It's really a shame what has happened to Blue Origin. They've gone from a promising space startup to yet another purveyor of perpetual vaporware.
Where is the BE-4 engine? Delayed, again and again. New Glenn, the rocket that could actually go into orbit? Same. So far their only functioning hardware (New Shephard) is, in effect, a glorified amusement park ride.
Considering that SpaceX has actually made it to orbit multiple times, any rational actor would clearly choose SpaceX over BO.
Robert Siegel: "As NPR's Peter Overby reports, Capitol Hill has always been deeply involved in NASA's activities, and sometimes seem to regard NASA as a jobs program, as well as a space program."
Overby: "This year [2011], according to federal contract data, NASA will buy goods and services in 396 of the 435 congressional districts."
"NASA will often highlight the fact that its SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft support aerospace suppliers. For example, this agency website details the number of suppliers in every US state and says, 'Men and women in all 50 states are hard at work building NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems to support missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.' There are 106 suppliers in Alabama, alone, according to NASA's site."
What advancements have its current flagship program (SLS) produced? Maybe they do produce some but congress clearly wants them to produce jobs not anything else.
Have you noticed that most critics aren't complaining about all of NASA, but mainly about SLS/Orion?
On reddit, what usually happens is that SLS defenders try to misrepresent attacks on SLS as an attack on all of NASA, parenthood, and apple pie. And so the world turns.
... it's pretty clear that the person who said that is unaware of the full scope of NASA's programs. But that's not the person you replied to. You replied to someone specifically criticizing SLS.
There's a logical train here, that I think you're attempting to work around.
1. Nasa is a jobs program
2. A jobs program that produces good tech?
3. Yeah, but what did SLS produce?
4. You know that SLS is not NASA (is what I should have said). But I actually said was close enough.
3 makes zero sense unless the poster believes NASA ~= SLS.
I find it fun that we're saying the same thing (NASA != SLS), yet here we are arguing.
Given that this was all different people, I'm not sure why you chose to interpret #3 as not knowing that NASA != SLS. As I said, critics focus on SLS. I could easily have made statement 3, and I work at an org with plenty of NASA funding for non-jobs-program projects.
And if I were to go out on a limb, I suspect if you asked person 1 what they were mad about, it's probably the human spaceflight program, not science.
Excuse me, I am quite aware of the scope of NASA's programs. Perhaps you are unaware of the politicking that's surrounded the space program since its inception and the longstanding history of NASA as a pork funnel.
None of that is a disparagement of the scientific research NASA does. But for congress, the value is a way to send money home.
That's the point. Specifically, the point is to pay for aerospace jobs if we want to compete in the aerospace market. Nasa launch contracts are the carrot for companies like spacex and others to get in the market. Various contracts keep a larger pool of engineers in the market
The idea of paying for aerospace jobs lead to steady losses in the aerospace market, until deeply capitalistic (in a sense) SpaceX came and lowered costs.
Once again: the idea that USA would keep competing on international aerospace market of launch services wasn't working before SpaceX started launching Falcon-9. Maybe the market losses are because of paying for aerospace jobs, or maybe it's just a coincidence, but USA was practically pushed out from the market, until - heavily vertically integrated - SpaceX put the launch price on their website.
I think the idea of paying for aerospace jobs in this way doesn't work.
I'm not talking about NASA headcount, I am talking about NASA contracts which support private sector companies and aerospace engineers.
The USA wants to maintain the domestic capability to for launches, and this means funding technology and expertise. If you don't award contracts domestically, in 10-20 years the capability is gone. No domestic contracts => no jobs => no grads => no rocket engineers.
NASA's model has always been to award contracts to the private sector companies. This is why you have SpaceX, Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed launch capabilities.
>I think the idea of paying for aerospace jobs in this way doesn't work.
I'm not sure what you mean by paying for aerospace jobs. NASA funded private sector manufacturers before and continues to fund it now.
I agree the the US manufacturers were ripe for disruption, and SpaceX did a great job of doing just that. However, the entire market and jobs exist to chase these government contracts. Do you think that SpaceX would exist if it wasn't for NASA and DOD launch contracts? I don't.
Yes, I think we talk about different things. Main focus of criticism of alt-space, a.k.a new private space community is cost-plus schemas of payments, which encourage increases in costs. The big difference of SpaceX was offering a "function" for sale - there is a launch capability, which has price N dollars per launch or M dollars per kilogram on LEO, and NASA can take it or not.
This way the idea that all or many congressional districts should participate in NASA contracts - because then those congressmen support increasing NASA's budgets - goes out the window. Now congressmen - and congresswomen, of course - can judge NASA in terms of space progress vs. money spent, not in terms of distribution of money to jobs in their districts. From this point of view, your question is irrelevant - no, it wouldn't, as after forth launch Falcon-1 SpaceX didn't have funds to continue, and NASA helped, but that doesn't mean NASA doesn't have an ineffective policy.
Sure compared to those same scientists and engineers doing subsistence farming or something as an alternative. But compared to working elsewhere in society as scientists and engineers it's not so obvious what an alternative world would look like. There's always a hidden cost.
Launch technology isn't the only thing space research and exploration is about.
It's an important one for sure! But it's just not true to say NASA hasn't accomplished amazing stuff in the last decades with the funds and focus they're allocated.
Does NASA have mulitiple programs, some of which are more effective than others? Hint: SLS/Orion is not Planetary Sciences is not Earth Sciences is not Aeronautics is not Astronomy.
Hell no. Space exploration and expansion should absolutely NOT be in the hands of corporations but an government funded entity that contracts out work as we have now. If every government program should be profitable.
Space exploration and expansion shouldn’t be in the hands of the government in the first place. Let the private sector figure out how to do it, pay for it, and profit on it.
NASA is one of the biggest bangs (literally) for the taxpayer buck in the entire US federal budget. There are countless other agencies I'd be scrapping long before even thinking about scrapping NASA.
If you’re a member of Congress running for re-election, what’s a better sales pitch? “I voted for a slightly more cost-effective space program, which saved taxpayer dollars in a way that is almost completely disconnected from how much tax you have to pay”? Or, “I created jobs in this district by voting to award a federal contract to <LOCAL_SUBCONTRACTOR>“?
I don't think SpaceX would be as strong if not that early NASA funding. "SpaceX contracted with the US government for a portion of the development funding for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, which uses a modified version of the Merlin rocket engine." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
So by your thinking, they could have only invested in old-school-reliable-expensive rocket companies, because less risk is involved...
So funding a space company that doesn't yet have required capability but can be helped to get there - is not dumb.
