I'm not sure why people feel this need to draw this weird line in the sand and say that SpaceX is okay because Musk built a business, but Blue Origin and Virgin are bad because... reasons?
Technology advances for all sorts of reasons. Lamborghinis exist because a farmer was pissed at Ferrari. Motorolla made the first cellphone to steal the thunder from AT&T. Hell, the first space race back in the 60s was basically done to flex on the USSR.
If this is all a massive dick measuring contest, I honestly couldn't care less. It's advancing space exploration and providing competition in the space. Even Bezos and Branson stopped right now, they've still proven that it's possible for a company other than SpaceX to put a man in orbit and dumped billions of dollars back into the economy.
When I hear people complain about this being a vanity project like that somehow taints the accomplishment, all I can think about is a particularly on the nose quote from the TV show Community. "Who cares if Troy thinks he's all that? Maybe he is. You think astronauts go to the moon because they hate oxygen? No, they're trying to impress their high school's prom king."
Even Bezos and Branson stopped right now, they've still proven that it's possible for a company other than SpaceX to put a man in orbit and dumped billions of dollars back into the economy.
That's not to say that neither is impressive. They are definitely impressive. But they're also just carnival rides for Billionaires, and that's what gets on peoples nerves.
Since you've edited your post, I'll respond to the rest.
> But they're also just carnival rides for Billionaires, and that's what gets on peoples nerves.
If Bezos or Branson had sent someone else up in their place, does that really change anything?
Sure, it's expensive and only the super wealthy can afford to go into space right now, but there are plenty of technologies in our past that only the wealthy could afford at first, but as time went on, they became more affordable.
Orbit is a little bit of upwards velocity and a whole lot of sideways velocity. They only did the much simpler former.
These sub orbital flights are just barely over the line into what can be called space travel, and do nothing useful except letting them brag that 'they went to space'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounding_rocket
The delta-v differential between sub-orbital and orbital is tremendous, though.
At least cheaper than going to actual space and longer than using parabolic flights in planes.
Well, ICBMs are very useful, and only require sub-orbital velocities, though I don't necessarily want Bezos or Branson to get those.
ICBMs can be converted to carry a human in a tin-can on top into space, if you happen to find yourself in a space-race.
Some of the space launchers today either started life as an ICBM turned dedicated launch vehicle (Proton) or are decommissioned ICBMs turned launch vehicles (Minotaur)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_(rocket_family)
I think the deltaV's needed to place a warhead on the surface are significantly less than those needed to put a satellite into low-earth orbit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardme...
The other nuclear powers did not like it and it was scrapped. Not to mention that even if you might get the first shot this way, there will almost certainly be retaliatory strikes back on you.
And I think if they'd sent up other billionaires instead, it would have made no difference. The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider.
I hear you there, but I don't understand why Musk gets a free pass then? He's just as rich as Bezos and just as out of touch with what the needs of average American.
I don't think any of the three are bad, but I do think there is a gradient in terms of ambitions/successes that puts Musk well ahead of Bezos (at least until New Glen launches) and Bezo ahead of Branson.
While Bezos/Branson's priorities seems slightly backwards to me, it isn't wholey unreasonable to take that stance that making spaceflight available to more people will increase the level of interest in spaceflight (even if the timing seems a bit tone deaf for that goal.)
Suborbital flight only requires 3,700 mph (6,000 km/h)
Highly recommend playing kerbal space program if you'd like to get a better intuitive understanding of the difference: suborbital flights are your second or third attempt - pretty easy, orbital flight will probably take you a dozen flights or so to figure out.
The only thing it may make cheaper is suborbital flights, which are essentially useless. You can't even launch satellites that low. So there's essentially no practical purpose for their tech, and their companies, besides bragging rights for rich guys.
