I&#x27;m not a SpaceX fan boy, and I am happy Blue Origin is contributing to this space too. However; going straight up and then coming back down is no major challenge. It doesn&#x27;t impart anything extra to the test. The novel and hard part is the landing. It&#x27;s quite a shame that Bezos (and Musk, I guess) felt he had to treat it like a competition when actually both are doing cool and hard things.<p>That said; SpaceX are clearly some way ahead, in that they (rightly) focused on getting stuff to space whilst heading toward the landing tech.