I admit that I thought BO was going to be a poor competitor to SpaceX, with them already having an operational fleet of reusable boosters, and BO just doing these suborbital amusement park rides. That they made it to orbit on their first launch is pretty impressive. They are also trying to recover a much larger stage than the Falcon 9 which might present some different (or at least more intense) technical challenges, and they're attempting a landing ship recovery right out of the chute vs. a RTLS landing. They might have to blow up some rockets before they sort out the details, but if they are taking data and learning lessons, they will get there eventually.
If they can get New Glenn working and start regularly recovering stages, it could be an interesting competitive dynamic with SpaceX. It has a much higher payload to orbit capability than the Falcon 9, and it might eventually beat Falcon 9 in price/lb to orbit. It's smaller than Falcon Heavy, but it seems that there is a very limited market for missions that require FH performance, and several of the FH missions that did needed all the performance where they had to expend boosters. New Glenn might be closer to a Goldilocks sized booster for economic Earth orbital operations.
The wild card is Starship/SuperHeavy, but I don't see that system as a major competitor for Earth orbital operations. StarLink might enjoy being able to put up whole satellite constellations in one launch, but I don't know any satellite companies outside of StarLink that would like to risk their entire constellation on a single rocket launch. Payload deployment still needs to get sorted out, and the Pez dispenser might only work for certain payloads. I don't think a 9 m fairing is ever going to be a thing. Starship/Superheavy is really meant to chase the white whale of going to Mars which I think is unlikely to be a profitable mission market for a long time yet. They're dreaming of using it for point-to-point travel on Earth, but I don't see anyone happy with loading hundreds of people on the thing and doing the Adama maneuver to touchdown, even if it gets you there in 90 minutes or less. I think they'll get Starship/Superheavy working, but it may not have missions outside of a mad billionaire's desire to go to Mars.
Interesting times.