The point is that Blue Origin isn't going to have anything ready by 2023 which is the year the crewed Artemis 2 mission should get the go. They might not be vaporware, but they're still several years behind SpaceX.
It's telling that Bezos has chosen to take this fight to Washington DC - his only real hope is to kneecap SpaceX politically. It's not that Blue Origin lacks engineering know-how, it's that they brought in a ULA executive to run things and so he's running the ULA playbook - maximize profits by delaying things indefinitely to keep that taxpayer money flowing. Blue Origin wants SpaceX to play by its rules and slow to a crawl so they can compete. Elon Musk, for all his faults, wants to accomplish something and is personally driving things to get that done and is unwilling to settle for vanity wins and big talk to impress fellow billionaires at Davos. Unless Jeff can convince Elon to focus on salad fights over how high is up I'd say this competition is long over.
Reminds me of a quote from the WeWork documentary:
"When you can land two rockets concurrently on barges and you smoke pot, you're seen as 'quirky and likeable'. When you don't go public and your investors lose money, all of a sudden they decide that smoking pot is a criminal activity."
[1:30:30]
Everything SpaceX is successfully launching today was similarly delayed during development. It's too early to write off Blue Origin, especially since Bezos just got involved in it full time.
>They have some achievements to show. New Shepard was the first to land vertically. That's not nothing.
Sorry, but the McDonnell Douglas DC-X did the rocket straight up & down vertical landing in 1993. New Shepard frankly wasn't particularly different. It went higher and longer sure, but for orbital rocketry the challenge isn't height so much as speed and everything that comes with that. The Falcon 9 flight 20 at the end of 2015 that marked its first landing was a vastly bigger achievement given that it was an orbital class rocket booster. It was going much, much faster and had to descend on a much more complicated arc through the atmosphere. And it pathfinded for actual rapid reuse, which is a whole different set of skills. That New Shepard did a suborbital jump a mere one month earlier 2015 honestly just isn't great.
Since then, F9 has done over 100 more flights, to orbit, including crewed ones, and set ever growing records on cadence, reuse of boosters and refurb speed, satellite launch records, etc. NS has done... what? 5 test flights over 6 years? Then that silly little PR stunt? It's ludicrous. And it's long since stopped serving any useful purpose in terms of learning because it avoids so many of the true challenges in going orbital which involve 9+km/s of delta-v.
The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos. What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design. It was a massive display of faith in his engineering team.
Musk didn't do that. Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
As for the BO rocket being totally automated, that was the original intent of the Mercury missions, until the astronauts objected. Nobody called them joyriders or ludicrous.
One pilot died, the other bailed out successfully.
Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.
It didn't have to have manual controls, and in fact the fatal accident was caused by moving the wrong control.
Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.
> most boring
Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.
Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.
> Only because of resources limitation in the ‘60s.
Doesn't matter what the excuses were. It was supposed to work, it failed, and Armstrong took over and saved the mission.
> Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs
Most every software bug today, once rooted out, looks like a mistake only an incompetent programmer would make. Except the best programmers make these mistakes, because humans are fallible.
If I recall correctly, SpaceX had some unintended disassemblies from software problems, too.
SpaceX had no RUD or any problem whatsoever because of software during the commercial crew test missions.
Which RUD caused by a software bug are you referring to?
I honestly think you have it backwards: the media has been very kind to both Bezos and Branson, particularly the latter. This isn't surprising because the media doesn't really get orbital dynamics any more than they get most technical topics. Nevertheless a lot of them act as if Branson's and Bezos' flight were some big technical achievements or progress forward, as if they can just evolve the designs around the current limitations.
They cannot. Hybrid engines have garbage ISP, the entire design of the Unity is completely worthless for high speed period let alone reentry, every $ spent on it is pointless beyond a quick joyride that will relatively soon be obsoleted by real space tourism. NS is at least vaguely sort of more useful for BO, it has a hydrolox engine so it's not doing anything for them on that front but they got to work on their landing a bit somewhat more easily.
But the value of space comes from actually getting to orbit and then beyond, and that's a fantastically more difficult problem due to the delta-v needed, the rocket equation, our material science, etc. SpaceX's approach of focusing on the real hard problem which delivers serious revenue and opportunity then working backwards on economics, always with focus on orbit as their lodestone, has clearly been much more effective. BO is older than SpaceX and has yet to even once get to orbit or deal with reentry. At all. It's hard not to look at so much of NS and just see such a waste of years and dollars.
>What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design.
I guess? It had been flown and landed multiple times and it had a lot of margin to work with since it's just a big sounding rocket. They did a hyperconservative work-on-the-first-launch Old Space development process.
>Musk didn't do that.
You think Musk wasn't puckered launching 6 astronauts and tens of billions of dollars worth of other people's precious cargo to space? Musk didn't do that because it wouldn't have proved anything and been a pure waste and distraction from the actual serious mission.
>Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
Branson is a daredevil and that design is garbage on a host of levels.
>As for the BO rocket being totally automated
So is Dragon 2. So will Starship. That's normal and good, it's manual that's bad. But it's also not a special achievement that justified 6 years after first launch and landing.
The public has been primed too much by the media to literally spew hate like there is no tomorrow for certain individuals. On the right wing - it is Bill Gates, on the left wing it is Bezos/Elon. They got their clicks and ad revenue.
Y'all might be interested that the Air Force used to take the chief mechanic along for the check ride after an overhaul. It wasn't policy, but it happened a lot. It ensured the airplanes got overhauled properly.
It's a good thing. I've also always been happy to fly on a 757. (I worked on the design of flight critical parts for it.)
Blue Origin arguably did the first verticals landing from “space” as defined by 100km of altitude in 2015. Though the lunar lander is perhaps the more famous vertical landing from space in 1969, following earlier soft landings like Luna 9 1966, and a lot of earlier VTVL rocket research at the time.
SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015. I don’t mean to dump on Blue Origin but their achievements are really just around the definition of space as 100km which is completely arbitrary, their effectively just publicity stunts.
It’s possible that Blue Origin will create a useful system for space exploration, but based on past progress their years if not decades from that point.
> SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015
I'm not sure how important/big the difference is, but IIRC spaceX only lands boosters that never actually reach orbital velocity. They help boost things into orbital velocity, sure, but the things that land under powered flight never actually reach orbital velocity, right?
I'm aware that the crew dragon was supposed to do this, but AFAIK it never has.
It's still a dramatically different and faster trajectory than straight up-and-down. There's a reason SpaceX has drone ships out in the middle of the ocean -- they travel laterally hundreds of miles.
Yes, but what I was getting at was the safety factor. As part of the first stage of an orbital rocket SpaceX was stuck with a ~20% safety factor if they wanted to get significant cargo to orbit, where Blue Origin could seriously over engineer the rocket without any obvious problems.
