We are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the first flight of Blue Origin‘s New Glenn rocket. It’s faint, but we can at least now see it as the company has a potentially flight-ready rocket sitting at its launch pad in Florida.
For the last week, Blue Origin has had its first flight-ready New Glenn sitting at its LC-36 launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. What the team is doing is still yet to be known, but we do know that Blue Origin hopes to conduct a static fire using the seven installed BE-4 engines on the booster.
That has yet to happen, nor do we have an estimated date for when that will take place. However, even having another commercially viable, reusable rocket nearing launch is a breath of fresh air for those who can only rely on the Falcon 9 for cheap and reliable access to space, like the Department of Defense or NASA.
However, SpaceX executives, not just Elon, are already talking about the retirement of the Falcon 9 and Heavy, expecting customers to favor Starship for its planned low cost and reliability. SpaceX President and COO recently shared that they hope to launch Starship 400 times in the next four years.
Sadly for hopeful competitors like Blue Origin, ULA, or Relativity, their rockets might, or already have, arrived dead on arrival if they are simply trying to meet a first-stage-only reusable rocket. The biggest cost leader for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was its second stage, as it was not able to be reused.
The good of a multi-launcher market, no matter what
A major concern that has been raised not just by these potential SpaceX competitors but also by the customers themselves, including government ones, is the need for more options when it comes to launches. No matter how you look at it, a monopoly on a market is inherently bad for the industry as a whole.
Currently, the Department of Defense only has one real option to award launch contracts for the time being: SpaceX. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is yet to be certified, and neither is New Glenn. The only thing that is holding the DoD back from awarding SpaceX more NSSL Lane 2 contracts, the high stakes, big money ones, is that they don’t have a completed budget.
By the time Congress gets around to lifting the continuing resolution and passes a spending bill for the DoD, they will likely have at least certified Vulcan, and possibly even Blue Origin.
While in less than a decade Starship’s new market entrance as a fully ready commercial launcher could start this trend over again, in the short term, tripling the available commercial launchers for the US government will give it dissimilar redundancy on some of the most important, and expensive, missions that launch to space.
Is partial reusability too little too late?
This will be a hard question to tackle as we only have two studies on the success of reusable first-stage rockets, SpaceX and Rocket Lab. While SpaceX hopes to reduce costs to the customer, Rocket Lab’s mission with reusability has been to increase launch capacity for Electron.
Done well, reusability for just the first stage can reduce the cost of launching satellites to orbit; that’s obvious with SpaceX’s success. It can also increase the reliability of a rocket. NASA officials have stated several times that they prefer “flight-proven” boosters over new ones. SpaceX has seemingly taken on the burden of flying its Falcon 9 boosters at the most riskiest parts of their life, brand new and life-leading, with commercial launch contracts taking up the flights in between.
However, if Starship is going to be the success SpaceX says it will be, will this just mean the goalpost has once been moved by the company already in the lead? The worst-case scenario for the industry is that once SpaceX begins taking commercial launch contracts for Starship, satellite producers flock to the new rocket for its lower cost, even if they don’t need all that payload space.
A more probable outcome is that companies with smaller rockets like Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity will carve out niche markets for dedicated launch contracts. However, SpaceX would still dominate the launch game with its new, cheaper rocket.
We’ve actually seen something like this happen already. Just a few years ago, dedicated small satellite launches were all the rave, with everyone and their mothers taking advantage of cheap capital to start their very own launch companies. Many of those dreams of daily dedicated missions for CubeSats never materialized, and many companies have closed up shop.
This was partially thanks to the introduction of SpaceX’s rideshare program. Being able to undercut the competition, SpaceX launches the majority of small satellites on just a handful of missions a year. With Starship, what would stop folks from ridesharing their larger satellites? You could even use the new on-orbit refueling to increase the performance of the rocket, enabling the delivery of satellites to different orbit inclinations.
So is Blue Origin the next SpaceX?
With the company’s larger focus on being a government contractor with its Blue Moon lander, commercial LEO flights with New Shepard, and hope to provide space station services with Orbital Reef, Blue Origin will be a good alternative to SpaceX for government and some commercial contracts, but likely not a full-blown serious competitor to SpaceX.
Sadly, Blue Origin is the closest thing we have to a competitor. There’s always room for change, but in the current standing with SpaceX, that just doesn’t seem likely.
Similar to the tech companies in the early 2000s needing to copy what Apple was doing, SpaceX and Apple may have something in common: they set the trends. SpaceX is not worried about what rockets Blue Origin or others put out because the goal is not to compete; it’s to land a human on Mars, disrupting a slow-to-adapt and slow-to-innovate market along the way.
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