Blue Origin nailed ⅔ of their New Glenn debut: ascent and staging, and orbit insertion. We still don’t know what happened to the first stage during reentry.
Not bashing them at all, for the record. The headline is just very tilted to BO.
Right, especially when SpaceX caught another booster and was testing a new ship variant that still started up normally. And Blue’s ambitious launch ramp up requires booster reuse.
People really want a SpaceX competitor and are pretending it’s here. Meanwhile, 8 Falcons have launched this year (a 9th is scheduled for today), including 4 customer launches.
The possible Utah spaceport is news to me. I don’t get that at all. Who would use it? Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin (New Shepard), and Stratolaunch all don’t need it for any suborbital missions. Maybe they could stick it out in the desert and get SpinLaunch?
It’s especially weird given that Utah is a landlocked state. Any orbital launches would need to fly over another state. Could they even get approval for that?
SpaceX had talked about trying to get eastward launches out of Vandenberg. And Utah has a whole lot of nothing. So, maybe?