I think spacex getting some competition is good and healthy for the space market. Even though I like spacex a lot, monopoly isn't the preferred choice.
I was trying to find difference between blue origin and F9 and found these old articles. [0] [1]
They haven't gone anywhere but none of them can compete in price. Even the new vehicles, ULA Vulcan and Arianspace Arian 6 will be vastly overpriced, even if they reach the goal price they have set for themselfes.
For SpaceX reuse and the price saving are already a reality, ULA and Arianspace are only in the concept phase for these things. Their rockets are only planned for first flight in 2020 and maybe reuse a couple of years after that.
The only reason Arianspace can compete at all is that they don't amortize the development of the rocket.
They may not be able to compete on price, but they sure can when it comes to reliability and launch cadence (current strike action in French Guiana notwithstanding). Ariane 5 is currently on a 77 successful missions streak. SpaceX has a long way to go to reach those numbers.
If you're trying to get a $250 million satellite into space, price savings of $20-30 million can easily be outweighed by a long history of successful, on-time launches.
For spaceX they just had one failure out of 8. If they have none in 2017 and they can keep up the cadence then it will be a solid blow to rest of the industry.
I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.
Once spacex finds their sweet spot in design, they can shooting them up like crazy.
I am really looking forward to the moon mission. Last time it happened, I wasn't even born :(
>I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.
The thing is that safety is cultural, not technical. It means that everyone realizes their limits, and has a conservative streak in them (if it ain't broken, don't fix it, or so least test it like crazy before putting a customers multi-million dollar payload on it). SpaceX, on the other hand, is all about moving fast and iterating fast.
To be fair, the conservative streak cuts against safety too. I believe a large number of US launch accidents were ultimately attributed to "component or measurement out of spec, but it's worked before so we'll expect it to work again."
Let's label them inertial conservatism and objective conservatism. Where the former is the sense of "we should do things the way we've previously done them" and the latter is "we should do things the most conservative way out of all of our options, even if we've never done it that way before."
NASA during Challenger would have been an example of the former [1]. In a way that I think many overly bureaucratic organizations are.
The other sense is somewhat oxymoronic given that conservatism is generally resistance to change. So when safety situations arise where the safest option requires acting novelly, who is there to lead the charge? I suppose in that case you'd want a radical safety department.
[1] From the NYT article on the findings of the Challenger commission, "As Commissioner Feynman observed, the decision-making was 'a kind of Russian roulette. . . . (The shuttle) flies (with O-ring erosion) and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. . . . You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over again like that.'"http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/10/science/shuttle-findings-l...
SpaceX is already doing pretty good on launch cadence and they are gone to be way better before 2020 because they are building launch sites like crazy. Neither Arianspace or ULA will be able to keep up (they are simply not expanding their launch sites at the same rate).
You have a point on reliability, but I would ask you to consider that both Arianspace and ULA is pushing hard to get a new launch vehicle. There is no way, they would be doing that if they thought reliability was their big money maker. Additionally with their new rockets, that reliability will be mostly gone. Vulcan and Arian 6 need to build up a record as well, and that will be hard because they will both be very limited in launch cadence just because they don't actually have enough commercial flights.
I made a similar comment before, but the launch cadence is key in that it enables new markets.
If it takes two years to get your heavy launch payload scheduled then of course a ~$10M price difference is dwarfed by making sure nothing goes wrong on your end.
If SpaceX can reschedule you in a much tighter timeline, for a competitive or cheaper price, then simply building two payloads and skipping some of the exhaustive QA starts to make sense in a way it simply didn't before.
And as the market shifts to that kind of thinking, there's more business for rocket companies that can provide a quicker cadence, which allows them to grow farther, which reduces costs, etc.
And anyone who doesn't have a reusable product or expandability to match isn't able to take advantage of the new market reality.
Arianspace and ULA are building new rockets to reduce costs. So there's a datapoint for how those 2 companies balance reliability vs cost.
Note that Atlas V had zero failures when it was young. So there's proof that new development doesn't necessarily hurt reliability. You're correct that the track record of reliability will be absent for the first couple of dozen launches, which will be quite a while for at least Arianspace.
The Atlas V was built off the Atlas 3, so it wasn't totally starting from scratch. They kept the RD-180 engine, rebuilt the booster, and added strap-ons.
Also the Atlas program has about 40 years of experience on SpaceX. But I should point out they've also maintained their glittering track record while regularly upgrading their rockets, so they've shown it can be done.
Is the satellite that expensive? I would have thought that the cost to develop it (R&D) would be very high, but the cost to produce one actual satellite unit (given the R&D money are already spent) wouldn't be a quarter billion dollars.
