I'm publishing this from sunny cloudy SF and just before leaving I contemplated what on earth a 'check in' even meant now that you can do it by pushing a button on your phone the day before. Of course, the internet is happy to tell me all about it.
I may be the world's largest Elon Musk fanboy (call me, Elon!) but that doesn't mean I'm not also super excited about Bezos' Blue Origin. They both have comprehensive visions of humanity at home in space (video) and that's pretty much what gets me out of bed in the morning. Sure, they have some shiny CGI renderings of big rockets (narrated!) and glamour shots of engine plumbing but that's just PR. The most interesting parts to me are the boring logistical bits: building up the transport capacity to send boxes to the moon on a 10,000lb lunar polar lander (registration required). Building a cislunar industrial presence is sort of orthogonal to Mars plans: it takes almost exactly as much delta-v to land on the Moon as Mars despite the huge difference in distance; aerobraking is worth ~4km/s which is a lot. Because of this, landers suitable for one body are not good at landing on the other; Dragon 2 can't land on the Moon and this lunar polar lander would asplode if it tried to land on Mars. At a certain size this breaks down, the ITS mars lander could certainly land on the Moon.
It's really nicely parsimonious that two billionaires (and ULA which is a big fan (pdf) of cislunar and already good buddies (pdf) with Blue Origin) can build heavy lift infrastructure and really only be in competition as far as LEO. Space is big.
