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That's just it. Those rockets use technology NASA developed a long time ago. And don't ignore Falcon 1. It was just as much a learning curve for SpaceX as Electron is for Rocket lab. Yea, sure. Airbus is especially notorious for exploding every A380 during testing - to the cheers of every...

In the last 30 years, there was a great push to "make spaceflight private". We now have the results of that. The companies chasing profit have sacrificed reliability and safety in favor of moving quickly and breaking things. NASA has had rockets blow up and it's lost crews. But there was never...

The NASA basket seems to be the smallest, but doing fine. The other two are on fire.

It's clear to me now that NASA should have been heading the development of of these large rockets, not simply acting as a customer.

"... but the good news is that we didn't blow up ANY OTHER pads!"

With every Falcon 1 & 9 launch, they were reasonably sure they'll make it to orbit and orbit was the goal from the start. With landing boosters, they had quite a few failures, but they made their own work harder by having it land on the drone ship instead of RTLS. The priority was clearly the...

This iterative design approach doesn't seem to be yielding any significant results.

Wouldn't you want to get something to orbit first? :P

Elon Musk will save us all!

Do we know what the trajectory was supposed to be like? I find it hard to believe that the second burn would have included such a large plane change...

How the hell did they manage to screw this up?! I remember a "Trajectory nominal" callout at some point...

But will it have full self driving? :P

Apparently they managed to cut the booster in half and remove the CH4 tank.

No need to bring your can opener :P

Overall the design seems to be very conservative given its size. Supposedly it can do 45 tons to LEO, but only 7 tons to TLI, which seems a bit small when compared to Falcon Heavy advertised numbers - though those could have been "Elon Musked-ed"...

Congrats to the Blue Origin team! Flawless launch, execution of primary mission and spot on landing.

Yea, this is the 2019 clip with "heat shield can be much lighter", when reality started setting in. Before that, he claimed that stainless steel, cooled by fuel would be a viable heat shield and before that, he claimed the stainless steel would simply take the heat. As a recent test of an...

Initially Musk claimed the reason for steel outer skin was because it doesn't need a heat shield. Turns out it does. An ablative heat shield might be easier to apply to the ship, but obviously would need to be rebuilt for each flight. So instead, let's go for a complicated tiling system. They're...

Flying people to orbit on this is likely never going to happen due to a lack of launch abort system. This thing is nothing but a shell and it'll take many more iterations before it's ready for anything useful. Landing this on the Moon is just asking for trouble, given that it's tall and narrow...

I wonder at what point do they call this a sunk cost...