Blue Origin works towards New Glenn debut, ramps BE-4 deliveries

If everything goes well this year then New Glenn took 8 years until the first flight. Meanwhile if starship launches any payload next year it will have taken 6. Launching unfinished rockets looks good on TV, but it only demonstrates your ability to manufacture quickly, not your ability to build a functioning rocket quickly. For the latter, only the final rocket matters so you can just skip the unfinished test articles.

This old space and new space distinction is really perplexing on on a tech focused site like Hacker News. You do realize that you want to avoid as many silicon tapeouts as possible, right? Getting things working flawlessly on first try is important. The current iterations of starship might look like they can fly, but Starship is suffering from underperformance. They will have to build "Version 2" to fix that and that means new engines on a bigger fuselage so the current starship is not representative of what they are actually going to launch, meaning further delays are possible.