Numbers aren't always easy to come by, but e.g. Amos 6, a more or less run-of-the-mill communications satellite that was destroyed when a Falcon 9 exploded during fueling operations, reportedly cost around $200 million.
The wording on that is misleading, you insure the satellite AND launch and then measured things in terms of launch cost. Industry has ~95% success rate so insurance is limited to around 10% of total costs or basically nobody would use it.
Further, insuring a 5% risk to a 200m satellite and a 100m launch vs a 200m satellite and a 50m launch at 10% failure rate would not be 2x because the payout is 50m less. Also, if the numbers get overly lopsided SpaceX would offer insurance for it's customers at close to the actual risk adjusted costs.
An Atlas V with the strap-on boosters is roughly equivalent to the Falcon 9 FT, it's about $150M (about $110M without the strap-ons). A brand new Falcon 9 non-reusable is around $65M?
You have a $200M satellite. Insurance on a Falcon 9 launch is $20M, your costs now are $85M. Even forgoing insurance on the Atlas V can't bridge the gap, and SpaceX's launch cadence is getting so rapid that you should be able to launch much sooner too.
Also, using a "flight tested" Falcon 9 apparently does not significantly raise the insurance rate: http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/spacex/... "In one measure of the mission’s perceived risk, Halliwell said that the insurance rates SES is paying “did not materially change” from a typical launch on a new rocket."
I wouldn't expect it to, and over time the insurance cost for used boosters may even be less if it turns out there are more failures related to manufacturing defects than damage from previous flights. Though it's going to be awhile before we know one way or the other.
Also, to be clear, in terms of reliability concerns vs your choice of launch provider the important thing is the marginal cost of insurance for company A vs company B.
As you say, if the insurance market were utterly deliquent it's inevitable that SpaceX would resolve the issue but I very much doubt it is. I wonder if it's done through lloyds...
Depends on the satellite. A cubesat is very cheap, a large commsat might be in the 100s of millions range, military surveillance satellites might be in the billions. But in general we should expect a world with cheaper launches to lead to an equilibrium where the average satellite gets less expensive.
To put this into perspective: the Planetary Society solar sail cubesats have a novel design, cost about $1 million apiece, and mass ~ 3kg. Falcon 9 costs about $12,000/kg for a GTO launch. The cubesat dispenser does have mass, but as you can see, the launch cost is still << satellite cost.
Amateur radio cubesats, which use 100% volunteer labor, appear to cost ~ $50,000 for a 3kg satellite. Launch cost is significant for them.
The thing I always forget is just how cold it is up there. You remember when your physics teacher dipped things in liquid nitrogen and smashed them? Well it's 70 degrees colder than that.
And then there's the radiation, the liftoff stresses, vacuum welding, and the complete inability to repair the thing after launch.
I could argue that SpaceX might be better targeted for manned flights, given that meat-loads can be replaced essentially for free, given the huge line of people willing to be sent to space even at significant risk.
Wouldn't a price reduction of that size open up a new market for smaller clients? Companies who couldn't afford it before would now be able to consider it.
20-30 million extra for insurance would take an ~85% success rate and SpaceX is well past that. Industry average being 95% and SpaceX is around 93%.
Note: at ~95% you would expect very long stings of successes not just 19 then one failure repeat. But, it's reasonable for those long strings to represent an increasing probability of success over time.
There are no fundamental reasons to believe that Ariane space and others can and will not reach a similar level of cost cutting by the time Space X gets anywhere near them in reliability level.
Yes there is. We know the target that they are planning for it. Those targets are for 2020 and beyond and its already more then you pay for a F9 now.
Yes, maybe sometime after 2025ish they might have their so far completely theoretical re-usability plan in action. Even then, they are still throwing away far more stuff then SpaceX. They throw away a very expensive upper stage, solid fuel boosters and most of the core itself.
Additionally and that is not talked about enough, Arianspace can only compete on price at this level with Arian 6 because the development cost is majority funded by ESA (and co). They don't have to put that in their launch price. So Arianspace is essentially completely unable to compete with SpaceX in terms of cost.
As long as the Arian 6 flies, it well simply never be competitive in cost with the Falcon 9. Even in price it will not be competitive. The architecture of Arian 6 as currently planed is just not designed for it.
The national champions are going to have a difficult time matching SpaceX on cost if for no other reason than the respective governments will force inefficiencies on these organizations by dictating where the rockets are built and by whom. That's what made the shuttle so damn expensive.
