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

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.

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.

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.

I'm not blaming the authors. It's not any one language's responsibility to make tooling stacks modular and interoperable.