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Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are companies that first and foremost have to make a profit, not lose money. SpaceX was profitable with Falcon-9/-Heavy, but has bet its future "farm" on rideshares with Starship/Superheavy. They still have their hands full just trying to make Starship/Superheavy work at all as a transport to LEO. Blue Origin has its hands full trying to make New Glenn into a profit center. Coming up with a contracted NASA lunar lander is a smaller piece of that overall larger puzzle, for both of them. I cannot fault their priorities.
Of the two, I suspect Blue Origin might be a little closer to satisfying the NASA lander contract. That is because SpaceX bit off a much-larger piece of "iffy" technology advancement, trying to do the all-reusable Starship/Superheavy. Plus, my reading of the events suggests the ratio of Musk time to real time (3 to 4) is a bit bigger than Bezos's ratio (2 to 3).
The time from lunar rendezvous being the adopted Apollo architecture in 1964 or 1965, to the Apollo-9 checkout of the Apollo CSM with its LM in LEO in 1969, was only 4 or 5 years! THAT is how long it took Grumman to come up with a workable lander, under a crash program where cost was no object. And higher risk-taking by NASA with its astronauts was "normal".
Artemis is NOT a crash program where cost is no object, and NASA (I hope) has learned not to take such extreme risks with its astronauts! Expecting SpaceX and Blue Origin to come up with anything workable as a lunar lander in only 4 years or so, is actually quite unreasonable! SpaceX started only 2-3 years ago, and Blue Origin "in earnest" only last year.
You CANNOT count the proposal and contract-win time, as real hardware development time! That only sets the concept they will focus upon. REAL development only starts AFTER contract award. And coming up with a concept has NOTHING to do with its development into something real! That's just life. Ugly, ain't it?
NASA projecting schedules that have no reality tells me there is no one there anymore that understands the difference between company time and real time, and that the ratio varies from company to company. I would expect that, after all the former traditional contractors agglomerated into monopolies that no longer really compete (with the government making no anti-trust moves to stop it). THAT is why "new space" has had such a hard time getting established. The game was rigged.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (Yesterday 15:18:04)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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