Hacker News Reader

Comment by Trisell | Hacker News Reader

The problem that SpaceX has is that Blue Origin did it first. Even if the technical challenges were larger for SpaceX then Blue Origin.

In the mind of the general public that cares, it's all the same thing. The technicalities of a suborbital flight of a small capsule verses an orbital flight carrying a payload is meaningless. They just saw the Blue Origin rocket do it, and then the SpaceX rocket do it, and they looked about the same.

View on HN

Nope.

SpaceX did it in 2011 w/ Grasshopper - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)

And McDonnell Douglas did a vertical hop of a rocket in 1993 with DC-X.

Uh, Grasshopper went < .5 miles up, Blue Origin went into space.

Too bad Blue Origin can't actually put anything into space that stays for a while (such as 11 satellites). The only thing Blue Origin exists for is to give millionaires a thrill ride that lasts a few minutes. BTW, this isn't fanboyism -- I really fail to see how the suborbital rockets will advance humanity's future in space -- whereas getting down the cost to orbit (and remember, leo is halfway to anywhere) is what is going to open up a new future for mankind.

If the millionaire gets out and jumps at apogee, they might stay in space for a while. But that'll use up Blue Origin's market pretty quickly.

Blue Origin technically went into space for about ~30 seconds. The space officially starts at the Karman line (100 kilometers) and they reached 100.5 kilometers for a split second.

They actually had a successful 1km test.

TBF, 1KM is less than 100KM and Falcon 9 Dev didn't successfully land until 2014.

Fortunately for SpaceX it doesn't really matter what the general public thinks since they're not buying SpaceX's services.

The general public has no idea what Blue Origin is.

In reality, the general public has no idea what SpaceX is either.

You can continue to down vote me, but none of these examples went into 'space'. Also I reiterate my point, that the average person is not going to know or care that grasshopper went up and down 2440 ft in 2013. Or that others had a rocket that went up a few hundred feet and then landed in 1993. They will remember that Blue Origin just did this and that SpaceX did it second.

I'm not a SpaceX fan boy, and I am happy Blue Origin is contributing to this space too. However; going straight up and then coming back down is no major challenge. It doesn't impart anything extra to the test. The novel and hard part is the landing. It's quite a shame that Bezos (and Musk, I guess) felt he had to treat it like a competition when actually both are doing cool and hard things.

That said; SpaceX are clearly some way ahead, in that they (rightly) focused on getting stuff to space whilst heading toward the landing tech.

You still haven't described what exactly Blue Origin did first, that is so important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com