starship rocket. The approval was delayed due to the federal agency finishing its comprehensive safety review of the eighth flight earlier this year.
The FAA said in a statement that it has determined that SpaceX has “satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap, and therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight.”
The eighth test flight occurred back on March 6. SpaceX completed a successful liftoff of Starship and the Super Heavy Booster, before the two entered stage separation a few minutes after launch.
Starship Flight 8: SpaceX nails Super Heavy booster catch but loses upper stage
The booster returned and was caught by the chopsticks on the launch pad, completing the second successful booster catch in the program’s history. However, SpaceX lost contact with Starship in the upper atmosphere.
The ship broke up and reentered the atmosphere over Florida and the Bahamas.
The debris situation caused the FAA to initiate a mishap investigation:
Starship Flight 8’s Ship 34 provided some beautiful fireworks in the sky during its rapid unscheduled disassembly. Beautiful but unfortunate.
Hopefully, Flight 9 would no longer have any RUD incidents. pic.twitter.com/p4qAToDXOM
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 7, 2025
The FAA said it will verify that SpaceX implements all the corrective actions on Flight 9 that it discovered during the mishap investigation.
There is no current confirmed launch window, but the earliest it could take off from Starbase is Tuesday, May 27, at 6:30 p.m. local time.
To prevent any injuries and potentially limit any damage, the FAA has stayed in contact with various countries that could be impacted if another loss of vehicle occurs:
“The FAA is in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom, Turks & Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba as the agency continues to monitor SpaceX’s compliance with all public safety and other regulatory requirements.”
The agency has also stated that the Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA) is approximately 1,600 nautical miles and extends eastward from the Starbase, Texas, launch site through the Straits of Florida, including the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos.
For flight 8, the AHA was just 885 nautical miles.
News
Hyundai begins real-world testing of AI-powered EV charging robot

Hyundai announced on Thursday that it has officially launched real-world testing of its AI-powered EV charging robot, which it is referring to as the ACR.
The Korean company is partnering with both Kia and Incheon International Airport for the testing phase, which was launched with a memorandum of understanding (MOU). The pilot program is going to be used to lay the groundwork for future robot use for EV charging.
Incheon already has a reputation that aligns with the pilot program as it has the largest eco-friendly vehicle infrastructure in Korea, according to Korea JoongAng Daily, which first reported the launch of the pilot program.
Hyundai is partnering with Kia’s Robotics Lab to provide hardware and software solutions for this early rollout.
Yan Hee-won, President of Hyundai Motor’s R&D Division, said:
“This marks an important turning point in validating the practical value of future mobility technologies. With customized automatic charging solutions, we aim to deliver a more convenient and enhanced mobility experience for users.”
The testing phase will be limited in the sense that the charging robot will be deployed for a fleet of eco-friendly airport vehicles. Those who park their EVs at the airport will not be able to use it for use while they’re traveling — at least at first.
Eventually, it will become a great way to give vehicles range while the owners are off on trips.
Tesla had a similar idea several years ago, which it shared viral videos of back in 2015.
Tesla “snake charger” wasn’t just a creepy one-off, suggests Elon Musk
Musk said in 2020 that Tesla still had the intention of making it. However, it has shifted to wireless induction charging, which seems to be a better option simply because of fewer moving parts and better compatibility with the upcoming Robotaxi fleet.
Tesla flexes Robotaxi wireless charging — autonomy from top to bottom
Tesla displayed its wireless charging idea at the “We, Robot” event last year:
Robotaxi wireless charging
No hands required pic.twitter.com/XL746DkGhb
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 18, 2024
Elon Musk
How Tesla could benefit from the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that axes EV subsidies
Tesla has a few paths to limit damage from the elimination of tax credits.

The United States House of Representatives passed President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” by a vote of 215 to 214 on Thursday, effectively bringing an end to many EV subsidy programs, like the $7,500 tax credit, by the end of this year.
The bill will not only eliminate the $7,500 credit on new EV purchases, but also the $4,000 credit given on the purchase of used electric vehicles, and a $1,000 credit on the installation of Level 2 chargers. It will also impact solar subsidies that help generate clean energy in a residential setting.
EVs would also be subject to a $250 road use fee.
🚨 The “Big Beautiful Bill” has been passed in the House, meaning:
1) The EV tax credit is in serious jeopardy. It will likely be eliminated for 2026.
2) EVs will likely have a $250 road use fee
3) $1,000 Level 2 charger credit will also be eliminated pic.twitter.com/Aad41say43— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 22, 2025
All of these things sound like negatives — truly because they are. Those who are not in a financial position to buy an EV this year, even with the tax credit, might not be able to afford them in the coming years either, unless manufacturers are able to bring pricing to a level that is more accessible to consumers.
In theory, President Trump’s focus on bringing manufacturing back to America would bring prices down, but it won’t happen overnight. Companies will take many years to completely bring manufacturing and part sourcing to the United States.
However, Tesla could feel some positives from this bill, and it all comes down to timing. Of course, in the long term, it wouldn’t be great for the company, especially if it did not have two things going on right now: a slightly lagging delivery pace and the introduction of affordable models.
Tax Credit Sunsetting Advantage
Sunsetting the $7,500 tax credit means one thing: those who have been in limbo over buying an EV from Tesla are going to have to make a decision on whether they want to buy this year and still have access to the credit, or test their luck and hope for price reductions.
More than likely, those who have been on the fence will be willing to pull the trigger this year, and Tesla will definitely gain some sales from this fact alone. Other automakers will, too.
This could help offset Tesla’s slow start to the year, which has been caused by the changeover of production lines of the Model Y across each of its factories globally.
Affordable Models
Tesla said earlier this year that it will roll out affordable models in the first half of 2025. These cars are expected to be around the $30,000 mark, but the company has not shed any true information on what they will cost.
Potential affordable Tesla “Model 2/Model Q” test car spotted anew in Giga Texas
Ideally, the cars would cost under $30,000 without the EV tax credit, which would be more than accessible for many car buyers in the United States.
The introduction of models that are not in need of a tax credit to be affordable to the masses. This would help offset some of the losses Tesla might feel from cars losing the tax credit.
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