> Being able to shoot straight up and fall back down isn't anywhere near as useful or hard as orbit.
Being able to reach space at all is the hard part: so many pieces have to be developed and work well together. Achieving orbit is more evolutionary than from going from 0 to 1. Orbit seems like a such an arbitrary line, amd I suspect once BO achieves it, the bar is going to be arbitrarily raised to "Heavy-lift rockets are the hard part, and only 2 organizations on Earth can achieve it"
Being able to reach space at all is the hard part: so many pieces have to be developed and work well together. Achieving orbit is more evolutionary than from going from 0 to 1. Orbit seems like a such an arbitrary line, amd I suspect once BO achieves it, the bar is going to be arbitrarily raised to "Heavy-lift rockets are the hard part, and only 2 organizations on Earth can achieve it"