I am not saying they fudged things or that it was easy, just that it wasn’t the kind of litmus test you see on an actual orbital rocket.
The first stage is far from orbital velocities when it reaches MECO and starts down, even though I strongly agree with you: SpaceX is in an entire other league.
> if it were looking like a failure, ULA would have dropped them a long time ago
That seems to be assuming that they have a choice. Given the fuel difference between AR-1 and BE-4, they've been committed to BE-4 for quite some time, no matter how much progress BO is doing (or not doing) on BE-4.
Sure, if that probe's rather crude landing system is enough for you, suit yourself with Luna 9. However, the LM landed on its legs in one piece, just like DC-X, New Shepard, Grasshopper, and F9 first stage did later.
I think it’s fair to classify Luna 9’s landing as soft because at 14 mph it was survivable, though other landers where softer. LM was an achievement not just because humans, but also because it could take off again without maintenance.
Bezos was never a scientist, engineer or dreamer. He is an entrepreneur, business savvy guy. Its about the dollar for him (which I'm not saying is a bad thing), versus for Elon it is a dream/passion to get to Mars.
"While at Princeton, Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars and ran the campus chapter of “Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.” Through Blue Origin, which he has called his “most important work,” Bezos is developing detailed plans to realize O’Neill’s vision." - [0]
The kind of guy who saves The Expanse on a whim probably does have at least a hobbyist interest in space.
Elon was probably more invested earlier and was paying more attention to what was going on is for sure though. Im not convinced Bezos personal attention is going to do much to help his space company though. Nothing about him seems like it would help other than his wealth. And he hasnt shown a willingness to throw a significant part of his fortune into his space venture. Nothing about this strikes me as anything more than what is a hobby that one of the richest persons in the world is passionate about
No, it wasn’t.
Blue origin was founded two years before SpaceX.
SpaceX in the meantime managed to create the first ever reusable commercial rocket, the first ever reusable heavy launch vehicle.
The first ever commercial manned flight for the ISS.
And it’s well on track to perform an orbital test in the next month or two with a fully reusable rocket that is using a full flow engine.
Seriously, you are trying to compare an Australopithecus climbing a tree with an Homo sapiens building nuclear weapons.
Yes and yes. I expect Blue Origin are playing catch up with star ship. New Glenn could only self land the booster, not the upper stage. There's no way that could compete with star ship, it almost doesn't compete with falcon heavy.
That is like saying that the meek shall inherit the earth - or what is left of it when the bold have taken all they wanted. Slow and steady is just that, slow. There is a place for it, e.g. when refining an established practice like mining or internal combustion engines. Commercial space exploration is a place where rapid advances can be made by visionary explorers, only once you can buy an off-the-shelf space minivan for the whole family the time has come for 'slow and steady'.
Can you give a citation on that? I’ve seen rather, well, creative interpretations of Bible verses online before, and I’m wondering if the text actually supports this translation.
From them "This difficult-to-translate root (pra-) means more than "meek." Biblical meekness is not weakness but rather refers to exercising God's strength under His control – i.e. demonstrating power without undue harshness."
This is not really a race, as it does not have a well-defined endpoint. Reaching the orbit is just a starting step for some other activity and former champions may fall by the wayside as decades go by.
Soviets were once in the lead very clearly, Roskosmos lost that edge a long time ago.
Not if it's a 100m or 200m sprint. Try that and you'll finish dead last.
If SpaceX had gone with slow and steady, it would have merely given their monopolistic competition - competition particularly well connected in DC - that much more time to try to wipe them out using their preferred approach of avoiding competition via government protection.
Blue Origin may yet make something of itself via slow and steady pacing (which Bezos can afford), however it's not winning the race.
Blue Origin is doing non-launch things. They are working on a lander system and studying lunar mission concepts at a level of seriousness that does deserve some respect.
Maybe BO will one day actually do something noteworthy on their own, rather than trying to prevent SpaceX from moving ahead because they actually do things. Bezos also recently tried to block Starlink's modified expansion plans[1] saying it was unfair to his conceptual Project Kuiper (conceptual because it doesn't yet physically exist vs Starlink which is in beta service and expanding). Amazon isn't even using BO to launch their own Project Kuipers first satellites (they're going to use ULA)[2]. That says a lot.
> Amazon did not say when the first launch will occur, but the company said it had contracted with United Launch Alliance for nine launches to begin building out its constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit.
Dealing with and relying on ULA will be the Bezos' space endeavors undoing. Similarly as if Russians agreed to the original Musk idea back then - there wouldn't be SpaceX today.
Technically going hydrogen way Bezos cornered himself - the turbine would be extremely expensive and reliability is an issue, and by not doing it so far they are very limited by expander and tap-off.
> Maybe BO will one day actually do something noteworthy on their own, rather than trying to prevent SpaceX from moving ahead because they actually do things.
You don't consider being the first to successfully launch and land a VTOL booster noteworthy [1]?
> first to successfully launch and land a VTOL booster
They were not the first the launch and land a VTOL booster. According to the article it was the first VTOL booster to fly above the Karman line and then land safely. But SpaceX had a flying VTOL booster in 2012-2013. [1]
Actually it's amazing because Blue Origin made that flight in 2015, and five years later they made basically the same flight but with people in it. Meanwhile SpaceX nailed orbital landing, is reusing orbital boosters like crazy, released the Falcon Heavy, and has made remarkable progress on the Mars Rocket. And BO still hasn't made orbit.
Multiple providers has been the “name of the game” for a long time now, so it’s not surprising that Blue Origin or ULA got caught off guard. They had to know this Day was coming, but maybe not so quickly.
This should be a wake up call to established space players: the days of cost-plus contracts, multiple bid winners, and endless cost and time overruns - are over. There’s no purpose to those anymore.
For the past fifty years this all made sense: going to space was hard, and the financial risks were astronomical. This decision highlights how much progress we’ve made toward establishing a “space economy”. Space has been de-risked enough that the corporations can take on the (previously fatal) risk of a fixed-price contract. De-risked enough that the government is reasonably certain of achieving a strategic objective with a single provider.
BO, ULA, et. al - the game just changed. Adapt, or die.
Between this and JEDI I get the impression Jeff feels he simply deserves things, regardless of the established protocols which decide he does not, and he’s more than willing to take the government to court to prove it.
Maybe that’s just the kind of attitude it takes to be the richest person alive, but it definitely rubs me the wrong way.
Not like he cares who it rubs or in which way, of course.