A lousy metaphor we could use here is that in a world of automobiles, Bezos and especially Branson decided to research horses. It's not a very good metaphor - maybe a better one is someone trying a new entrant in the floppy disk category in 2021. Much like "Zip Drives" were able to make contemporarily larger floppy drives in their day (100mb instead of 1.3mb), you likely could make very good "modern" floppies in 2021, measuring in hundreds of gb, but they would still possess the fundamental flaws of the medium (being so easy to damage), and you simply couldn't get away from that. We abandoned it as a technological dead end for a reason.
They achieved something we already have the tech to do; the only thing that's special is that they paid for it all by themselves.
--
Musk, on the other hand, has two feathers in his cap - the first is that they're working on tech that's already fundamentally useful and "has room to grow" in incremental improvement. Getting to orbit is fundamentally useful (it's the tipping point where you can start to do satellites, and even extra-terrestrial trips); and pouring R&D into making that cheaper is very helpful for humanity.
The other feather he's got in his cap is that the company he founded didn't just do some piddly "incremental improvements" that shaved a little bit off the cost of launch. We'd all be cheering if they'd shaved, oh, 10% of the cost away. That would be really good for humanity.
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But no.
They went so far above and beyond that it's absolutely daffy duck. They won the lottery. They didn't roll a natural 20; they rolled a d20 and the dice face on top said "50 million".
They invented reusable rockets - which everyone, including all the government space agencies, had written off as permanently impractical. The cost comparisons are just nuts — The cost of a space shuttle launch is something like 0.5-1.5 billion dollars. A similar launch from space x is something like, pessimistically, a few hundred thousand. It's like FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. This is my first "allcaps" on HN, but it needs the emphasis. The thing that Musk's company (really; folks like Gwynne Shotwell deserve core credit here) did was a quantum leap that honestly - nobody else might have had the political capital to do. We might have gotten this a century earlier than an alternate timeline without him precisely because of the stupidity of "allocation of funding" - there's no practical reason why a government agency couldn't have done this; it's all social dynamics and groupthink.
It singlehandedly makes a lot of crazy, impractical things (like solar panels in space to solve terrestrial power problems) tip from pure fantasy into "gosh, maybe we could actually do this?" He's already rolling out Starlink, but there are an awful lot of really helpful things for real, contemporary problems on earth that "cheap space launches" could solve.
"One of these is not like the others."
Sending rockets to space is still very prone to failures. Failure rates for unmanned rockets where lower 40 years ago than they are now if you look at the trailing 10 year failure rates. Around 1 in 20 unmanned mission fails.
Failures for manned missions are less frequent, however noone can guarantee you, that the rate is lower than 1%.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s...
Do you have sources that indicate fabrication has not started?
I believe I was recalling another video tour, probably from last year, where they said "And this is where the assembled rockets will be stored" and the factory floor was empty. It's pretty cool that they've made so much progress since then!
It is true that reaching orbit is much more difficult than reach space but Branson has another company called Virgin Orbit that did reach orbit.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit :
> The first successful flight was on 17 January 2021, which delivered a payload of 10 CubeSats to low Earth orbit (LEO)
It uses an unusual strategy. A boeing 747 carries the rocket under its left wing. So, it does not need a spaceport and can can be pre-aligned on any orbit.
Bezos is also trying hard to reach orbit with the New Glenn space rocket. But this one had a lot of delays.
As for the founders. Meh. They're circus show men, but at least Musk comes from an engineering back ground, I guess? But the difference in mission is important.
That's kind of a silly argument in my mind. Tesla started out making electric sports cars that cost $100,000+ each. Just because a company focuses on high margin products for the super rich when they are starting off, doesn't mean they aren't making significant technological progress that can benefit the world.
> In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.
Not only was that the plan in 2006, you'd expect them to lose a bit of money as long as they have available funds, in order to get to mass production faster.
Yeah, the reality is that the big car manufacturers are going to be the ones to commoditize it because they are experts in commoditization and manufacturing processes that Tesla still struggles with today. That may have even happened without Tesla. But I am confident that Tesla has accelerated the adoption of EV and I think it's fair to say that in this sense, yes, Musk absolutely is "bringing EVs to the masses."