SpaceX won't be immune from this sort of meddling, but it's in a much better position to resist than, say, Arianespace or Roscosmos.
> For SpaceX reuse and the price saving are already a reality
Let's not get carried away... SpaceX has done one reuse until now, and there is no way to know exactly how much savings it will net them in the long run.
I appreciate the endeavour they started, but the HN fan service for Musk and his projects is cultish sometimes...
Obviously any discussion of the future of space will entail speculation since it's a volatile business by nature. But Shotwell recently stated that the savings of refurbishing a first stage over fabricating a new one was significantly over half, and the first stage itself comprises ~2/3 of the total hardware costs of an F9. It seems like that is a good starting place to estimate future savings, and other companies don't seem to have a competitive answer.
Aside from that, in my experience the anti-Musk is less rational than the pro-Musk group... We have a guy here that's started amazing companies that otherwise probably wouldn't exist. In the past year we saw the first orbital-class rocket landing on the Earth, a landing on an autonomous drone ship on the ocean, first launch and landing of a reused rocket first stage, and we heard about a private company's plans to send tourists around the moon, and eventually, settlers to Mars. Without SpaceX, none of that would be on the table right now. We'd still be waiting on NASA. I think the cult following is totally warranted.
Optimism around spaceX should be driven by it's current pricing and performance, which is pretty amazing. Even if they never improve their reliability and struggle to lower costs through re-usablity, they are still far cheaper for anyone who doesn't need the absolute best in reliability (certainly any payloads under $500B in value).
Those are cool things but they don't have the rockets with the size and launch cadence to compete in the same market as SpaceX, ULA and Arianspace is right now. Maybe in the further away future they can do it.
They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).
The reason I'm not very gung-ho right now is because there is, just maybe, a future in which ISRO isn't just "one of the space agencies that have made it into orbit", but as important to the future of space as NASA was a decade or two earlier, and getting there involves not just doing good work, but being ambitious at the scale of SpaceX and such. ISRO is being funded well right now, but if they can't "make it" in the next decade, with NASA in a slightly precarious position and private companies with no history of going into space doing all manner of remarkable things, they are going to miss this shot, and that can be dangerous in a political climate where the "can such a poor country really afford to go into space" types might drown out more reasonable people and shutter things for good. I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
Good promotional material attracts talent: I seem to remember someone from SpaceX saying "our webcasts are actually recruitment propaganda", and, well, they work! Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
[0]: Around 1.5 tons, and, no, I'm not discounting the challenges of actually releasing that many microsatellites.
> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).
Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission.
You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia.
We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.
>>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.
Oh yes we are.
But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack.
Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder.
The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India.
I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services.
Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.
You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more).
Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it.
I realize that ISRO's accomplishments are nowhere near NASA's or ESA's but to call ISRO's efforts 'jugaad' is a serious insult to the efforts and intelligence of thousands of people involved in getting a rocket to Mars.
>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space"
Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.
This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.
>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.
ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.
Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.
Eg:
They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"
Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?
Why not?
Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.
> Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.
Exactly my point. There was a ton of nonsense around the time of Chandrayaan about whether or not it was right to spend money on such things "when people were starving": in case it wasn't clear, I think that's bullshit. And I'm worried about it coming back, and actually doing some serious damage this time.
> Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?
As some of the other replies to your comment also point out: my problem is not the Hindi. If we launched a space telescope, I fear it'd end up named "Mahakashdoorbeen" or something. Why not something less boring than "Mars Vehicle" (which is what Mangalyaan translates to)? Remember, a 19- or 20-year-old is still young enough to be attracted to shiny things, so moralizing about how this is "useless nonconstructive criticism" doesn't help. The name doesn't increase the maximum pressure the rocket can survive, but it gets you people who can.
> Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.
That's very interesting: it's reminiscent of Erlang, in a way. Launch a ton of cheap missions, expect some to fail, work on reducing the failure rate while not crying because a couple went up in smoke. I could see this turning into something big if they took it farther in public.
> ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere.
Why does it need to stay that way? It seems you know more than me about how ISRO works, so this just makes me sadder.
--
It seems from the downvotes that people think I'm one of the rabid "India is a toilet" types that surface on /r/worldnews whenever there's some good news about India. I'm not: it's just I think that more Indian leadership (for lack of a better word, again) in space (and STEM more generally) is something to legitimately care and feel proud about.
>>Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.
Wanting the end without any focus on means will take us no where.
Like I said in another comment. Focus on development of human resources. Good quality and uniform standard of education for everyone without discrimination. Building high quality higher institutions of the standard of Harvard's, MIT's and Stanford's is what will prepare your next generation of citizens who will build the next space stations and space telescopes.