Anyone has insight into what BO's problems are? I heard that they had leadership problems but otherwise a top notch staff. People love to flame Jeff Bezos but if you look at his management of Amazon, I wouldn't dismiss him casually with regard to BO. He might not have the engineering chops of Musk but I'm sure he can put the right leadership in place to turn this ship around, now that he'll be focusing on this full time.
The industry needs a 2nd new generation provider. I don't harbour any fuzzy feelings for Bezos but I do hope BO will get somewhere, or that another company will. Perhaps RocketLab or Relativity Space?
Brad Stone's newest book about Amazon goes into it. In short, Bezos hired leadership poorly. Those hires led to a culture akin to a legacy rocket company like ULA.
You know the meme about devs going to Google to rest and vest? That's the reputation Blue Origin has in the space industry according to Stone.
This, exactly. They hired the aerospace equivalent of IBM and Oracle executives to manage the company, and Bezos doesn't have the technical expertise to distinguish why this is bad. BO has a lot of former SpaceXers as junior/midlevel engineers who have moved on from "hustling" in their twenties under Musk, and now want to start families, and have lives, in Seattle.
Their problem was the Bezos hired a some Old Space guy as a CEO and his goal was to 'turn BlueOrigin into a series space company that can win government contract' and by that he means turning it into a traditional Old Space company.
But the way the new world works, that approach loses out against SpaceX.
And unlike the real Old Space companies BlueOrigin doesn't have lots of military contract or a airplane business to actually make money.
Talking to some friends who work at Blue Origin, one of the ways they compete for talent from SpaceX is by promoting a healthier, sustainable work culture.
While this is great for individuals, it also attracts a lot of people looking to coast. And of course the highly motivated, intelligent people who are willing to put in more time to make cool shit happen aren't going to settle for a distant runner up.
I suppose the real question is, will the SpaceX hare or the Blue Origin tortoise win the race in the long run. SpaceX might make amazing strides quickly, but if they burn out their workforce and fail to keep talent long term, they might suffer in coming years and decades.
Which works to get you started fast, but something as complicated as rockets requires a lot of institutional knowledge. And if you lose too many employees too fast, you'll start to suffer from institutional alsheimers.
SpaceX has two tried and tested orbital delivery systems and is making its typical iterate-and-explosions progress on a third. It is basically the only company doing this.
The idea NASA would plunk down money for imaginary spaceships is silly. They have their own one of those already.
Well, if $3 billion is all it costs to send someone to the moon why doesn't he do it himself instead of asking NASA to buy his services? Probably NASA probably has some other hardware, know-how, and people that Blue Origins doesn't. But how much would that cost? Another 10 billion? 30 billion? Bezos has plenty to spare for that too.
Bezos didn't get to where he is today by spending his own money. Why do that when you can spend tax payer's money instead, and keep on amassing his immense fortune.
I was recently watching Kal Penn's "The Giant Beast That is The Global Economy", and the episode that covers the "Rent Seeking" behavior of large, entrenched, companies, rings fairly close to the kind of play Bezos was pulling out - maybe he's become too acclimated to the book and retail business.
So there have been two stories for me recently that just show how important and powerful leadership is. Perhaps more importantly, it seems like the culture that develops with bad or absent leadership can be really hard to correct to the point where it seems like cleaning house and starting over is the only way forward.
The first is obviously Blue Origin. Some important points:
- SpaceX was founded in 2002. Blue Origin in 2000;
- Blue Origin may have achieved a vertical landing first but it was for a rocket that basically went straight up and came straight down as opposed to going near-orbital speeds (Mach 30), which is unquestionably much more technically challenging;
- While SpaceX had delays in shipping (eg Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon) the track record of the Falcon 9 at this point is undeniable;
- Bezos made an extremely odd (to me) choice for leader of Blue Origin: the former CEO of Honeywell (to the point that I've read insiders call the company "Blue Honeywell"). The result seems to be that things are done incredibly slowly and the delays keep piling up. I wonder if the company is now so risk-averse they'd rather do nothing than risk doing something that will fail. Now compare that to SpaceX's Starship prototypes.
Whatever magic touch Bezos has hasn't rubbed off on Blue Origin and I honestly think they're at risk of sliding into irrelevance.
So the second example is of course (Activision) Blizzard. We actually have a good data point in how another company, Square Enix, handles Final Fantasy XIV (vs Blizzard and World of Warcraft). Some interesting points:
- Blizzard doesn't engage with the WoW community. Compare this to Square Enix explaining the issues and timelines for bringing new servers online to alleviate queues;
- It seems like Square Enix is still player-focused whereas all of Activision is clearly financially-focused at this point;
- The horrific allegations against Blizzard fit into a narrative that Blizzard leadership and employees disdain their audience and almost certainly don't even play their own game;
I could go on.
So the reason I bring this up in the context of Blue Origin is because to me there's some striking similarities here. Blizzard is run by non-gamers. Blue Origin is run by Wall Street financial types not rocket men (or even engineers). Boeing is another data point in how horribly that can go wrong.
A fish rots from the head they say. If leaders want to claim credit and get the rewards for good performance (eg Bobby Kotick's $150m bonus) then the buck stops with them with regards to the culture they've created or allowed to fester on their watch.
But just virtue signaling to the market by replacing the head of the company isn't enough at this point (in either case). The fish doesn't reverse the rot when the head is cut off. It's going to take cleaning house to save Blue Origin (or Blizzard).
It's not like they don't already have all the money they'd ever need or could use, and wouldn't the world be better off if they worked together than against each other?
Having some competition is probably the best way to make space companies work efficiently, cheaply, and reliably, so these two egomaniacs fighting it out in a space race might be the best possible thing for progress in the industry.
They're no more egomaniacs than, say, whoever wins a gold medal at the Olympics. You've got to be an egomaniac to think one deserves to be the fastest runner in the world, a completely pointless honor, but we celebrate them anyway.
Pointless as in I, an old man and an uncoordinated complete failure at athletics, can ride my bike faster than any of them can run.
Credit always goes to the leader. Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.
>Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened.
Anyone with the means could have founded Blue Origin, hired the same people, and gotten the same result. Jeff Bezos' money was necessary to the company's success, he was not.
>Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.
Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time. And, again, they do the actual work.
> Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time.
Society does not. It's always "Bob won Olympic gold!" Nobody else is mentioned.
> And, again, they do the actual work.
Um, sacrificing and earning money so your child can pursue Olympic dreams is actual work. The full time coach for them does actual work. (There's a reason families will hire the best coaches available for $$$.) The sports doctors who optimize their health and manage their inevitable injuries do actual work. Their nutritionists do actual work.
There's no such thing as an Olympic athlete who did all the work, not even close.
