Item — HN Reader

> Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.

For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?

2 comments

Is this a broken down budget you are talking about?

I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?

Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.

> Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin.

I have been following the Space industry for 1-2 decades and I would love to know what you base this number on.

In terms of what we know, is that we know that at times in the 2010s BlueOrigin had almost the same amount of people while launching much less often, having many many fewer projects (like no human capsule, no Starlink). It is well known that Bezos spend more then 1 billion a year on BlueOrigin, people estimate 2-3 billion $. And that was in a period where their overwhelming spend was on New Glenn.

The idea that SpaceX spent 20x that even on Starship is insane and not credible.

In fact, every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 at a incredibly small budget, like literally vanishingly small compared to what New Glenn in spending. And then SpaceX iterated on the design while generating revenue.

New Glenn cost many, many billions before revenue and has a budget that is not that different from Starship will being more comparable to Falcon Heavy.

We also have other evidence. Lunar lander document from NASA suggested as much. NASA estimate that SpaceX would assume 50% of the cost, Blue bid was much higher and they were less willing to self finance (at least initially). Those numbers suggested that SpaceX and BlueOrigin lander cost were not that different, except of course the SpaceX lander had much higher capability.

And pretty much everything we know about Blue is that they spend a huge amount of money and are nowhere near as thrifty as SpaceX, specially compared to the same stage of development. SpaceX had to do that because they simply didn't have the finances. They couldn't just use the 1-3 billion $ of free money flowing into the company.

I open to being proven wrong here with some actual numbers. But I have been following this space in detail and try to look at the best numbers we know publicly and follow some companies that estimate these things. For example, for early SpaceX NASA did a study on cost and how SpaceX could do it at these costs. So we have some good knowledge on that period. We can also look at when SpaceX raised money and do some estimates of their budget and so on. If there are reliable numbers out-there that exist I don't know about, I would love know what you are talking about.