Will New Glenn and Neutron Beat Starship?

Is Starship faltering and will the competition overtake it? And if not where is it going? What will 2026 look like?

Image from Official SpaceX Photos on Flickr

November 13, 2025 the New Glenn rocket achieved the milestone of landing its first stage on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

This event killed the sense of inevitability of SpaceX dominance and success in the space race. The turtle had caught up with the hare.

As of now SpaceX has absolute dominance with its Falcon 9 rocket. Other companies have since tried for years to catch up. And for a while it looked like the ferocious progress of SpaceX would not abate. Starship seemed to advance at breath neck pace. Many years prior to Blue Origin May 5, 2021 Starship achieved its first landing. In October 2024 they achieved the magnificent booster catch with “chopstick” arms.

It seems SpaceX kept catching one win after the other before any other company even managed to achieve their first booster landing for an orbital rocket.

But then… then it seemed like SpaceX wasn’t getting anywhere. Rockets kept blowing up. And we get articles like this **Starship Will Simply Never Work** written by Will Lockett. Honestly I was surprised. SpaceX had just seemed unstoppable.

But we have been here before. Elon Musk has pulled off amazing feats at Tesla and SpaceX on numerous occasions but he isn’t God. In several areas he utterly fails to deliver. He has since something like 2016 claimed he would have fully autonomous driving next year. Well… we are still not there.

And who can forget all his claims of hyper loop, solar roofs, car tunnels etc. None of that really went anywhere. The Tesla batter in the home… is that still a thing?

The really cheap EV for everyone promised for a while never came either. SpaceX has been delayed a lot on their promises but generally he has still managed to deliver more or less his promise albeit later.

But for Starship I think Will Locket is on to something. It is a sober analysis to counter so much of the unrealistic hype from Elon Musk. Having said that Will Lockett is unrealistically negative. While Musk looks for the absolute best case scenario, Lockett seems to look for the worst case scenario.

So I will argue reality will be somewhere in between. I think Lockett is right that the performance Elon Musk is pushing for in Starship just isn’t realistic for the reasons he has given about stability, margins, reliability etc.

Non Reusable Starship Isn’t a Failure

What I think Will Lockett gets wrong is characterizing a failure to meet the original goal of Starship as a fully reusable rocket as a failure.

How much it costs to make a Starship is contested. SpaceX claims around $100 but Lockett claims much higher numbers around $500 million based on **this logic**:

In 2024, SpaceX spent $5 billion on Starship and built and launched four fully stacked rockets. If we generously assume the Starship project has overheads of a billion dollars a year and yearly R&D costs of two billion dollars, as SpaceX has suggested, we can estimate that SpaceX spent $2 billion on Starship launches last year, meaning each fully stacked rocket costs around $500 million to build.

Lockett thinks the $100 million number is only for the upper stage. SpaceX is however still in a very experimentation phase, so one would expect Starship to get cheaper.

Also while Starship looks to only be pushing 45 tons into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) compared to 57 tons for Falcon heavy in reusable mode, that isn’t entirely comparable. The second stage of Starship is a whole space craft onto itself meant for reuse with storage bays, heat shields and other things adding weight.

If SpaceX cannot pull off full reuse, they could always redesign the second stage to something more like Falcon Heavy. And this is where Will Lockett’s reasoning falls apart.

See Falcon Heavy last stage is just around 4 tons in dry mass (no propellant) while the second stage of Starship is a whopping 100–120 tons. That is because it a reusable craft with heath shield, landing gear, flaps and more. We can compare to the higher stages of NASA’s SLS rocket which has similar size. It has something like 14 to 30 tons in the last stage of dry mass.

In other words it should be absolutely possible to shave 50–70 tons off Starship second stage if not going fully reusable. That puts its payload into 100–130 tons range. That beats both SLS and Falcon Heavy.

In other words that totally crushes SLS which at lowest estimates costs $2 billion per launch. It could be up to $4 billion.

This will also reduce the cost of the second stage. If you are not aiming to make it reusable you would not need to spend $100 million on it.

Likely Outcomes for Starship

I suspect they will pull off full reuse in the end, but possibly with only 45 tons into LEO. In addition they will make fully expended second stages that can deliver 130 tons or something to LEO.

That will in my humble opinion still be an impressive achievement. Just not what Elon Musk had aimed for. The first stage using Methane fuel with liquid oxygen as oxidizer (Methalox) should manage at least as many reuses as Falcon 9 because Kerosene engines require more cleaning and refurbishing due to sot. Hence 20 reuses for booster stage should be perfectly doable.

Last stage is harder to guess. Say it is more difficult and only gets 10 reuses. That gives amortized cost (spread over all launches) o $25 million for the first stage and $10 million for the second stage. There are of course operational costs as well. But either way it looks to me as if Starship can beat Falcon Heavy and clearly SLS.

New Glenn promises 45 tons reusable at $68 to $110 million per launch. Starship would be able to compete with that.

The Good and the Bad

Starship not hitting Elon’s lofty goals would be bad in the sense that us space Geeks will not see the same massive expansion of space exploration that we have wished for.

But frankly I think this is for the better. Starship being less awesome means other companies can more realistically compete. That avoids a monopoly hat could have given Elon Musk far too much power. Look at the influence Elon Musk got in Ukraine due to his Starlink system. Elon Musk is a political extremist and hence giving him immense wealth and power is a rather bad idea for the world. At the same time a total failure of Starship would have been a sad day for the space industry.

I think what we will see is that Falcon 9 will continue to be a workhorse while Neutron and New Glenn will slowly eat into its market share. Meanwhile a lot of the bigger projects such as moon landings, space station module launches, Mars missions etc would be built on top of Starship. SLS is in my opinion dead in the water. It is too expensive and lack versatility.

Frankly they don’t need it as New Glenn from Blue Origin can work as a backup solution for moon based missions. It may not have exactly the same great cargo capacity as Starship but it has a decent lift and fairly wide diameter to allow a great variety of payloads.

Final Remarks About 2026

This coming year will be great for space enthusiasts. Neutron from Rocket Labs is expected to launch in first quarter.

And we’ll likely get exciting events from Blue Origin as well:

New Glenn is scheduled to launch Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on robotic missions planned for early 2026 and late 2027.

This will be delivery of a rover onto the moon surface. One clear step towards manned missions. The upgraded Mark 2 is made for astronauts, but not until 2030.

In other words my take is that Starship will benefit the world of space exploration. It will not be a failure even if it might never deliver what Elon Musk promised. I do think other companies will increasingly be able to compete with SpaceX. My long term bet is on Rocket Lab. They are disadvantaged with less money and hype, but I think their approach and thinking is very sound.