Maybe Electron and Virgin Orbit are in the race, but these hop 100km (or 80!) up and about 5 miles downrange are nowhere near the same league.
Especially since blue origin has a design that can scale up quickly, as SpaceX did with falcon 1 to 9
For myriad reasons Blue can't just "scale up quickly" in any meaningful way from NS to New Glenn, hence why it's going to take them 8+ years between the first NS and first NG launches. Being realistic about this is not cynical and negative.
Certainly applies to the operational launches of all their rocket vehicles, however they've also done suborbital test flights with with Grasshopper, F9R, Starhopper, Starship (and maybe Super Heavy soon as well depending on if they do a sub-orbital with that first).
The important difference is that SpaceX has never considered the Karman line as a target in its own right (somewhat rightly, its only value is for "whelming" space tourism).
So you're saying that after say the initial 100 launches
Launch 100-199 would have 5 failures
Launch 200-299 would have 7 failures
Launch 300-399 would have 10 failures
Why?
Generally doing more of something reduces the cost per something. Why do you think the inverse will hold with spacex?
You need the demand to make that worthwhile though.
Bezos is smart and talented... but it's hard to overcome a lead like that.
Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.
Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.
https://twitter.com/Charly923407591/status/14162863209561210...
Nation states -> wealthy bigco -> billionare's pet project -> ????? -> normal people
(some steps omitted for brevity)
Even in smaller time frames, I read somewhere that one of Bezos' plans is to move manufacturing into space.
And if/when we do get colonies on other planets and moons, some people would want to live there.
In, what, five billion years? I’m not sure we need Bezos to be focusing all his money on that timeframe.
I am also sure that you could do cool sports events on the moon or a big space station.
The wealthy early adopters provide the capital to refine and scale up the industry to make it practical and affordable for less wealthy late adopters.
Winner of the race will be the dominant company in said community of 100,000 or the most socially influential person.
Bezos, Musk and Branson won't be alive to see that, so they are shooting for George Washington type influence, the one reserved for the founder, the guy who was at the beginning of it all and gets remembered .
Virgin Galactic is an expensive carnival ride and has nothing close to orbital capability.
For those that don't know: getting to orbit (let alone beyond) requires way more delta-V (energy) than getting past the Karman line. The German V-2 is (I think) the first vehicle to do that, but it was nowhere even near orbit capable. The first photo from space was done by the USA with a captured and modified V-2.
I think you mean "Grasshopper" (the Falcon 9 VTOL test mule from a few years back). New Shepard is less than half the size of Starhopper, and the BE-3 engine has ~25% of the thrust of the Raptor engine.
They launched satellites earlier this year.
The space tourism thing is just a part of what the company does.
SpaceX is still way ahead though.
That's like saying Lockheed Martin (maker of the F-35) is "way ahead" of Textron (maker of the Cessna). They have different goals entirely.
With government-sponsored exploration, you at least ended up with public research and development that resulted in spinoffs that are useful on land. With a private space race, technologies like these seem more likely to remain a trade secret.
Also, when it comes to 'hard problems', physics is pretty predictable. Humanity has all kinds of social problems, which I'd argue are harder than these tech problems. For example, we'd have the capacity to eliminate hunger if it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that.
Hunger is basically a non-issue in all developed nations. See all the gray and purple nations on this map. In the US, for example, deaths from malnutrition are ~,1% of all deaths annually. Any money the billionaires might put into it would be better spent on traffic safety, reducing cardiovascular diseases, or researching cancer, and those are all by several orders of magnitude. https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...
Also, aid sent to the countries that do have hunger problems (like much of sub-Saharan Africa) has simply crashed their agricultural economy, making the issue even worse. Local farmers can't really compete with free, after all.
…doesn’t that suggest it would be worth a billionaire trying to find an answer for the latter? A way to help local farmers feed their population? It seems like an interesting problem space to me. Certainly more interesting than replicating space flights NASA already did decades ago.
And you (the public) pay for it. With the Musk's of the world paying, the gov has more money for social causes.
If the public can't consistently support these kind of projects without constantly threatening their budgets, maybe they are better in the hands of private benefactors that value them.
> it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that
How can they help? There's enough money to eliminate hunger and keep billionaires. Hunger isn't just about who has money, it's about who could have money and maintain it.
Much of what is developed is in the public domain. Patents and trade secrets only go so far. You can't patent or keep secret the concepts that these trials prove out.
The satellite of industries that develops to support space flight is also not affected by whether the fights they're supporting are private vs government, and neither are the skills developed by the engineers working these projects.
Private also has one distinct advantage: it can be self-sustaining, in being managed by an owner with a strong stake in the venture as a business unit.
I'd argue this is, if we're talking about practicality, is just crumbs though.
For example, scratch-resistant lenses were developed at NASA. Proving that it could be done wasn't the important factor that brought it to everyone's homes. What brought it to everyone's homes was the fact that NASA licensed
As another example, single-crystal silicon solar cells were first developed after NASA sponsored a 28-member coalition to develop an unmanned, high altitude aircraft. Private companies don't create coalitions like this and are much less likely to license or waive patents.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies#Scra...
