This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchelor.

Behind the Black.

Bob Zimmerman, Behind the Black,

and your subscriptions and donations are welcome this month of November.

Bob is extremely generous in his patience for big space.

He's extremely expansive in his patience for big space. He's extremely expansive in his enthusiasm for private space. And somewhere in between the billionaires, that would be Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos.

We lead today with Mr. Bezos, perhaps asserting success for Blue Origin. Congratulations. The second launch

ever was successful, launching packages

toward Mars. But at the same time, I puzzle if showing off the footage of this event

indicates that Mr. Bezos has been a little anxious about his non-performance these many years.

Bob, what is your opinion? Good evening to you. John, you continually,

you want to, for good reason, you have skepticism about Blue Origin and New Glenn, and I don't blame

you for that because it took them five more years to finally launch that rocket. It just took

them too long. But in this case, no, what Jeff Bezos did is he released good, new video of that first stage landing of New Glenn when it launched last week.

And the first stage came down like a Falcon 9 first stage, and it landed on a barge in the Atlantic, like SpaceX lands on its drone chips.

But he provided video from a drone a distance away, so you could really see it clearly.

And what he was showing us is the sophistication of their software landing technology.

This doesn't mean it's better than SpaceX, but it surely matches SpaceX because they had the

stage come down several hundred feet to the side of the barge. And he says they do this to

avoid, quote, to avoid a severe impact if engines fail or to start or start slowly. They don't

want to crash on their barge.

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