Fully Reusable Starship: Blue's Elephant in the Room
I wanted to get your opinions on a thought I've had. Starship has been demonstrating various but improving degrees of success in fielding a reusable upper stage. Even the most pessimistic doubter would agree that full reusability is going to be demonstrated in the very near future.
At this point, with Blue's only real heavy lift competitor making such great technical leaps, you would think that Blue would be going gangbusters to develop their own fully reusable vehicle system.
Now let's assume that job postings, especially for certain telltale skillsets, are an indicator of where a company is investing effort. (Anecdotally, this does seem to be the case, for anyone who's followed Blue's job postings for a long while. Looking at you, Eric Berger.)
So you would expect that Blue would have a great number of job postings for reusable upper stage positions, relative to incremental engineering upgrade positions. Yet, the engineering job postings are overwhelmingly dominated by hiring that appears to be aimed at the 9x4 New Glenn system, which still has an expendable upper stage, but now features twice the engine consumption per launch as 7x2.
Is anybody at the top concerned about the competition? In the future, will Blue be mentioned alongside Kodak in as companies that completely failed to maintain technical competitiveness, despite every sign that their survival would eventually depend upon it?
I know we heard that little blurb from Jeff on the Everyday Astronaut factory tour about running two expendable and reasonable development programs side by side. But, there has been no public discussions of any reusable stage beyond that, and assuming job postings indicate company priority, full resuability certainly does not seem to be one.
I'm just flummoxed.