This may come off as sour grapes, but it's really important for Musk to point this out. It's not just that you need to go sideways at mach 24 when you reach space to achieve orbit. It's that you need to carry the fuel up to space to be able to do that. Which means that any returnable vehicle is going to be way larger to carry all that fuel. So from an engineering perspective, the size of Blue Origin is a toy compared to the size of rocket that would return after achieving orbit. Not to mention the amount of additional fuel required to decelerate a much larger mass right before landing.
> This may come off as sour grapes, but it's really important for Musk to point this out.
It does come off as sour grapes and it absolutely wasn't important for Musk to point this out. His PR team needs to deal with this, not him. He can send out congratulations and rah-rah for another amazing achievement for humanity, but his PR needs to get on the ball and show what the differences in goals and achievements BO and SpaceX have. They also should look at this as a failure to explain what the whole landing phase means for both companies. He can stay above the the whole thing. Its not like Bezos is beloved (the whole Stark / Hammer comparison is not far off).
Sort of. The ascent booster separates from the crew capsule, which basically uses parachutes for its deceleration. For descent of the booster, there will be some fuel requirements, but most of the work should also be done by the parachutes (I think. It just says "guided flight", but it would be weird if it did not use parachutes), with fuel only needed at the end.