In short solve social and political problems first. Western perspective on India is right though. You can't have starving people, who don't have access or means to basic hygiene or sanitation, coupled with society deeply in social problems won't take you too far.
What you have at ISRO is despite these problems and initial inertial of the initiatives created by a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately off late the country's politics hasn't much talent to offer to the challenges and needs of our times.
I would like to tangentially note that NASA couldn't have done what it has done without the post-WWII Operation Paperclip, in which the USA literally stole Germany's rocket scientists.
For some reason you seem to be ashamed of your own culture. What's wrong in calling the Mars mission by its Hindi/Sanskrit name? Do China, Japan and Russia not use names from their languages for their missions? And what's wrong with old people appearing in the webcasts. They are the people behind the mission. They know the most and can inspire the best. NASA always puts their scientists (which are mostly old) in their webcasts. Do you recommend NASA do the same to attract youngsters?
See my replies downthread. It's not Hindi that I dislike, it's the choice of the name. I'm definitely on board about Hindi being a good idea for Indian spacecraft.
Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.
Their mars mission was amazing, not only was it cheap but they did it in a super short timeline and still managed it with such great attention to detail that it succeeded, and lot of martian missions fail.
One of the ways they made it for only $75M was the spacecraft was only 3,000 lbs, so they could use a relatively small rocket to launch with. But the Falcon 9 can put 8,000 lbs in martian orbit for only $65M. That doesn't include the spacecraft, so more expensive obviously, but not much.
India's space program is amazingly economical when compared to NASA. But they aren't as cheap per kg or as capable as SpaceX. They are "cheaper" in that they are launching much smaller rockets than SpaceX.
The GSLV can put 5,000 kg in LEO for around $36M.
The PSLV puts 3,800 kg in LEO for around $15M.
The Falcon 9 puts 22,000 kg in LEO for around $65M, re-usable is estimated around $45M for probably 15,000ish kg.
Their price has been around $65M for years, even before they ever recovered a rocket. Either way it doesn't make a big difference, even if SpaceX was charging $85M for an expendable launch it's still cheaper per pound than virtually everyone.
They have the design expertise they need to compete. They're definitely behind, but they will respond. Besides, at least for awhile they have a quality advantage and they don't have such a huge backlog you can't get your satellite up for years.
They are competition for the present market, but they are not even trying to compete for the (possibly illusory) market opened up by (also possibly illusory) 100x cheaper spaceflight.
Yes, he may have lost his job for it but it's not myopic when ULA drops out of a competition leaving SpaceX as the only bidder and then announce a program to transistion to Blue Origin's systems.
Incumbents count as competition as long as they are in the same market. If we just look at NGO:s the list of competitors becomes shorter, of course. Falcon 9 launches (8 in 2016) were 9.5 % of the total global launches in 2016 (85) [0]. When appraising the future of spaceflight, It would be quite misleading to ignore e.g. Indian and Chinese efforts in this sphere, government funded or not. This is not to say I'm not silently cheering each time a Space X launch succeeds.
Most of the launches are simple not competitive. SpaceX can not bid on Government contracts in China.
The actual commercial market for launches is getting taken over by SpaceX. The only thing that holding them back is launch cadence and their government contract requiring them to make launches (COTS, Commercial Crew, USAF and so on).
They are building more launch sites as well, so they are really just pulling away from the competition in that area.
Elon Musk believes this as well. In a 2012 interview by Chris Anderson published in Wired[1] on why SpaceX does not patent anything:
Anderson: So what have all your creative people come up with, then? What’s different in your basic technology versus 50 years ago?
Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.
It's literally bottom-up vs. top-down respectively. If you consider how far ahead SpaceX is up-top, having even interacted with the ISS, Blue Origin is that much further ahead near the ground. Overall SpaceX does seem to have chosen an approach that provides more traction. However, the BE-4 (orbital engine from Blue Origin) is slated for testing this year. It's going to be interesting to compare apples-apples once Blue Origin reach orbit.
I completely disagree. Blue Origin is not far ahead on the ground, either. SpaceX did a bunch of suborbital hops before retiring their Grasshopper/F9Rdev1 program.
However, Blue Origin's technical approach with New Glenn is sound and could easily give SpaceX a run for its money (but SpaceX likes to run anyway). Blue Origin is the only real long-term competitor for SpaceX that we've seen so far.