This is the crux of your argument, and it's the core disagreement. Blue origin does nothing to advance space exploration just by virtue of existing. They are not competitive.
> you can't employ that many people and spend that much money without advancing the industry.
I'm (jokingly) saying I definitely could.
I don't have a position one way or the other, it just sounded like you were missing the argument of the post you responded to.
And how did they do that? By wasting earthly resources and real human lives on pointless rocket launches.
The disgusting part isn't that they are going to space. The disgusting part is that ONLY they get to go to space. They are pushing the worst conditions here on earth (forcing shit hours and trash work conditions) so that they can go fly in a rocket.
It's pathetic.
I mean I get it that it seems extravagant, but if you just think about it as another test launch that they risked their lives to ride along with, it’s less troubling.
It's because they know exactly what it really means if they cut SpaceX off at the knees and include them. It reveals what they're really saying they want to do. And that's just too far in polite company.
With Blue Origin they think they can chop them down and use them as an example and it's ok, because it doesn't imply a desire to return to the stone age and the crushing of technological progress. Blue Origin is a convenient example in other words, for now. If they use SpaceX, it would go too far in making them look like a luddite, lusting to dial back centuries of progress.
They apparently think it's possible to preordain from the word go which company will be the successful one. It's a product of centrally planned thinking, centrally planned fantasy. Such that it was okay for Musk to be doing what he was with his great wealth back when he had $100 million, and not if he crossed some arbitrary wealth line. It was ok for SpaceX to fail over and over and over again, and to burn through a large sum of money trying to get the Falcon 9 flying. It's just not ok for anybody else to fail trying. It's ok to take N time to succeed at $N money, but not ok if it takes more time and more money. Funny little needle the central planners want threaded.
When Bezos had $20 billion, nobody cared much about him. You'd very rarely see his name eg on Reddit or HN or Imgur or anywhere else outside of the business press. He'd occasionally pop up on HN in an Amazon story, it was rare though. Few people actually knew his name or who he was. That's ~2012, he had been a billionaire for about 14 years by that point and had been working on Blue Origin for around 12 years. So now he's worth $200 billion, everybody knows his name, zillions of people apparently hate him, people post vicious shit about him 24/7. They're all lying. They don't know Bezos anymore today than they did in 2012, what they know is his name is at the top of the rich list now, and the mob loves nothing more than to chop people down. The exact same thing happened to Gates once he took the rich list title.
What you're witnessing is mimic-based mob behavior in action. That's why it's so irrational, so emotional, so very much not thought-out. It's very predictable, most people that join in likely struggle to control their urge to mimic and join the rage mobs, and it goes after anybody that pops their head up too far. It's what social media is largely filled with today, ignorance and rage mobs. It's probably genetically wired in behavior for some people and then amplified depending on the culture and context.
You had an agenda and a point to make. You likely were going to get your anger across no matter what evidence you had to use.
I’m pretty sure at least half the people on HN knew who Jeff Bezos was a decade ago. That’s like saying people on HN don’t know who Jack Dorsey is. Sure he’s not going to be known by name to the average person but that’s not what HN’s crowd is
Is your point against society at large, who don’t fit in with defending Musk and attacking other space billionaires because they don’t really care or know what’s up. Or HNers who as said above, don’t work with what you’re saying.
> What you're witnessing is mimic-based mob behavior in action. That's why it's so irrational, so emotional, so very much not thought-out. It's very predictable, most people that join in likely struggle to control their urge to mimic and join the rage mobs, and it goes after anybody that pops their head up too far. It's what social media is largely filled with today, ignorance and rage mobs. It's probably genetically wired in behavior for some people and then amplified depending on the culture and context.
The vibe given off thru the post and ending with this is hard to distinguish from trolling or inebriated anger posting. Sounds like an exaggerated smartest person in the room take - Vs the rest of us sheep proletariats being too stupid to know right from left.
