I don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.
Nobody with any sense for how rockets work should be impressed with parachuting and refurbing SRB tubes. Landing a proper rocket stage the real way is an impressive feat of robotics and engine engineering. The shuttle SRB thing was a wasteful farce meant to pay lip service to the loftier goals set by earlier Shuttle proposals (such as real flyback boosters.)
A far better example, although still not exactly the same sort of thing, would be landing the SSMEs with every orbiter landing. They obviously required refurbishment (as all Falcon 9 Merlin engines do too) and the propellant tanks were expended, but the engineering that went into the SSMEs is a much better example of precedent to Falcon 9 than dropping spent SRBs on parachutes.
SLS/Artemis is actually using some of the specific SSMEs that have flown before on Shuttles. Veteran engines, but they will be discarded this time, no more refurbing. What a damn shame.
Shame for nostalgia reasons perhaps, these engines were made out of unicorn tears and the price tag reflected that. The new gen methalox engines are much saner economically.
SpaceX have had much worse recent failures on launches of their new generation rocket.
Blue Origin have moved glacially slow by comparison, but they achieved their primary goal with this launch (get to orbit) and failed a secondary goal (land the booster).
If this were a SpaceX launch of a brand new rocket we'd be calling this a success and noting how they'd almost certainly achieve the secondary goal soon.
I think the question is how well and quickly Blue Origin can iterate to achieve first stage reuse. It took SpaceX quite a long time with a lot of lessons learned to reach the maturity they have now with Falcon 9 landings and re-launches.
This. I used to be very skeptical of anything Blue Origin. But after the CEO change they appear to have changed their attitude for the better.
They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.
I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
> ... they even fubared the thrust:weight ration a bit ...
Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.
I don't understand why you're drawing attention to their failure, it doesn't mean anything. Failure by anyone on the first time of anything is understandable.
But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.
