I really like this rocket because you can see with the naked eye that it is really stable. They designed powerful enough engines, good enough software to keep it very stable. When you watch a SpaceX landing it's like watching a sports event: you wish more than you are certain.
Your comparison isn't a proper one. The SpaceX landings that you're talking about are very, very different from the Blue Origin landings. Once Bezos starts putting things into orbit, then we can start comparing properly.
It's amazing to me that people don't understand this. Lumping all rocketry together is a rather grave mistake. Yes, it's all hard, yes they all can explode, but the current Blue Origin landings are the equivalent of tossing a dart and hitting a bullseye across the room, while the current SpaceX landings are tossing a dart, hitting a bullseye in the next room, where the board is strapped to a dog standing on a skateboard, and in the meantime having your dart deploy a second smaller dart that has it's own bullseye to hit. They're just not comparable at all.
I'm a fan of any company that wants to get people off this rock cheaply and safely, but Blue Origin has a long way to go to achieve what SpaceX is doing. I can't wait to see that thing fly though. :-D
Agreed. From the article, this highlights what kind of shift Blue Origin needs to make it from their current rocket to one on the SpaceX scale:
"Put another way, Blue Origin wants to go from a small, suborbital rocket to one that stands four times as tall and possesses 35 times the thrust. That is quite a leap."
Somewhat counter intuitively, the New Shepard is so stable because it's less powerful. You'll never see a hover + correction maneuver in a SpaceX landing because even the single engine used for landing is too strong to allow hovering when the fuel tanks are almost empty.
One further comparison, the Blue Origin rocket that has landed several times is roughly the height of one of SpaceX's landing legs. It really is a different game.
