Vastly different levels of capitalization. Bezo's is a multi-billionaire, while Carmack was only a multi-millionaire.
Bezo's has more money to invest in failures and iteration than Carmack did. Also as far as intelligence goes I think they're pretty close, or Bezos would come out ahead, specifically when taking account of deep breadth of knowledge.
Vastly different levels of capitalization. Bezo's is a multi-billionaire, while Carmack was only a multi-millionaire.
And motivation. Carmack's original thing was just that he was spending a lot of money on modifying Ferarris, and instead decided to put that money towards rocket development. That's not to say they took things more seriously later on, but that was the start of it.
And we learned very, very well, that H2O2 monopropellants rocket engines are a pain to use in practice, and don't seem feasible for any kind of reusable system.
> And we learned very, very well, that H2O2 monopropellants rocket engines are a pain to use in practice, and don't seem feasible for any kind of reusable system.
In no way Armadillo Aerospace's work shown that H2O2 engines are somehow fundamentally inferior to other rocket engines. What turned AA away from H2O2 were problems to obtain rocket-grade without building a processing plant.
Bezo's has more money to invest in failures and iteration than Carmack did. Also as far as intelligence goes I think they're pretty close, or Bezos would come out ahead, specifically when taking account of deep breadth of knowledge.