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Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos flying with his brother Mark on the first manned flight of Blue Origin is the ultimate dogfooding event. Surprised people are so against it, it is an iterative step and was massively risky but proves out the technology.

Blue Origin will be a formidable competitor and working with ULA, JPL and NASA will be great for the space industry and new perspectives on sustainability on Earth.

ULA will be launching Amazon Kuiper satellites to start but eventually it will be Blue Origin itself. I wouldn't ever bet against Bezos. The competition is just beginning. I am glad we got a space race, competition is good.

The Blue Origin flight was extremely smooth and clean, I can't wait to see more.

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ULA has contracted Blue Origin for their BE-4 engine to power their Vulcan. Future heavy lift launches will fund Blue Origin for a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4

Viable biz model, ability to execute is all I care about wrt Blue Origin.

Competition, good.

Living in space, colonizing Mars, mining asteroids, neurotic billionaires... Whatever. Just infotainment.

> mining asteroids,

I agree about the living in space and colonizing mars which are mostly pipe dreams (that I'm admittedly optimistic about as a spaceflight enthusiast), but I think mining asteroids is a feasible proposition. The material is there, and in-situ resource extraction and return has been demonstrated. It's really just a matter of scale-up and putting in the upfront investment.

And Blue Origin has forced ULA to fall back to using Russian rockets engines because their engine hasn’t been finished yet. ULA probably regrets using BE now.

I get the natsec hesitancy to go with the RD-180 over a domestic model, but at least the RD-180 exists.

Except the Vulcan hasn't had a single launch yet, will have half the payload capacity of the Falcon Heavy and is being built by a company with no experience in rocket landing/re-use.

I don't really see how the Vulcan will be competitive with the existing launch capabilities of SpaceX, even if it does launch successfully before Starship.

I don't see how Blue Origin producing the engines for an also ran rocket is going to fund their operations. Blue Origin will be dependent of Bezos and the USG for quite a while, atleast until the New Glen can be launched re-usable.

It is weird that they went with a brand new company to provide the lift for their NSO launches. Especially when they haven't executed on a heavy lift engine yet. It feels like New Glenn especially is a pipe dream.

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