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Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by bryanlarsen on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:08PM (#26268360)
Amazon's Kuiper constellation and Telesat's Lightspeed constellation are more than enough to ensure viability of New Glenn.
Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by throwawayX1 on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:27PM (#26268550)
That's an interesting thing to consider.

Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.

Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.

It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.

Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.

Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by bryanlarsen on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:32PM (#26268599)
That 2.5B is sunk costs. They should be pricing based on operating costs and the market, mostly ignoring sunk costs.
Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by throwawayX1 on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:38PM (#26268665)
Sure, my point is that nothing about Blue Origin implies a lean, cost conscious way of operating or that New Glenn will be cheap to build and fly.

The money has to come from somewhere.

Either it's from Bezos, or it's from launches with a price that won't make it easy to win many customers in the very small market of large payloads.

Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by wmf on Friday February 26, 2021 @12:24AM (#26271632)
I guess the optimistic take is that Bezos believes the addressable launch market will be huge enough to amortize multi-billion upfront costs. It's definitely a hail mary.
Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by Iolaum on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:15PM (#26268432)
Will the end product be competitive if their launch costs are 2+ times the cost of their main competitor?
Re:New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight by bryanlarsen on Thursday February 25, 2021 @04:29PM (#26268578)
There are enough companies that won't launch on SpaceX because SpaceX is a competitor and enough companies that spread their launch contracts as a kind of insurance that a second vendor could stay viable. But with Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane and Roscosmos fighting for that second spot thats a small number of launches spread over quite a few vendors...