The only company currently performing is SpaceX.
And then we have the suit problem (that I talked about in my Reason study last year). But Eric Berger seems sanguine about it:
People often say there's no difference between "new" space and "traditional" space. Not true, and we've seen that play out with this spacesuit contract. Axiom has no guarantees it will ultimately profit on its fixed price suit contract with NASA. It could lose big time. But the…
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) April 21, 2026
[Afternoon update]
I left Rockwell a third of a century ago when it became very clear that, despite being the prime contractor on the Shuttle, they didn't see themselves as being in the space business. They were in the government-contracting business.
— Rand Simberg (@Simberg_Space) April 21, 2026
The “Show More” of Berger’s post is worth the click.
Blue Origin is not ready for the big leagues, not ready for prime time, not ready for national defense or commercial payload launches.
Despite being in the game longer than Space-X.
Kudos for their investment in keeping NASA’s finest retirees out of the way
New rockets tend to have problems, especially with upper stages. Even SpaceX has not been entirely spared. Preliminarily, anent the AST SpaceMobile mission failure, it looks as though one of the New Glenn 2nd stage’s two engines failed to restart and the other one couldn’t compensate for the loss.
The two rockets notably free of 2nd-stage bothers were Atlas V and Delta IV. Both, though, used 2nd stage engines with copious prior flight history. Neither rocket was entirely free of 1st-stage bothers, however, and now Vulcan is having SRB issues while its upper stage, based on those of its predecessors, has yielded none.
Both Blue Origin and ULA will get their problems sorted out. Blue will likely do so first because it provides its own propulsion.
ULA, in contrast, buys its propulsion. Its SRB supplier, Northrop Grumman, has had a number of issues with new-model big solids in recent years other than those recently manifesting on GEM 63 XLs. The arm’s-length relationship between the two companies – and the fact that both sides of it are OldSpace stalwarts with corporate cultures steeped in ass-covering and the rhetorical minimization of difficulties – is all but certain to slow the process of actual problem-solving.
Still, NorGrum is also the prime contractor for the next generation of US ICBMs. If nozzles start falling off of those in tests out of Vandy, I think Sec’y. of War Hegseth will have one of his famously plain-spoken Come to Jesus meetings and make it clear to NorGrum higher-ups that large War Department contracts are not entitlements.
Hopefully firefly works out for Northrop.
BO will get it together. Now that they are flying, they can find the things that need fixed
What are the ACTUAL PROBLEMS with the Axiom suits? Please tell us.
A large problem is that they are the *only* ones working on suits.
There’s a lot of people thinking SpaceX has too much power, but at least there are some other people building rockets even if they’re a long way behind.
SpaceX has “power” mainly because it is very good at what it does, but secondarily, because of failures to execute on the part of many others.
It wasn’t diabolical machinations on SpaceX’s part that prevented any other rocket maker from launching, recovering and reusing a large orbital-class booster for an entire decade. It was some combination of funk, sloth, learned helplessness and plain old lack of capability on the part of legacy aerospace that left the matching of a feat SpaceX accomplished over 10 years ago to a second NewSpace company.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth US companies to do this trick will also be NewSpace companies, some not even in business yet when SpaceX first landed a Falcon 9 booster.
As to space suits for operating on the Moon, I do not see SpaceX relying on any other entity for something so clearly critical to its recently outlined lunar ambitions. SpaceX’s suit people are hard at work on a minimum viable Moonsuit. It will be trotted out only when SpaceX decides it needs to be.
As with everything else SpaceX does, the initial suit will be quickly superceded by a succession of improved models based on in-service experience.
That guy really doesn’t like Musk or Tesla.
Tesla might be overvalued but they sell over a million cars a year and make more profit per vehicle than Ford. CyberTaxi and Optimus will both be big in the future.
The only shareholders who will demand a payback are the investors who put big money in and they seem to be the type of people who want Musk to realize his goals and are patient enough to wait for the revenue to roll in.
What “guy” are you talking about? Berger doesn’t hate either Musk or SpaceX and I don’t recall him ever saying anything about Tesla – he certainly didn’t in the linked tweet.
All of Berger’s colleagues at Ars Technica certainly have it in for Musk, Tesla, SpaceX and all of Musk’s other works, especially the execrable Jonathan Gitlin. That is because they are woke progressives and Musk is their number one demon these days – or maybe tied for that distinction with Trump.
It is a little ambiguous. Because Stephen Green wrote the PJ Media article, while the X/Twitter threads are from Eric Berger.
I’m assuming Wodun meant Mr. Green.
Also suprised Eric hasn’t been cancelled over at Ars…
Maybe he has mastered Jedhi mind tricks… “I am not the MAGA[t] you are looking for…”
Would there ever have been a US-made Raketa Dvigatel-180? I really doubt it. Nowadays, Merlin is a better kerolox engine.
You are quite correct to doubt it because the answer to that question would be ‘No.’ Rocketdyne, as it was then, is said to have taken a look at documentation for the RD-180 back in the day and concluded that it could not duplicate the engine at a cost competitive with what the post-Soviet Russians were willing to sell them for. It was right about that. Rocketdyne made good engines in its day, but it never figured out how to make them either inexpensively or in large quantity.
SpaceX, of course, figured out how to do both pretty much from the get-go. And, yes, the Merlin 1-D is a better engine than the RD-180. It trails a bit in Isp and a lot in total thrust, but has a much better thrust-to-weight ratio, an absurdly lower unit cost, clusters well and is very reusable. The RD-180 might have proven reusable as well but was never part of a reusable booster design so we’ll never know.
I think the problem at Rocketdyne was as much a serious loss of mojo as an economic calculation. The last really good engine produced by US OldSpace was the RS-25 – at least after the early fragilities were worked through. And OldSpace never acquired the knack of producing big liquid-propellant engines on a mass production basis at reasonable cost.
Following the RS-25, the RS-68 should have been easy but was a disappointment that required a 2nd try to meet specs. Even then it was quite expensive. So would have been the ultimately doomed AR-1. The rejiggered and disposable RS-25Es are even worse from an eye-watering cost and mingy production cadence standpoint.
All real large liquid-propellant engine expertise is now the exclusive domain of NewSpace – mostly SpaceX, but with a number of other promising players also coming up and showing some moves.
I’m very stoked about Stoke Space.
Rand, did anyone ever do anything with your glove idea?
I heard someone was making use of a prototype but that it wasn’t going so well.