Would it be better if C, Java and Rust were integrated into a single überlanguage with one central committee to drive further development?
From a layman's perspective, an idea like that would make superficial sense; they are all programming languages, after all. From a programmer's perspective, that would be a nightmare.
I think the companies are so far apart that extensive technical cooperation would slow them both down. Maybe they could share a weather service or even a drone ship fleet for landings, but not the core products and their parts.
> Would it be better if C, Java and Rust were integrated into a single überlanguage with one central committee to drive further development?
Yes!
They need different runtimes, but there's a lot of infractructure they could have been reusing. It's a shame we have a couple dozen language silos that have to reinvent everything.
Please note that the Raku Programming Language currently has 3 backends (MoarVM, JVM and Javascript) and that Parrot was dropped as a backend target in 2015.
Space is expensive. Bezos is pumping 1 billion per year into the company and the blue origin proposal was for 13 billion. Even for Bezos that's not chump change.
Too much money might be part of Blue Origin's problem to deliver. SpaceX did not have the luxury to take ages, they had to build a working rocket to be able make money or die otherwise.
I can only recommend Eric Berger's excellent book "Liftoff" to gain insights into SpaceX' way of working to get the Falcon 1 rocket off the ground and eventually into orbit. I cannot imagine Blue Origin having operated in a similar way at any point in their history.
I'm not so sure, though. I think there's still an argument to be made for multiple approaches and different technology, which you're not likely to get if everyone works together. I'm not sure that "avoiding a monoculture" is important for this sort of thing, but maybe it can't hurt?
Another problem when multiple independent orgs pool resources and work together is you either end up with design-by-committee (which leads to overengineering and extra expense, both of which are anti-goals for SpaceX and BO), or deadlock when the parties can't agree. And you'd better believe personalities like Musk and Bezos would clash a lot if they ever did a joint venture on something.
People like to romanticize market competition as a epic battle of great minds and ideas that we all benefit from... but, in all honestly, it allows for comparative testing of diverse ideas while keeping pricing honest. Cooperation might lower the "cost" of producing similar products but, then we are producing similar products. A major goal of competition is to prevent us from putting all our eggs in one basket.
I mean what if all the space companies decided to use one company's rocket engine and they failed to delivery...
They have certainly pushed the world. Whether the direction we're going is 'forward' is extremely debatable. It certainly might look that way from certain positions, but not all points of view agree, and there's no clear way to determine which should be privileged.
Exactly most of the complaints I find are simply out of jealousy of their accomplishments and the need for power among people who want to put limits on their achievements.
Can we revert back to its none of your business what they do?
So it's civil to engage in anti-competitive behavior which arguably sets back the progress of humanity ("pushing the world forward"), but not civil to use the word 'sociopath' in reference to such actions? I was always taught that actions speak louder than words.
This is an incredibly small minded perspective. Difficult challenges require new technologies, new processes and new ways of thinking. More specifically, technologies developed through the race to land on the moon (and space flight generally) are integral to almost every aspect of 'your' life and define what most of us consider human flourishing.
These companies are just trying to shoot rockets further then each other. They're not science pr research companies. We're not learning more about space and the universe thanks to the them.
But these companies (well, at least SpaceX) have their focus on making orbit cheap and sustainable, and pushing towards Mars colonization and asteroid mining. Those are engineering and logistics problems more than science problems, but I think they're very important.
Those are all ways to squander the Earth's limited resources while sounding forward thinking. Colonizing Mars will likely never happen, there is simply no upside: huge challenges, with no interesting resources. The Earth has plenty of space, we're limited by resources, and there are no interesting resources on Mars. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that we'll have a colony outside the solar system before a colony on Mars.
Asteroid mining is more plausible, but still extremely unlikely given our current technology. There are massive hurdles, and few things that would massively improve life on Earth - it's much more interesting from a profit perspective than a future of humanity perspective.
Musk's motivation, which he has expressed repeatedly, is to make humanity resilient to an event that makes Earth uninhabitable.
Whatever that event might be (asteroid impact, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, plague, whatever), I think the idea of having a second site of human habitation is not an unreasonable goal.
Which is not, as has sometimes been stated, "giving up on Earth and the rich moving to Mars" -- it's just an insurance policy.
The resources expended to achieve this are tiny. It's not a lot of money, and the consumables are ... literally drops in the ocean.
That's not to say that there aren't other problems that could be addressed using that money, but it's not really a question of either/or: humanity could very easily do both, should it choose to do so. It's just that Musk chooses to focus on this problem, and its solution. We're all certainly free to make a different choice ...
Mars is already uninhabitable, so what would we gain from moving to Mars? The Earth is not going to become as bad as Mars with any possible disaster smaller than a planetary collision.
Also, a Mars colony that could survive indefinitely if the Earth is wiped out is almost certainly impossible, given the extreme conditions on Mars' surface. We don't even know if there is enough water ice on Mars today to sustain a human city, nevermind the huge network of cities that would be required to produce all high tech products on Mars. Also, with no fossil fuels, it's very unlikely that you could launch rockets from a Mars colony entirely cut off from the Earth.
Then, you'll also be missing nitrogen, and probably a lot of other nutrients. Oxygen will be in short supply, as will Helium. And remember, every time you leak water or other gases into the atmosphere, you've likely lost them forever, since there is no closed cycle of water on Mars, and solar winds are constantly stripping away Mars' atmosphere.
Also, the cost of building a self sustaining colony on Mars is well above the GDP of the world many times over. It would be many times easier to establish a second global trade network on Earth, completely isolated from any existing trade hub. Imagine building chip fabs and growing enough crops for food and bioplastics in Antarctica, and now remeber that on Mars it's much colder, there is virtually no air, and you have to dig tunnels everwhere, since any sort of prolonged exposure to the surface would irradiate you. Oh, and make sure you do this without any dependence on fossil fuels, except perhaps a few tons every few months.
> Also, a Mars colony that could survive indefinitely if the Earth is wiped out is almost certainly impossible, given the extreme conditions on Mars' surface.
Let's say you have a Martian colony of 100,000 people. It is self-sufficient in basic goods but still relies on imports from Earth for many advanced goods. Something terrible happens, and imports from Earth are no longer possible. Those 100,000 people have a choice – find a way to make do with what they have, or die. I don't think we should underestimate human ingenuity in such circumstances. They'll lose access to a lot of highly advanced goods – for example, they probably won't have their own leading-edge semiconductor fabs – but they may be able to survive without them, using more basic goods to take their place.
> Then, you'll also be missing nitrogen
The atmosphere of Mars is around 2.8% nitrogen. There are likely to also be nitrate minerals in the Martian soil and rock.