Even in spite of the fact that SpaceX is so far ahead, Blue Origin at least isn't making the same mistakes that 90% of SpaceX's competition is: using really outdated ideas that don't stand a chance at competing with SpaceX if first stage reuse works very well and /definitely/ no chance if upper stage reuse ends up working, too. Blue Origin is ultimately pursuing full reuse just like SpaceX, not partial gimmicks like engine pod reuse (which might be better than full expendable, but that isn't the standard any longer).
Blue Origin can and will be able to compete not because they have any kind of technical edge (they don't) but because their launch technology is going in the right direction and because Jeff Bezos has more money than God and wants to use all that cash to open the space frontier.
It's worth noting that Blue Origin was founded /before/ SpaceX and had been pursuing VTVL reuse while SpaceX was still messing with parachutes, but they basically squandered that initial lead and now are playing catch-up. But a billion dollars non-diluting investment each year certainly helps a lot, and I have no doubt that Blue Origin will succeed.
>Blue Origin at least isn't making the same mistakes that 90% of SpaceX's competition is: using really outdated ideas that don't stand a chance at competing with SpaceX
This is why BO is so behind. They went with new technology thus have a lot of catching up to do to the old designs and the guys running the old designs get an instant leg up, but ultimately will fail from a cost perspective. A bit like writing an OS and just using an established kernel or writing an OS with a new kernel. The latter will simply take longer but if your design is innovative it'll beat out the previous kernel designs.
I think SpaceX is something of a freakshow of success. Elon has talent and drive and surrounds himself by similar personality types on top of entering the space game at the right time where the STS to SLS delay was significant the US was hungry for private rockets. As well as our cooling of relations with Russia and the various rockets, engines, and launch services they're been providing post-communism.
BO being behind SpaceX is a bit like saying I can't outrun Usain Bolt but I can come within 5 seconds of his time. That's still incredibly impressive. I don't feel like the current private space race is necessarily zero sum. There's no big advantage to being #1 or hitting goals faster than the other guy. Practical concerns like scale, launch windows, economics, etc mean that SpaceX probably can't monopolize this market and competitors will always be able to land contracts as long as they're remotely competitive against the very expensive nation-state/public-private rockets we're so used to.
I also think the market will open up to a more casual manned program and I think the people behind the Dreamchaser will find a nation state or even private buyer. The DC mounted on a low cost SpaceX or BO rocket is going to be able to launch humans into LEO for a incredible fraction the STS or Soyuz do. I think we're in for a lot of interesting developments and I doubt it'll be SpaceX trouncing the competition as much as a very busy and competitive space market with SpaceX at the top, for now.
Blue Origin is ahead of SpaceX when it comes to their engines. I actually think the similarity is a lot like Waymo and Tesla with respect to their self driving programs. A billion dollars is a lot of money for a company that has very few launches and only about 600 people.
It's an apples to oranges comparison. One of the two companies manufactures O(100) engines per year, flies them to orbit on a regular basis, and has had the opportunity to examine and test O(50) engines that have flown and were recovered. That counts for a lot, even if the other company is going to test-fire a full scale methane engine sooner.
Blue Origin has more press releases about BE-4 than SpaceX has about Raptor. /sarc
EDIT: In all seriousness, Blue Origin has had a reputation for secrecy, but in the last year or two, they've shed that partly because they're now a major contractor for ULA in a competition to provide the main engines for their new rocket (Vulcan). They are facing a politically-well-connected opponent (Aerojet-Rocketdyne). If they keep silent, they could very well lose out. I think that explains why Blue Origin has been very vocal even though it hasn't even been test-fired, yet. (I think Blue Origin's engine is way better than AJR's, BTW.)
SpaceX, on the other hand, had a reputation for loudly proclaiming any progress. Early on they would roll out half-finished prototypes as evidence of progress even though they still had a lot of work to do. Yet in the last few years, they've started being more secretive. Other than a few miniscule mentions in NASA PR releases from Stennis mentioning a little bit about the component testing, they've only publicly released evidence of all the work they've been doing after they did a test firing in Texas with Musk's big Interplanetary Transport System unveiling. SpaceX doesn't have as much reason to be show-boating progress, partly because they HAVE been making a lot of progress.
So since their secrecy is relatively recent, people assume that just because SpaceX hasn't loudly proclaimed something, that therefore they haven't made any progress, while Blue Origin is the opposite. But if you look at who has test-fired and who hasn't, then SpaceX is ahead for Raptor vs BE-4. If you look at actual orbital-scale reuse, SpaceX is far ahead. If you look at level of technology in the engine and things like Isp, density, and thrust to weight ratio, then Raptor is much higher than BE-4. If you look at thrust to weight ratio period, then Merlin 1D is ahead of everything in existence, with a thrust to mass ratio of somewhere between 150 to 200, depending on which version and thrust level. The nearest competitor is NK-33 with T/W of 137.
