On April 14, 2025, Blue Origin launched its 31st New Shepard mission from Launch Site One in West Texas. This suborbital flight, lasting approximately 10 minutes and 21 seconds, featured an all-female crew. The mission reached an altitude of 106 kilometers, allowing the crew to experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning safely to Earth.
While Blue Origin's recent missions may generate headlines, especially due to celebrity passengers, these media spectacles often mask a harsher truth that the company remains years behind in the real space race. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, Blue Origin has spent over two decades talking about a future it has barely begun to deliver. In contrast, SpaceX, founded by Musk just two years later in 2002, has already transformed itself into the backbone of global space operations.
As of April 2025, SpaceX continues to dominate the launch industry with an astonishing 138 successful orbital launches in 2024 alone, representing over 50% of all global orbital missions that year. In the first three and a half months of 2025, it’s already carried out 41 launches — 39 on Falcon 9 and 2 test flights of its massive Starship rocket. That's an average of one launch every 2.5 days — a cadence unmatched in history.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin finally launched its New Glenn rocket in 2025, after nearly a decade of delays — but the long-awaited debut was far from flawless. Originally promised for 2020, the heavy-lift rocket’s first mission slipped five full years behind schedule, and when it did fly, the results raised more concerns than confidence. While the rocket technically reached space, the upper stage failed to perform as expected.
Their suborbital tourism vehicle, New Shepard, while operational, isn’t much more than a glorified amusement ride. It has conducted fewer than 25 flights in total, and even that record isn’t spotless. In September 2022, a New Shepard booster failed mid-flight during an uncrewed mission, triggering the launch escape system. While no one was hurt, the failure grounded the vehicle for over a year. Blue Origin only resumed launches in late 2023.
Compare that to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster, which has achieved over 300 successful launches and has landed and reused rockets more than 250 times. Some Falcon 9 boosters have flown as many as 20 times, dramatically cutting launch costs and reshaping what’s economically feasible in spaceflight.