> Oxygen will be in short supply
Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2. You can extract oxygen from CO2 by electrolysis. The MOXIE experiment on Perseverance has demonstrated this.
> and solar winds are constantly stripping away Mars' atmosphere
On human timescales (decades to millennia), Martian atmosphere lost to space isn't significant.
> Also, the cost of building a self sustaining colony on Mars is well above the GDP of the world many times over
I think Musk is going to try to establish a settlement on Mars, initially with tens of people, then hundreds, then thousands. And becoming fully self-sustaining is going to be their long-term goal. But I don't think actual full self-sustaining status is going to be achieved for several centuries.
> Those 100,000 people have a choice – find a way to make do with what they have, or die. I don't think we should underestimate human ingenuity in such circumstances. They'll lose access to a lot of highly advanced goods – for example, they probably won't have their own leading-edge semiconductor fabs – but they may be able to survive without them, using more basic goods to take their place.
The answer will be die. There is no way to survive on Mars for any period of time without access to high technology, you will be dependent on it for electricity, for water, for farming, for pressurized ventilation, for air recirculation, for robots that can work on the surface (e.g. To keep solar panels clean, or for any kind of construction on the surface), to dig tunnels through rock to expand as resources dry up, and to produce the majority of the more basic goods you need. 100k people is very little for a functioning isolated economy on Earth, on Mars it would be much more complicated.
> The atmosphere of Mars is around 2.8% nitrogen. There are likely to also be nitrate minerals in the Martian soil and rock.
The much denser atmosphere ON earth is 78% nitrogen (see also my next point for a comparison), there is plenty of nitrogen accumulated in the soil, and still it is one of the major factors limiting plant growth. Any nitrite deposits on Mars are likely to be contaminated with other toxic chemicals, like much of the Martian soil and probably much of the water ice.
> Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2. You can extract oxygen from CO2 by electrolysis. The MOXIE experiment on Perseverance has demonstrated this.
O2 is about 21% of the Earth's atmosphere.
Mars's atmosphere is less than 0.6% of the Earth's atmosphere, even at the ridiculously low Martian surface temperatures.
So even if you can convert CO2 to O2 with 100% efficiency, and even if Mars' atmosphere were 100% CO2, you would still only get 0.02 times the O2 you have on Earth.
This is extremely relevant not only for breathing, but because the only kinds of batteries we can imagine that have anything close to the power efficiency (Wh/kg) of fossil fuels utilize atmospheric oxygen to get most of the power.
> On human timescales (decades to millennia), Martian atmosphere lost to space isn't significant.
Fair enough, but it's still going to be impossible to recover water or helium or other gases we leak from Mars' rarefied atmosphere.
> I think Musk is going to try to establish a settlement on Mars, initially with tens of people, then hundreds, then thousands. And becoming fully self-sustaining is going to be their long-term goal. But I don't think actual full self-sustaining status is going to be achieved for several centuries.
I don't believe Musk will achieve anything more than tragically killing some volunteers on Mars. I also don't think a permanent self sustaining colony on Mars is actually possible or even desirable, for all of the reasons I listed, with any kind of foreseeable future tech (of course, paradigm changes in physics or chemistry could have completely unpredictable effects).
Edit to add: it's also important to remember that we do not know if humans can actually survive long term in 0.3g, or with what impact on their health. This will have to be tested on animals for years before actually attempting a human base.
Humans surviving long term off of Earth, I think, is still just a pipe dream and pure sci-fi. I agree with the idea, I think it is something humanity should attempt, but it is atleast 100 years too soon to even attempt.
It is like trying to build a space station in the 18th or 19th century.
What's wrong with trying now? (By "now" I mean, "in the next 20 years".) So long as nobody gets killed, if it fails, at least we can say we've tried. Trying now may bring forward the date at which it is actually feasible compared to putting off trying.
Even if people die–and they may–if they make a free and fully informed choice to sign up to something which may risk their lives, and they end up dying as a result – wasn't it their right to take that risk? There are a lot of people out there, who will view being one of the first humans to attempt to live on another planet something worth risking death for.
The problem is that it's a massive waste of resources, in terms of fossil fuels, production capacity, engineering talent, research talent. There are much more pressing and likely to be fruitful avenues of exploration. Launch or build telescopes to explore space, and engineer green energy and carbon capture solutions on Earth.
> The Earth has plenty of space, we're limited by resources, and there are no interesting resources on Mars
There are new discoveries on Earth even today, after hundreds of thousands year of mankind history. What make you think we have known all we need to know about Mars?
> I wouldn't be surprised to find out that we'll have a colony outside the solar system before a colony on Mars.
Mars is a 8 month journey. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is a 296,000 year journey using the current propulsion technology. We'll have colonized every single colonizable planets in the Solar System before then.
> it's much more interesting from a profit perspective than a future of humanity perspective.
Future of humanity depends on advance in science. Space exploration has always been a major force that drives science forward, asteroid mining included. So many examples to list, but just to pick one:
> Mars is a 8 month journey. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is a 296,000 year journey using the current propulsion technology. We'll have colonized every single colonizable planets in the Solar System before then.
Sure, but there is nothing on Mars. We have no reason to colonize places that lack even the basic resources necessary for life, or some precious resources that are scarce on Earth. At least with a different star system, you can imagine that in some far flung future we may need to escape the expansion of the Sun (though assuming humanity survives for some billions of years is indeed unlikely).
> Future of humanity depends on advance in science. Space exploration has always been a major force that drives science forward, asteroid mining included. So many examples to list, but just to pick one:
I'm not sure what the article was supposed to show, is spectroscopy a technology invented as part of the space program?
It's true that a product of the spave program are advanced materials and other factors that can be re-used on the Earth. But this is more a question of the vast resources which were invested in the space race, which could as well have been invested in Earth programs and would have likely yielded similar results.
Teh most valuable results of the space programs have been communications satellites and things like the hubble space telescope - which has done far more for scientific space exploration than the entire Apollo program, as have the Voyager probes, Mars rover etc.
Manned space exploration may still serve an inspirational purpose, though. I absolutely admit that the social and inspirational impact of seeing a human on the Moon/Mars/in outer space is hard to beat.
> Sure, but there is nothing on Mars. We have no reason to colonize places that lack even the basic resources necessary for life, or some precious resources that are scarce on Earth
You don't know what Mars can offer. Not without extensive exploration that can only be done effectively with human presence. We still don't fully understand Earth.
