How come Blue Origin with earlier start with richer founder is so behind?
vs SpaceX ? Bezos became richer earlier and Blue Ocean founded 2 years earlier. We don't even know what they're doing at this point. How is the gap so big? The founder found a more lucrative route to defense contracts. SpaceX followed the path of least resistance. First they developed launch systems that targeted the middle of the space launch system that weren't terribly "high tech" but were designed with cost optimization in mind. Then they developed a real business, and they pursued re-usability in a conservative way as a further cost optimization. After all of that (and capturing a huge amount of the market) SpaceX began development of a truly radical system that promises much better capabilities and lower cost. Blue Ocean has made the mistake that many entrants in this market have made by developing a super high tech system (reusable from the start) rather than taking minimal steps. The market for orbital flights is real, the market for sub-orbital flights is not. Really some university team should try making a reusable sounding rocket because people launch a bunch of those, but rocket companies promising suborbital flight, like Virgin, chronically disappoint because it is a ride to nowhere. There's more of a market for a theme park ride like Disney's "Rocket to the Moon" than there is for a $100,000+ suborbital flight that might just blow you up. The difference is corporate culture. Blue Origin (not "Ocean") behaves like Old Space, companies like Boeing, who spend a huge amount of time designing and debating before they even bend a piece of metal. SpaceX on the other hand likes to move fast and fail forward. They'd rather build a lot of prototypes and blow up a few, and learn a whole lot in the process. Also, Musk is a fanatic and workaholic, and drives his employees hard, whereas Blue Origin is more laid back and "normal" in their work ethic. I'm reading the just-released Musk biography by Walter Isaacson and I think this is a pretty good summary. He has basically taken "move fast and break things" to the extreme and with hardware. Musk himself is quoted as believing that SpaceX's success is in large part owed to him getting involved with the technical minutiae, whereas Bezos has other people making decisions. Blue is run by accountants, spacex is run by engineers with a megalomaniac nominally in charge but well contained musk fan here, highly accurate. even the internal tech emails of him saying "what did you get done this week?" brings chills to my spine. Is it possible to "lead" a lot people with being really nice and kind tho? Those things are really important and not for great leaders IMO. In reality people don't follow kindness or nice people. They follow leaders and money. Somebody nice with a realistic business plan (skip the suborbital "rocket to nowhere") would have accomplished more than Branson and Bezos ever did. I don't know about Branson, but nobody ever accused Bezos of being a nice guy. Nice is only required when you are leading with no institutional power. If you have power, nice is a waste of time. Isn't this also a difference in safety-ethic? SpaceX seems to have a rather high number of failures, crashes and even killed people, but also a higher activity. And Musk in general seems to prefer a style of "move fast, crash hard, grow quick". Is this a joke? SpaceX has the most reliable launch service in human history. Also, SpaceX promotes itself as very mission focused and exciting. By doing so they end up getting the best people. Among Musk's successful customs in running his businesses is going above and beyond in recruiting. He is very personal and direct with every hire he goes after, as he seems to understand or at least recognize the substantial difference in the 5-year out outcome of a company between getting someone who is 99.9th percentile vs 99.99th+ percentile. I loved your comments, it's a very interesting take that throws some light into the dynamics of space businesses. Why is the market for suborbital flights not real? Is it because it's more of an expensive recreational thing? Also, do you recommend any interesting resources to learn more about this? There is a proven market for orbital flights for communication satellites, cube sats, space exploration, sending people to the space station, etc. There aren't really that many commercial uses for unmanned suborbital flights. For instance if you just want to test something in zero gravity for a short time maybe you can do your experiment faster in a drop tower. Manned suborbital flights are so expensive that the market is this tiny intersection of people who can afford it and who want to do it. If it was $500 you would get lots of people to sign up, but at current prices I think there's no way to sell enough seats to pay back the development costs of the machine. Eric Berger wrote a great book on SpaceX https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... There are a lot of government reports on the subject from the 1980-2000 range where people were considering the needs of launching for the strategic defense initiative, this is a typical one https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CSAT/documents/O... but not the one I was really looking for. I would say follow up the references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle and try to dig up more of the same.