And proving it can be done is aside from proving how it can be done. Once the general principle is proven out, competitors find ways to apply it that avoid infringing on the patent. The process of discovering the how involves expensive trial and error, that a large private sector can greatly accelerate.
I agree that publicly funded technology initiatives have their own strengths, but private technology provide far more than crumbs. Much of an industry's development is in the form of mundane, that is too unremarkable to be patented or held in secret, and for that, it makes no difference what the source of the funding is.
A couple vaporized high profile customers will have a massive chilling effect on the industry.
I think Musk's "we are going to Mars, people will die" is the most sober/realistic take. This messaging will do a much better job eliciting a customer base that understands the product and that will lead to sustainable industry someday.
- anyone can spend money on things, if enough sub-billionaires spend money on something the same amount can be raised - there's no reason a billionaire needs to do it. On the other hand, large focused projects like this are arguably harder to crowdfund from a management perspective.
- The governments is richer than Musk. Taxation brings in more money, and is a much fairer way to contribute to these problems.
- the government is more empowered to deal with social issues. There are some things a private corp/citizen cannot do, at least without government approval anyway. The issues being tackled here are mainly engineering, that is "free" to solve. The items that they would "better" to fix are highly political, with a heavy side of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
- throwing money at something can make it worse. A pipedream has no metrics that could prove this, so they can always be optimistic. When a "clothe the poor" drive kills local tailoring businesses, for example.
- Billionaires pay taxes, usually more than most (generally, though they have more leverage to bargain for lower taxes. unfair? sure, but that's global free trade gets you). What remains is income - why should they fix the problems government could, but won't?
- A major component of this is envy/belittling effort (Musk looks too happy in PR pics, so he's "playing around") or belittling the goal (spaceflight is useless) - i.e. grievance from the ignorant. There are a bajillion "useless" pastimes and occupations relative to some rando's pet social cause, yet billionaires are easy individual targets when everyone is equally to blame - at least Musk probably works hard.
Life expectancy is dropping, climate change is accelerating and while we can't solely blame any individual billionaire, they have as a group profited astronomically [:)] from the collapse of our institutions and middle classes, and from the wholesale destruction of livelihoods during the pandemic.
The government is more corrupt, more attuned to the needs of the rich than ever, so you don't need to wonder why the government has failed to attend to the needs of the majority. The same class of people currently culminating in rockets launches toward space have been directing the flows of tax dollars for decades.
How are billionaires on the hook for these things?
I always thought that Amazon was just the way to make his space dream possible.
But are they "hard" problems to solve? Most of the projects Gates takes on have already been solved in the developed world. He's primarily trying to distribute those successes to the developing world.
In any case, we can have both: rich people building the tech of tomorrow, and rich people trying to apply existing tech to the underserved. Both are good; both have utility.
Jeff Bezos' company has contributed significantly to the problem, I get his plan is to manufacture things in space, but who is that really designed to benefit.
The real hard thing to do would be to invest his personal billions into the issue, today.
Theses newcomers have drawn in attention and effort and are trying to reframe space as a business being funded by revenue - which has trade offs but in general is a positive development. The really challenging work without the glamor is still being down by the scientists and research agencies with the government. I do tip my hats to the accomplishments of all three of the new comer organizations. I just dispute that the narrative that they are driving the future. I think they are complementary.
To be clear - they don't have enough money to "solve" space exploration - it takes deeper capital than they have - though they are bringing a new business model to potentially stretch their capital deployments.
Privatization helps because NASA cannot afford failures today, but private companies can. And since space is a new and risky frontier, failures will happen. That's why I believe that privatization is a good thing overall
It's not dissimilar to how most energy technology makes its way to the private companies. DOE research labs do most of the work with college collaboration and then it gets released through private equity into the public domain.
Hasn't Branson essentially cashed out of Virgin Galactic for a huge payday? Even his flight was just a stunt to sell 500 million in stock.
-Some dude in the 1400s
These two flights were ~60mi altitude. The ISS, for reference, is at 250mi. We've launched people there more than a hundred times, never mind having to put it there in the first place. The moon, which we landed and recovered people from in 1969, is 240,000mi away.
This is a hobby project, which is totally fine in that it's their money to spend, and it's kind of neat that we can generate enough wealth that private individuals could even imagine doing this, but let's not dress it up as more than that.
Edit: Musk/SpaceX is definitely in a different category. That actually seems to be shooting for space exploration, which is pretty neat, though I still think there are earthly priorities that we'd see much higher ROI from.
Not everyone agrees.
But why is it anyone's choice? People are already taxed disproportionately, why can't Musk spend his money, or the money people invest in him?
The US is free to outlaw large accumulations of wealth, it would just lose a lot of people in the process (assuming emigration wasn't also outlawed).
People in the US are, equally, free to move to places with fairer tax laws.