Human once couldn't survive on the desert. We might still not if we never explored it in the first place. Technologies or knowledge we take for granted today may never exist either. The same will happen with Mars. I don't know what the future hold thousands years from now. We may have terraformed it, human body may have adapted to Mars environment, or we may have found it indeed not suitable. We'll however have permanent presence on Mars, and we'll make major leap in science and technologies thanks to Mars exploration.
> I'm not sure what the article was supposed to show, is spectroscopy a technology invented as part of the space program?
You wondered the role of space exploration in the future of humanity. I reckon that our future lies in the advance of science. Spectroscopy would be much less developed without its application in astronomy.
> Teh most valuable results of the space programs have been communications satellites and things like the hubble space telescope - which has done far more for scientific space exploration than the entire Apollo program, as have the Voyager probes, Mars rover etc.
I'm not sure what points you're trying to make it here? some programs have more short term return than others? We are doing both, right? not only that, investment for something like communication satellite dwarf that for outer space programs.
What is the benefit of living on Mars, rather than a space based habitat that can attach to and mine asteroids or small moons for extra resources? Living in a "large" gravity well seems like all negatives to me in terms of expansion and resource extraction.
To be fair, living in 0g is even less plausible than living in 0.3g long term. In particular, there is a good chance that animals can't reproduce in 0g - those that have been tried have definitely been unable (including insects and chicken - there is still a chance mammals could).
You can spin for artificial gravity out in space though, which would be relatively simple to do provided you had any sort of space manufacturing capabilities.
It's not actually simple at all. You need a massive station to actually spin in such a way that humans don't get dizzy just by crouching (you need the acceleration to be almost constant for the ~1.5m difference between a person lying down and a person standing up). You also require lots of fuel to actually maintain this constant acceleration. The larger everything is, the more problems you have with shielding and energy expenditure. Any malfunction of the spinning mechanism is likely to be catastrophic, as suddenly losing 'gravity' is can easily cause massive damage if people are living without care for this constant possibility.
Not to mention, this would not feel like living on Earth - there are many effects of spinning that do not approximate gravity well, such as the fact that forces acting on you depend on the direction of your movement relative to the direction of spin.
How is star link moving the world forward. A small amount of rural people get faster internet is not a big deal. Satellite based internet already exists, it's not ground breaking. It's also at the expense of polluting the orobit around the earth. It's also just profit motivated, the intent isn't to make the world better, just sell more crap to more people
No. There is a potential user base of millions of people that have no access whatsoever to broadband.
And you can’t be serious in trying to compare starlink with the awful current geostationary satellite Internet offering.
Reusable rockets with massive cargo capacity is just one example. SpaceX equipped rockets will soon be able to carry around 100 tons of cargo to any place on earth in less than an hour; massive implications for disaster response.
Your whole perspective is a bit jarring. At any point in history - on the precipice of technological innovation - someone could have said 'Why go further, what's the point?' And that's just it, your limited ability to see the positive implications shouldn't define where progress goes. If we stopped at the horse-drawn carriage we would have missed the fire truck. If we stopped at Arpanet we would have missed every unforeseen positive associated with the internet today.
These companies aren't going to the moon, the US government is going to the moon using these companies. These companies are significantly lowering the cost of going into space and eventually going to Mars. That is moving the world forward.
Well there is the prospect of mining, refining, and construction in space and on the moon. While all that presents a whole slew of new challenges, it also has many huge benefits.
Rockets use like 90% of their fuel just getting their payload into off of Earth, refining fuels on the moon would make going any place else in the solar system super cheap. Building ships already in space would allow much lighter designs and less constricted spaces as it doesn't have to survive an external atmosphere and intense winds. It also makes asteroid capturing and mining feasible, currently we would need an almost perfectly ideal asteroid to capture because we can't get that much fuel up into space to push an asteroid around much at all. We open up tons of potential candidates if we can make even small amounts of fuel off of Earth.
Capture even a small platinum asteroid and nudge it into a collision course with Antarctica and you just made platinum stupid cheap which has a bazillion amazing uses but currently costs ridiculous amounts of money. It would be worth more than the entirety of all space programs on Earth combined, just to do it once.
Antarctica is a fragile environment, no way we are going on purpose slam an asteroid into it so we can continue to pollute our planet. This isn't realistic at all
It isn't like anybody is going to really stop you from living there. There are multiple land disputes over Antarctica and nobody has given a shit about those. Plus all the research stations which provide permanent habitat if someone wanted to keep shipping in supplies. You expect if you built a greenhouse or power generation source for indoor gardening that some government would spend the effort to send in troops or bomb you?
> You expect if you built a greenhouse or power generation source for indoor gardening that some government would spend the effort to send in troops or bomb you?
Well, if you are a US citizen, it is illegal to do that in Antarctica without a permit from the NSF (under the Antarctic Conservation Act). If you do it anyway, expect to be prosecuted, and the US will send agents to arrest you, even if you are in Antarctica. The FBI has made an arrest in Antarctica before (due to a fight at McMurdo Station).
All state parties to the Antarctic Treaty have similar laws, which (generally speaking) apply to their nationals worldwide.
If you were a sole citizen of a country which is not a party to the Antarctic Treaty – such as, Andorra or Afghanistan or Costa Rica or Cyprus or Ireland or Malta or Nigeria or Uzbekistan – then you'd have somewhat more chance of getting away with it. But surely your act would cause an international incident and they'd look at ways of shutting you down – the country of which you are citizen might suddenly decide to sign the Treaty as well, and shut you down. If the country of citizenship lacks the resources to shut you down, it may give permission to another country which does have those resources (e.g the US) to act against you on its behalf.
Elon Musk gave Jeff Bezos advice on building rockets, which Bezos flatly rejected. He also hoped that Bezos work on Blue Origin or otherwise Bezos will die before he gets anywhere.
If Bezos had been clever he would have just said 'oh you have rockets covered, amazing, let me invest any my company faces on in space infrastructure'.
With the billions and billions BlueOrigin spend they could have done amazing things in space. But instead they are building inferior version of rockets.
SpaceX is a functioning business that actually launches things into space at a lower cost than competitors.
Basically every successful company has a massive amount of ego behind it but the question is if they actually achieve anything tangible and, eventually, profitable.
"SpaceX is a functioning business that actually launches things into space at a lower cost than competitors."
This might actually lead to a greatly increased risk of creating an impenetrable field of space junk if the thousands more satellites that SpaceX launches collide in to one another.
If that happens expect SpaceX supporters to start singing a different tune.
SpaceX is launching its own internet satellites into low orbit so their satellites will only burn up in a decade without boosting. If your argument is "don't progress or change in any way because something bad might happen" then I suspect you'll find few takers on this site.