That's the poorly-sourced hearsay. It was lower thrust, but that doesn't mean it was physically smaller. Most likely, it was operated at a lower chamber pressure, since the most difficult thing about Raptor is the crazy high chamber pressure. Also, Raptor needs to be able to throttle down a lot anyway.
Keep in mind SpaceX has been launching rockets to orbit since 2008. Blue Origin has yet to even complete their orbital engine. Even if we assume Blue Origin can somehow ramp up at 2x the rate SpaceX did, we're still looking at another 5 years before they're where SpaceX is today on orbital flights.
In addition to all the existing competition, I find this news disheartening. Things like this seem like they are about legacy for people like Bezos. It would be nice if some of the multi billionaires started some not for profit companies to solve the existing problems we have like clean energy, clean water, sustainable agriculture, etc. Especially in this case since Musk has already spent a ton on this.
In general you are right but Gates is giving other people money to further their projects. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish he would run one of these companies for one of these specific purposes. There is a reason he is Bill Gates and they (random charity) are not.
I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on?
And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too. I can certainly see the thrill of the ride described though and who wouldn't want to be weightless for 4-5 minutes? But the market for that carnival ride is about as big as the number of cars Ferrari sells each year so I don't get that.
One can call this a "steppingstone" tech for now if they choose but it's more likely to be a cliff unless there's something of real value here. Even if we go out on a limb and say all this is really a way for the wealthy to escape the planet they'll find there's no place close enough to go so even that doesn't make sense.
No, none of the above makes sense to me yet so there must be something more fueling this race than what's being said.
And hey, isn't there also a downside to poking holes in the upper atmosphere and/or ozone depletion? How long do we let someone profit off the effects of that?
I honestly don't know the answers to those questions but I do wonder about them.
If you look deep enough you will find that even life on Earth is meaningless. Our very existence is just a ride on a blue-green rock inside a meat suit.
For a more 'down-to-earth' answer, we can look into the past - how did the space race, landing on the moon, etc contribute to the development of science, technology, art...
Did that have anything to do with our development as a species ?
If we manage to settle on Mars, that would mean a great deal of new technological and scientific discoveries - which we'll be able to apply here on Earth. Maybe the solutions for the problems we experience here on Earth lay on other planets ?
Other planets will follow and eventually other stars. There will probably be generations of people who live and grow on a space ship, watching space youtube and movies all their lives - set in a strange distant place called Earth.
Eventually, they will arrive on a planet far away and settle there - maybe they'll forget all about their space trip and technology - become farmers and raise space chicken - only to reinvent rockets once again thousands of years later.
I think there are definitely a small minority with the 'explorer gene', who are keen to be on the frontier. But most of us (if we're really honest with ourselves) would find it too hard to live on Mars in the next 50 years (say). Being so far away from home, simple things like the lack of internet, your surroundings being mile after mile of this : https://go.nasa.gov/2p4TKrK.
I think realistically most of the people who first colonise mars will be doing it for financial reasons, because better options are not available to them on Earth.
They're not going to let random hobos move to Mars. Anyone that would be accepted for that mission would have perfectly adequate financial options available to them on Earth.
Lack of internet seems like an overly pessimistic view. We have a connection with Mars already, streaming high quality media and other data back to us. Having actual people on Mars would only increase the demand for better internet connectivity and I see no reason why that connectivity won't be improved.
Sure the delay fluctuates between 5-25 minutes, so you won't be enjoying any realtime activities like voice calls or playing Quake. [1] Initially bandwidth will probably also be too low to casually download 4K cat videos. However there won't be any issue with setting up a local Mars community web proxy that downloads HN & friends in compressed batches. There are a lot of things to do on the internet where even a 25 minute delay is no biggie.
--
[1] Although it shouldn't take too long until there are enough local people on Mars for low latency activities among themselves.
Tourism is a multi-billion-dollar industry that employs millions, which involves a lot of going places and staying places for no practical reason.
Vacationing with a view of the Earth's limbe is conceptually not that different from vacationing on a cruise ship around the Caribbean. Sure, the losgistics are a bit tougher; the ship goes Mach 25 and a broken window will boil everyone's blood in a few minutes. But the point is to get out of the house and get some reading done somewhere else.
>I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"?
