This is a good history from @SciGuySpace, but there's a word missing in it: Starship. Tory's problem is that he thinks that he's competing against Falcon, but Elon is going to obsolesce Falcon ASAP. How will Vulcan or New Glenn compete against a fully reusable heavy lifter?
The thing about Elon is that he never faces the Innovator's Dilemma. His first instinct is to obsolesce his own product line before a competitor can. Anyone who wants to seriously compete against SpaceX has to compete against his future plans, not his current business.
If space launch was just a business for Elon, he'd be as complacent as any other businessman in his position, but it's not a business; it's a passion, and he wants to get thousands of people to Mars. So he's going to continue to out-innovate the competition.
Imagine a world in which SH/SS is flying daily (or more often) on regularly scheduled trips to ELEO at a cost of tens of dollars a pound. Propellant would be cheap enough to deliver a payload to anywhere in cislunar space for much less than the cost of a traditional launch.
That is what ULA and BO are going to have to compete with if they want to stay in the launch business.
I know, "But there's not enough demand for that level of launch activity!" Believe me, at those prices, we will finally see the kind of price-demand elasticity that will drive it through the roof. People will be doing things dreamt of for decades, held back only by launch costs.
So good luck to ULA (and BO) on their upcoming maiden flights this year, but I don't predict a long future for them. Not to mention SLS...
I feel like I should write a book about this.
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First, there is no relationship between the learning period and NASA "certification." If private astronauts imagine there is, they will be disabused of the notion as part of informed consent.
Second, no space flight is "safe," whether for NASA or private astronauts. In fact, nothing is "safe"; there are no guarantees of safety this side of the dirt. Someone wrote a book about that.
@MarcAndreChart1@kfacciol@Simberg_Space Oh, I agree. From a safety standpoint, in both design and management, Shuttle was seriously flawed from the beginning. I discuss that in the book. But we can't just say "safety first," or have a one-size-fits-all approach for probability of loss of crew. It depends.
@MarcAndreChart1@kfacciol@Simberg_Space Let's talk a minute about Apollo 13, and "Failure is not an option" (which Kranz never actually said). Once the LOX tank did a rapid unscheduled disassembly, mission control had no choice, except to do everything possible to get the crew back alive.
But when you're planning a mission, or deciding to launch, "Failure is not an option" is a recipe for inaction, and caution, and failure by not performing the mission.
First, since people are saying that Blue Origin should demonstrate the ability to develop an orbital rocket, it's fair to say that so should ULA. They're flying vehicles developed by other companies over two decades ago.
Arguably, only two teams with recent orbital launcher development experience are SpaceX and NGIS (by acquiring Orbital ATK). Vulcan and New Glenn both currently remain paper rockets. At this point in time, SpaceX has the most experienced launch-development team on the planet.
And while NGIS does have the Antares experience, that won't necessarily apply to their new vehicle. Even if it was a good idea, no one has successfully developed an orbital launcher based on a large segmented solid rocket. We know that Ares I had teething issues.