Collisions in LEO launch debris in all orbits, they are not limited to LEO. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX will turn out to be the reason we won't be able to explore space at all for a few hundred years.
> I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX will turn out to be the reason we won't be able to explore space at all for a few hundred years.
You seem to be referring to the Kessler syndrom. If that happened, it would not mean that we could not send probes to space anymore. It only becomes unviable to have satellites at the altitude of the debris field. We could still launch through it into higher orbits or onto interplanetary trajectories.
Any collision has a chance to knock things at orbital speeds in any direction. Anything launched away from the earth will be flung towards other orbits at something close to the 28,000km/h speeds of LEO.
Here is an article in Nature [0] discussing other risks, and mentioning that LEO is already in the early stages of Kessler Syndrome, while SpaceX alone is seeking to launch as many extra satellites as there are tracked pieces of debris already in orbit, with several other companies having similar plans. They also mention that debris in one orbit can cross to other orbits.
The links says that 3 pieces of debris attained higher stable orbits (ie: were still around 1-2 years later). There were 400 pieces of debris altogether. So not a large percentage.
Sure, but there also haven't yet been any major collisions in orbit. The risk will increase greatly if the huge number of satellites they proposed ever happens.
Won't be much of a war if Bezos can't get Blue Origin working. They can't operate at 5% of the speed of SpaceX or even 100% of the speed of SpaceX. They have to operate faster than SpaceX because SpaceX is in the lead.
There is no "current space race" as far as the US is concerned. Americans put a man on the moon fifty years ago, and no one is worried that China or Russia are going to "gain the high ground" and nuke Washington from orbit. No one cares.
I think you're underestimating things here. These days we have two new milestones: a crewed mission to Mars, and a permanent moon base. The fervor to get there is of course nowhere near what it was like in the 50s and 60s, and I probably wouldn't even call this a new "space race", but the US doesn't want to look weak in matters like this, especially with China's general technological and economic rise over the past decades.
I actually think the US hasn't made such a big deal about Mars and the moon because they're afraid China will latch onto that and make it a big deal, and more likely "win". So instead we focus on LEO, ISS, Mars rovers, probes, telescopes, etc. And if China does eventually build a permanent moon base or get a crew to Mars before the US does, the US can claim "cool, good job, but we didn't think it was all that important, so we didn't pursue it as hard as they did".
(Note that I believe that Musk pushing hard for Mars is not the same as the US pushing hard for Mars. The US seems more outwardly excited about Musk's ability to cheaply ferry things to and from orbit than anything much farther.)
small satellites, Internet access to remote areas (both military and commercial uses), space tourism, space habitats, competitors to GPS (both military and commercial uses) etc…
I think they count, never really checked specifically though and the karma system isn't exactly spelled out in detail anywhere. I'm pretty sure your downvotes to the parent and children of a comment you make don't count though - or at least I read that a few times while looking into the site initially.
I bumped your comment up, if you want to find out I should be able to un-up it once you check your current number... if I remember to refresh my comment history ;).
It's probably a good thing points aren't the main thing.
HA that's exactly the main reason I keep an eye on it up top to know if I should check my comments to respond to someone. I'm at 1631 right now but also a couple other recent comments in the mix. Though also with that lately I've noticed more random downvotes for what I don't see any reason for.
I can only speak for myself, but typically I'll make a single post and very rarely maybe a single followup to a later commenter.
If there is an "on topic" discussion, the back-and-forth can actually be very engaging and worthwhile. Some of these exchanges are really golden and is why I keep coming back to HN. However, these high value interactions tend to be rare.
Unfortunately, many discussions here tend to be fairly low value. Especially those topics that are prone to draw emotional responses from people that are arguably no more qualified to comment other than they feel strongly about the topic (and, yes, guilty as charged). In these cases, back and forth between the already committed serves little purpose and just adds stress to life. I think by simply stating your position and maybe why you think it, anyone really interested will know by that single expression that 1) there are contrary points of view, and 2) it might inspire the undecided to look into matters and draw their own conclusions... and do so with better information than is available from comments here.
Blue Origin makes Bezos look like a sad little boy that wants to fit in with he big boys but fails miserably. BO feels like a cheap SpaceX knock-off. His ride over the Karman line (which they tried to point out as the border to to space so bad on their channels) really convinced me of that. Bezos lacks a vision for space, it's just a hobby for him and he fails at executing the Amazon playbook there.
Just keep in mind that there are regular engineers like any of us working at Blue Origin and giving their best to achieve something, make a living and tackle really hard problems.
Some viewpoints expressed on HN feel like social media fed hatred, people often forget that there is a massive army of brilliant people doing stuff that most engineers would dream of. There are Facebook/Google engineers working on advertisement tech and we generally don't scorn at them. Adtech is far more "uncool" than space exploration.
I say kudos to Blue Origin to lift a building sized socket up to space with humans in it.
I agree that the current fanboi bucketing on Blue Origin is dumb, herd-mentality, kicking-the-weakest, bs. People need to grow up.
I think it's genuinely interesting to compare two well-funded, privately-led space companies and their results. What is it that has allowed one to make such substantially better progress than the other?
It's clear that SpaceX is a tough place to work, and Musk has very high expectations that go well beyond a hard-worked 9-5 5 days a week. That said, Amazon is not an easy place to work either ... so is Blue Origin a driven workplace culture?
Perhaps it's just that BO got distracted by the sub-orbital hop goal, and should have ditched that (like SpaceX and the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5) and just gone straight into New Glenn? There's something to be said for aiming high.
Perhaps it's just bad luck? BE3 seems ok, but BE4 appears to have some issues. Maybe SpaceX got lucky with Raptor? Or perhaps the difference is just the staff -- one good hire could be the difference between the fairly quick success of Raptor vs. the delays with BE4?
Ironic as it is, I will give Musk some credit for keeping his ego out of the cockpit. Not that he's short of ego, but (so far) he's resisted the urge to launch himself.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that a culture of eccentricity is a hard-to-quantify edge for any company in the space industry. Amazon certainly seems like a demanding place to work, but (and this could be an outsider's misperception but even that matters) I associate it more with consistency than celebrating outliers.
Okay poor wording on my side. Obviously there are talented and great engineers working at BO, after all they successfully launched humans into space. However, the overall vision is lacking and this is Bezos' fault. He behaves like a child. This NASA contract thing right here is an example of that. It's just unprofessional.
Where is the BE-4 engine? Delayed, again and again. New Glenn, the rocket that could actually go into orbit? Same. So far their only functioning hardware (New Shephard) is, in effect, a glorified amusement park ride.
Considering that SpaceX has actually made it to orbit multiple times, any rational actor would clearly choose SpaceX over BO.