"The billionaire tech entrepreneur also laid out a vision for space commercialization that stretches out for hundreds of years, leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space."[1]
This is hundreds of years in the future, at which point Bezos believes the population of the earth will be in the tens or hundreds of billions. He thinks the surface of the earth will be "zoned strictly for 'residential and light industrial'", probably for a combination of pollution, land quality, and resource scarcity. In that scenario (which seems unlikely) millions of people would be like .001% of the population, which makes... some sense?
> at which point Bezos believes the population of the earth will be in the tens or hundreds of billion
where do you see this mentioned?
I think it's generally agreed earth population will never get to hundreds of billion, the demographic trend is to get to around ~10B and stop there (kids per family decrease as living conditions improve, and they are at ~2 in most of the world bar africa)
EDIT: AIU it, Bezos just thinks we will have laws set up to avoid destroying our environment, hence forbidding things like heavy industry on earth.
leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space.
That was one thing in The Expanse (great TV show about basically this (and also a series of books that I haven't read yet)), that I found a bit odd. We're currently doing everything we can to replace truck drivers and miners on earth with robots. So why would truck driving and mining in space be done entirely by humans?
Apparently they don't have advanced enough robots to do all the jobs for humans.
The problem with automation and AI is that a powerful enough AI will render any story pretty boring, because it can basically do anything. So when writing fiction, one has to put brakes on some implications of technology just to be able to make a story.
But assuming that fully-automated space-everything wasn't developed before Epstein drive[0], the geopolitical (systempolitical?) situation makes the whole scenario plausible - you have overcrowded Earth with most people living on Basic Income just because there aren't enough opportunities, Martians hell-bent on terraforming their world ASAP, and the Belters, who can't live downwell and whose ability to provide services to inner planets is the only way to survive out there. One could imagine a strong opposition to automated mining from the Belt, and powers on Earth and Mars not too eager to upset that.
--
Also, read the books. TV show is awesome, but the books are even better :). I binge-read them all last month.
--
[0] - pretty much the only fictional human technology in The Expanse; it's a hyper-efficient fusion drive
I highly recommend all of the culture Novels By Iain M Banks. IF you haven't read any consider "The Player of Game" for a light fun read and "The Use of Weapons" for something a little harder and more touching on existential issues.
All of the culture novels feature "AI is that a powerful enough AI [sic]" yet I do not feel these stories are rendered boring. The AIs just become more characters.
The author has stated that while he believes actual space colonization will be mostly robotic, that makes for an extremely boring story. So people, not robots are in space.
You clearly are not a visionary pioneer. That's what it is about. To go where no one else has gone before, just for the sake of it. Remember, there are plenty of people doing things like climbing Mount Everest for fun while you and I are watching Netflix.
there are plenty of people doing things like climbing Mount Everest for fun while you and I are watching Netflix
The net long term difference of which is effectively zero. Adventure travel Everest climbers are not pioneers, and provide no new knowledge about Everest or the human condition - while burning up millions in cash in the process.
I mostly agree with you, but wanted to note that the money they spend doesn't get "burnt". Spent money gets just moved around, it isn't destroyed. And a significant part of the money spent on climbing Everest stays in Nepal - an extremely poor country - where it can maybe do some good.
The goal of rocket reusability is to get the fraction of launch costs that is spent on burning stuff as close to 100% as possible. In a somewhat literal way, by making launches cheaper they are making "rocketry is burning money" more true, not less.
In a strictly literal interpretation of an entirely figurative figure of speech.
The money might literal be burnt in the form of fuel, but it will be only the cost of the fuel. Modern and older rockets had to burn that and effectively burn all the other disposable costs, like the whole rocket and every piece of gear sent up. The situation is certainly being improved by these new innovators, and that is the point that was trying to be made and it is highly likely that you knew that.
Oh, but I do have vision. I'm looking for more than a few wealthy joyriders poking holes in the atmosphere here for nothing more than shits and giggles and questioning how that might affect our planet.
The people who are behind this effort are not doing this for "shits and giggles". In fact, these "wealthy joyriders" have specified exactly why they are doing it. Our future is uncertain. Visionary people spend their resources in a manner that brings about change that others later take for granted. For humans to survive far into the future it is necessary to become a multi-planetary species. For that to happen, it not only requires international cooperation amongst different nations but also individuals like Musk and Bezos, who have dreamt of these things since they were kids, and are now willing to allocate their substantial resources towards commercial endeavors that eventually bring about that reality.
