Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronauts on lunar surface

Re:Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronau... by dylan604 on Friday May 19, 2023 @03:07PM (#36005686)

Just have a 2nd Apollo rocket on stand by. After Columbia, this is what NASA did with shuttle launches. There's the famous images of two shuttles on the launch pad at the same time.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...

Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing

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Re:Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronau... by jvanderbot on Friday May 19, 2023 @06:49PM (#36007694)

Let me rephrase that: You can treat this as a sequential series of US Government specified projects, or you can attempt to bootstrap an economy around the problem and see if great things flourish.

Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.

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