In defense of Branson his other space company Virgin Orbit now does orbital launches also, and has cool capabilities that genuinely differentiate it from other providers. We'll see if Bezos catches up, he's personally focusing on it more now and may make faster progress on New Glenn etc.
A public space race of billionaires is exactly the kind of thing we should all be hoping for. They can leverage their relatively small funding to push much larger government funding in productive directions. They're better than most government administrators and don't have as many constraints, so they can take more risks and pay experts what they're worth on the open market.
The public should be calling for more of this kind of thing across all major areas of civilization. Let's get a public race among billionaires for curing cancer, HIV, and poverty.
If it feeds their egos, all the better. Almost all progress is connected to selfish goals, even among the greatest and most "pure" scientists. They want to win a Nobel, for the money and the recognition. Or they're doing science because it's just extremely pleasurable for them, which is not a selfless reason at all. The sooner people realize that base motivations aren't a sin the better we'll all be. And in reality, motivations are always a mix of (mostly) selfish and selfless reasons.
Motivations aren't what matters. What matters is making progress that can (eventually!) benefit everyone.
Imagine thinking that having to beg fief lords for what should be yours by right is a good thing...
The fact is that governments already spend far more than billionaires are able to spend and are relatively ineffective. No one has ever suggested they stop doing their part. Billionaires lending their expertise and money is not a substitute for government work, it's just a proven accelerant.
See Bill Gates' work in Africa for an example. He has leveraged his fortune to help find effective opportunities for his money and government money. He has has saved millions of lives that no government would have otherwise saved, even if he had donated all of his money to the U.S. treasury.
The end state of these things is still government provided utilities: space equivalents to roads and busses
The main benefit of billionaires doing this is that republicans love giving as tax money to rich people, so it can actually be funded, and the funding is what really decides whether a thing will be done
There's a reason capitalist-America has led technological progress for 100+ years. The USSR had almost purely governmental funding and their administrators were almost universally terrible at genuine innovation.
[citation needed]
> Sarah Scaife's causes were family planning, the poor and the disabled, hospitals, environmental causes and various good works in and around Pittsburgh. Her most famous gifts, in the late 1940s, were to the University of Pittsburgh – $35,000 to equip a virus research lab. In that lab, Jonas Salk discovered his polio vaccine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clint...
I'd rather see them paying fair wages and taxes. It's hugely inappropriate that they make billions while their workers struggle to pay rent.
It's only possible, because those poor people are too worked out to protest and do something about effectively being slaves.
These rockets seem more like modern day pyramids, only difference is that they will not last 3000 years.
Unless you're in the "billionaires must not exist" camp, which we could argue about, they'll still be very rich, given the scale and success of their businesses. A net worth of $50 billion vs $150 billion doesn't change all that much, for the U.S. treasury or Bezos.
> It's hugely inappropriate that they make billions while their workers struggle to pay rent.
There are many thousands of Amazon workers making six figure salaries. Thousands that making millions per year. These people are not struggling to pay rent. Amazon has also saved millions of low income people money through their services, not to mention the billions of taxes generated by their businesses. They're not some purely predatory business, like cigarette and alcohol companies. Billions of people benefit from Amazon.com and AWS-powered services every day of their lives.
The fact that low skilled jobs pay crap is in no way unique to Amazon, they just happen to employ more than any other single organization.
I'm fully onboard for a UBI policy in the US and I doubt Bezos or Musk would object for reasons of greed. The caricature of these guys being extremely greedy is fairly ignorant. Greediness is not what made them so rich.
> These rockets seem more like modern day pyramids, only difference is that they will not last 3000 years.
There's some other major differences, like they can actually make humanity space-faring, multi-planetary, provide world-wide high speed internet to poor villages, move toxic industries off-world, etc.
Even the pyramids were not all bad, although the best you can say about them is that they were jobs programs, and a better use of human resources than fighting useless wars.
They should be okay with $10 million. Average worker will never be able to accumulate even $1 million during their lifetime.
> There are many thousands of Amazon workers making six figure salaries.
