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To: SunkenCiv

It looks like SpaceX is so far ahead of all the others, Virgin Galactic, Firefly, Blue Origin, Boeing, et al , they will never catch up.................


18 posted on 04/30/2025 6:33:46 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
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To: Red Badger
My guess is and has been that RocketLab will take the silver medal. It was started in NZ I believe, but has development and launching going on here in the the US.

China had 68 launches in all of 2024, slightly more than in the prior two years. Also, only SpaceX has the reusable workhorse first stage booster.

I am and will remained puzzled that Blue Origin didn't further develop the New Shepard booster to send (relatively small) payloads to orbit. It's got a methane-burning engine, not easy to make. But its first flight was in 2012, but the first flight with passengers (strictly a thrill ride) was in the summer of 2021. BO has just two human-rated boosters, with just four or five capsules, has remained suborbital only, and has a very low launch cadence (31 total flights which includes I think eleven with passengers). If Blue Origin went on the block, it's likely to cost more and be worth more than ULA.

About 40 years ago, the airhead LSD king Timothy Leary was quoted in "California" magazine. It was a two page spread, just him and a bunch of what looked like Venice Beach's finest (/jk) outdoors, at night. Something like, "for 5,000 years humanity has been heading from East to West down the genetic runway... brightest, free-est... [all white kids] now on this Pacific Rim are about to make the next evolutionary lurch." Words to that effect. He'd have been so cancelled if he'd been alive and said that in this century. :^)

29 posted on 04/30/2025 8:44:58 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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