Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX • Hacker News Board

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#141

Post by Meandering » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #86

kelnos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

"you'd better believe personalities like Musk and Bezos would clash a lot if they ever did a joint venture on something" If they clash a lot it's proof they're not good at cooperating. So maybe the answer is that Musk and Bezos are good at competing, but not good at cooperating. That doesn't mean that cooperation is a losing strategy, but just that one has to be good at cooperating in order to succeed at it.

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...

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#142

Post by trhway » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

cronix wrote: post #137

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…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#143

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #128

xoa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> silly little PR stunt 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,…

Personally, though, I would have taken with me as passengers the chief mechanic and the chief engineer, just to ensure the rocket works well!

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#144

Post by relativ575 » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

mattr47 wrote: post #104

paxys wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

He's always been a big space nerd.

"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]

[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/04/16/documentary-featur...

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#145

Post by errantspark » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #128

xoa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> silly little PR stunt 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,…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#146

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

errantspark wrote: post #145

WalterBright wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silly little PR stunt 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,…

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…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#147

Post by __d » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #59

dna_polymerase wrote: post #12

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 advertise…

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.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#148

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

elif wrote: post #129

usehackernews wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BO didn’t want to replace SpaceX. That’s not what this is about. BO said historically NASA gives contracts to multiple companies, and BO wanted funding too (in addition to SpaceX. BO “argued that the agency was required to make multiple awards" because it had previously stated a preference for multiple awards”

BO wanted 10B compared to SpaceX's 2.7B. They also got court injunctions preventing SpaceX from starting it's program, kinda deflating your whole 'just wanted to play along' narrative

[deleted]

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#149

Post by voidfunc » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

Arrath wrote: post #99

meepmorp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Congress would be dumb to pick a new horse now. You're not optimizing for the same outcomes as Congress. NASA is a jobs agency.

A 'jobs agency' that has produced a whole lot of technical advancements, maybe.

NASA is a taxpayer boondoggle. The faster we can transition wasting tax dollars on it to the private sector and dismantle the agency the better.

Re: Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

#150

Post by Jcowell » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:02 PM UTC

voidfunc wrote: post #149

Arrath wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'jobs agency' that has produced a whole lot of technical advancements, maybe.

NASA is a taxpayer boondoggle. The faster we can transition wasting tax dollars on it to the private sector and dismantle the agency the better.

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.