Amazon has 1,298,000 workers. The 1% you are referring to, does not make Amazon a good company. Furthermore, given how much money Bezos was able to skim, the six figures are still laughable.
> The fact that low skilled jobs pay crap is in no way unique to Amazon
Yes, because we don't have proper regulation - like making sure highest pay is no more than 10x of lowest pay or linking minimum wage to company global revenue (with a minimum threshold).
> and I doubt Bezos or Musk would object for reasons of greed.
They would object, because people on UBI wouldn't have to work in their sweatshops.
> like they can actually make humanity space-faring,
Corporations are not motivated by humanity
> provide world-wide high speed internet to poor villages
To help with surveillance, data mining and control.
> move toxic industries off-world, etc.
Only if it is profitable. More likely they would move banking off-world to shield themselves from paying taxes.
Like this?: https://kstp.com/kstpImages/repository/2021-07/richard-brans...
I honestly don't think it's something bad to praise when only a handful of organizations have ever done it. [0] Thousands of people have climbed Everest, but it is still a commendable achievement.
> Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War?
Plenty of other nation-states have been working on spaceflight longer than that and accomplished less.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights#Sum...
You mean "countries", right, or are you trying to make some point about nationalism?
They would report to but be independent of government ministers, and likely span multiple governments.
'State' is what was meant. (Country, nation, fine; bit less accurate perhaps? But I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.)
Spaceplanes are also interesting tech. Maybe not the best choice for earth but could prove useful on other planets with different atmospheres.
In 1963 the reusable X-15 broke the same 330,000f (100km) barrier at 353,200 ft using a nearly identical approach, 3 aircraft 199 flights, zero crashes. Blue Origin only nominally beat that at 367,490 ft, but was optimized for altitude rather than extreme speeds of the X-15 @ Mach 6.7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15
Blue Origin is an awesome amusement park ride, but not particularly interesting in terms of space exploration. Air launched anti satellite weapons for example are actually the most common approach. The main issue with air launching is scaling problems as you need to support the weight in multiple directions.
"On 15 November 1967, U.S. Air Force test pilot Major Michael J. Adams was killed during X-15 Flight 191 when X-15-3, AF Ser. No. 56-6672, entered a hypersonic spin while descending, then oscillated violently as aerodynamic forces increased after re-entry."
What blue origin is doing is vastly simpler.
1. Building a rocket company
2. Being a billionaire
3. Going on a flight on a rocket your company built
The issue stems from how the optics of these 3 lumped together appears to the masses.
To the people who are struggling everyday to make a living, it says: "Hey look at how much of a baller I am, I just went to space and you didn't"
Obviously, investing many personnel hours, pain and billions of dollars into a venture just for a "personal vanity project" is absurd and key driver behind these ventures is probably a desire to build the future.
However, most people don't have the luxury to worry about building the future when they're living paycheck to paycheck.
It is difficult to explain how the pie grows and everyone is better off (even if the inventors are the best off) as we invest in technology. The only solution to prevent public backlash to innovation is to make everyone well off enough to want to invest in building the future (and better PR, Jeff Bezos shame on you).
If a person has a billion dollars it does not exist in a vacuum. It interacts heavily within the economy in which it exists and more importantly with the people who participate in that economy.
Think for example the amount of people employed to do work in order to service a billionaire. A vast estate requires 24 hour staff, a sports car fleet requires thousands upon thousands hours of labor to produce. The logistics of a private jet demands a lot of effort from a lot of people. In order to service a single individual we require, in aggregate, countless of human lives spent toiling.
I am not arguing that the effect of increased economic activity and employment are not desirable. And one can make a decent case that a billionaire's time is incredibly valuable which to an extent may justify spending larger resources in service to this lifestyle. I just think the idea of many humans spending their lives in order to satisfy a single human is absurd no matter which societal model organizes this arrangement.
It can be argued that the people who service the billionaire are better off having found employment within or in relation to someones billion dollar estate. Though I think it is even easier to argue that we can find many hypothetical arrangements that are far more just and moral for these people.
There is also an argument to be made about the large amounts of undemocratic power that a billion dollar in private wealth entails. If the billionaire holds majority stakes within prominent industries we are delegating important decisions to opaque power with unknown agendas that we can not hope to influence in meaningful ways. As I firmly believe that a moral society is actively democratic this feels deeply wrong.
With that said, I do not have any good quick fixes. Because the reasons I outlined I feel that the presence of billionaires reveal that human society has yet to reach its moral potential. I have no illusions that reaching that goal will be either a simple or fast process. I prefer billionaires to having a nobility class. Though I hope that we as a species recognize that deeply inequitable social arrangements is something we want to move away from.
First, you seem to conflate being a billionaire with conspicuous spending or otherwise inefficient use of their capital. Once again this is a generalization and many billionaires don’t have these sports cars and estates that you describe.
Secondly, you state “I just think the idea of many humans spending their lives in order to satisfy a single human is absurd”. This seems extremely blind considering that your iPhone was probably made the same way, and the food you get at the restaurant and literally anything you pay for. Countless humans have toiled to sustain your life too.
You also state that “If the billionaire holds majority stakes within prominent industries we are delegating important decisions to opaque power with unknown agendas that we can not hope to influence in meaningful ways.”. Yea it’s a risk, but it’s absurd to say with complete certainty that all billionaires use their power to influence the world in nefarious ways. What if they use it in moral ways that benefit us all? Does that make the billionaire a better person than the rest?
There is nothing to be fixed here. Your sense of deep equity is a feeling that’s born out of some kind of primal sense of fairness. In reality, there is nothing inherently amoral about billionaires.
Try applying all the arguments you have above from the perspective of someone with lesser means than you, with your relatively wealthy position being that of the billionaire.
Do you benefit from the labor of others? Check. Do you have more influence on the society than the other person? Probably, check. Somehow these add up to you being an immoral person. It’s pretty absurd bro.
>First, you seem to conflate being a billionaire with conspicuous spending or otherwise inefficient use of their capital. Once again this is a generalization and many billionaires don’t have these sports cars and estates that you describe.
Of course there might be some modest billionaires that lead relatively normal lives. Obviously my arguments do not apply to billionaires that sit idly in their wealth. I could try to make a different case for why that is an issue but I do not have major moral quarrels with that type of individual and have no interest in picking this fight. Though I assume you agree with me that this type of billionaire is a rare one.
>Secondly, you state “I just think the idea of many humans spending their lives in order to satisfy a single human is absurd”...
Excellent point and I can not stress enough how much I agree with you. To be clear, I am not arguing that the principle of the division of labor is bad. Obviously some people need to be software developers and other line cooks. But I am deeply bothered by the fact that I will average 40 hour weeks affording me a great deal more leisure than the person who assembled my laptop, farmed the bananas I eat and sewed the shirts I wear.
This does not mean that the solution is for me to live in the forest and sustain myself on berries. I recognize that this inequity is the result of different economies being in different stages of industrialization. My participation in the global economy will most likely help rather than hurt countries in earlier stages of development. I expect my global peers to join me in a relatively painless and happy life full of leisure as developing countries reach a more mature economic stage. If you tell me that this will never happen and this inequity is permanent, I might have to seriously re-examine my personal moral beliefs.
I have the same attitude towards billionaires. I recognize the historical trajectory that brought them here and for the cheap access to information and technology enabled by the industries that minted the latest set of tech billionaires I consider the deal to be quite good. I can still hold the belief that its morally wrong to have a billionaire class while not advocating for violently dismantling the current societal structure. I want society to become more equitable but I think the more realistic time-frame is in the span of hundreds of years, just as most social progress over the last millenia.
>You also state that “If the billionaire holds majority stakes within prominent industries we are delegating important decisions to opaque power with unknown agendas that we can not hope to influence in meaningful ways.”...
Good point. It can be argued we are better off due to undemocratic decision taken by key industry leaders. By democratizing every decision growth would likely be stifled. But there are middle-grounds. I for example would like some democratic influence over google without necessarily nationalizing it or forcing it into a co-op. Google is the de facto information aggregator for the half the worlds population that has internet access. This is a good thing and is due to decisions by democratically unchecked business leaders. However, its model for delivering information is highly incentivized to maximize ad revenue rather than providing the highest quality information. Philosophically, I believe that when something becomes ubiquitous to a large group of people, those people should have a say in that thing. I think a more democratic google is a moral necessity here which will likely be in detriment to the profit incentives of the shareholders. What this entails in practice is something we could probably argue about for a long time. (I understand that Pichai is not a founder nor a single majority holder of google and barely a billionaire. I choose google to highlight the drawbacks and advantages of democratic vs undemocratic power. Our discussion is about billionaires and not corporate decision making though I hope you can see how my reasoning would apply to undemocratic yet helpful decisions made by billionaires. )
Finally, I would like to state that my desired end goal is not complete 100% mathematically verified equality in all measures. I'm not a Pol Pot-esque collectivist who does not believe in the individual or individual differences. I actually believe a degree of inequity to be necessary for a dynamic society. A billionaire is a different beast than a multi-millionaire. I'm not advocating for a revolution to topple the billionaires. I'm advocating for a conversation about how extreme wealth might undermine the health of our society.
Branson is more likable but does seem like he's just trying to defend his title of being the eccentric billionaire, rather than thinking too hard about the future.
I thought that too, but apparently the BE-4 engine uses LNG :/
Isn't is an amazing coincidence that Elon was able to find so many rocket engineers with ideas just as NASA was being starved of funding? Just lucky I guess! anotherwinformilos.gif
SpaceX is a privatization that enjoys plenty of easy funding from the government, it's just that spaceflight staff aren't paid via the federal HR department anymore.
Frankly, I don't see the benefit of Elon getting any of my tax dollars.
Blue Origin's is reusable. That's a huge difference.
C'mon. Blue Origin has a proper rocket, it seems very capable. They even land the booster like SpaceX does. To be unimpressed with their achievements seems like sour grapes.
Carlin says something similar to what I was going to say, but he's better at saying it.
" The phrase sour grapes does not refer to jealousy or envy. Nor is it related to being a sore loser. It deals with the rationalization of failure to attain a desired end. In the original fable by Aesop, "The Fox and the Grapes," when the fox realizes he cannot leap high enough to reach the grapes, he rationalizes that even if he had gotten them, they would probably have been sour anyway. Rationalization, that’s all sour grapes means. It doesn’t mean deal with jealousy or sore losing. Yeah, I know you say, "Well many people are using it that way, so the meaning is changing." And I say, "Well many people are really fuckin’ stupid too, shall we just adopt all their standards?" " [0]
- George Carlin
Blue origin landed it's first rocket in 2005. It was a tiny rocket and a tiny flight and purely for testing.
SpaceX landed it's first rocket in 2015. It was an orbital flight delivering real value.
Would it have made sense for SpaceX to stop because blue origin already flew a reusable rocket?
Also, since SpaceX did it already, in less time, should others just close the shop and not try to do the same?
And if they didn't get government contracts, then where would they be right now? If those contracts had landed in the lap of other companies, maybe they'd be the more successful ones?
I’d be interested to see more progress made toward long term space habitats. You don’t need reusable rockets when you don’t plan on coming back anytime soon.
"I'll encourage journalists to say nice things by letting them believe there's a chance they'll become insanely rich if they do."
... Such a cynical move.
He deserves ostracism rather than recognition.
there's nothing that spacex has done that's "new tech". VTVL rockets were worked out in the 60s and the 90s
spacex does a good job of making it seem like what they're doing is new, though.
I also believe that Blue Origin had VTVL working before space-X
in the early 2000s there were one or two other scale VTVL projects that were working, I can't find info on them now.
also Masten: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5b9LnzjGgU
Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech.
Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration.
I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War?
SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.