alt Hacker NewsWhat I think is very ironic is that Blue Origin actually beat SpaceX to Mars, after a decade of SpaceX "make life multiplanetary". A few months after Blue Origin did that SpaceX announced now they'll just go to the Moon, no more Mars.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...
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That's not irony, that's shallow thinking. If you want to "make life multiplanetary" you would do it by building a very large, reusable, refillable rocket that can land 100 tons on Mars.
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
That article says that Rocket Lab is building the spacecraft designed by NASA. Blue Origin is just launching it.
Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter