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.
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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.
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."