When you have billions of dollars, there are many ways you can choose to spend your money. Some choose to use it on fleeting pleasures, but luckily humanity has others who have decided to use those resources in a systematic way that would help the greatest number of people possible, those like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We need those people. And we also need people who are willing to indulge the wildest fantasies of the human imagination in a completely reasonable way, like Musk and Bezos, who are thinking far ahead (and Bezos is the ultimate long term thinker), and realize that they now have the ability to bring about the innovation and lay out the first steps of commercial space exploration, which is necessary if the light of human consciousness is to see all the wonder the universe and the future has to offer.
Potentially, thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions of people populating multiple star systems. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people who are spending substantial amounts of money to make space travel feasible today, despite how unrealistic it seems to most of us.
If you're going to talk up preservation of the atmosphere while downplaying the enormous technological progress and bold, financially uncertain moves that SpaceX is making, you need to give your head a shake. The atmosphere has already been killed. And the methane that's being unlocked because of it's desecration will kill you, and it will kill me. We killed ourselves with the same type of ignorance towards new, uncertain technology that you have displayed in this comment chain. We took existing, working, and bad technology (ICE vehicles) and paraded it around to the world, and it worked, because we could show people how to use them to make money. We had an MVP with gasoline powered vehicles. People ate it up. Yet electric cars, the correct technology choice, get no mindshare with the serfs because they're heavier, slower, and can't exactly carry a dump truck full of aggregate rock up inclines for 24 hours a day.
You need to stop with the sour grapes, the tall poppy syndrome, and you need to start supporting the people who are actually doing shit. And you need to do it before the window of opportunity to use our technology to save ourselves closes. Keep in mind that me writing this comment to you is an enormous waste of my time, and I really thought it through, so please absorb the meaning in my words and stop having these pissing matches on the internet over things you completely misunderstand.
If you're saying climate change will kill any significant fraction of people alive today - enough that you expect it to kill you personally, then I think you need some evidence for that. It seems like quite an unbelievable claim - effectively the end of civilization within our lifetime.
I don't believe it's going to kill a lot of people. The planet went through this before during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum[0]. Basically a quantity of carbon roughly equal to our industrial output estimate up to 2100 or 2200 was released into the atmosphere over about 20k years. It stayed there for several hundred thousand years, raising global temperatures by 8 degrees. We're talking aligators and crocodiles living in jungles on Antarctica. Massive die-outs of microbes in the oceans due to acidification and sea levels rising. 70m of sea level rise is locked up in polar ice and then there's also thermal expansion.
None of that is going to happen in our lifetime. But the lifetime of our great grandchildren? There's a good chance. After all, this isn't the first time. However we will have several centuries to adapt. The real issue is we're destroying the natural environment faster than it can possibly adapt or evolve, but we'd be doing that even without climate change.
I haven't downplayed the tech advances at all here so that's a false narrative you concocted to make a point that ignores what I have done. That is I pointed out a few things that we should be discussing about this.
I really don't care if that causes some shade to fall on your fantasies of what this project might lead to. Not a bit. In fact, I couldn't care any less.
We are not discussing "Sci-Fi" here. This isn't a "Trekkie" convention, it's the real world effects of this we're talking about.
I am sure people said the same thing about sending ships across the Atlantic to America 500 years ago. What's the point? Why leave Europe? There's nothing over there.
And from an industrial point of view it is not like there are hidden mysteries in the close proximity of earth. And the industrial applications (mining mostly) are unlikely to be economical with rockets. We would need a much more economical way to lift heavy material. So I am not sure what entrepeneurs Bezos is referring to.
I totally get the personal excitment. And with a few dozen millions dollars in my pocket I would totally invest into something fun even if uneconomical.
Mining in space only to drop the resources downwell is uneconomical. Moving industry to space, where the resources are, and dropping only final products downwell might make more sense - especially if "moving industry" actually means rebuilding it with resources mined in space. But for that to happen, someone needs to lay the groundworks.
Why, they'll be driving SpaceUbers, doing the laundry, delivering food, walking the dogs, etc of all the techies debugging the asteroid mining robots, of course.
Translation: I don't want to do it for the reasons given, therefore nobody could possibly want to do it for the reasons given, therefore they are lying.
This is also the fallacy that I find most frustrating- "I am a salesman who travels 500 miles a day and the Model S doesn't have that capability so the Tesla company will never amount to anything and are doomed to failure."
When the iPad came out someone on Reddit said that they need to plug in a scanner to their laptop and you can't plug in scanners to iPads, so therefore the iPad was 'dead on arrival'. I'm sure there are still people out there who think that's still true because they don't have one.
>I appreciate the tech very much, but the visions of "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on?
Infrastructure, warehouses, and a rescue network mostly likely. Getting fuel reserves and supplies into particular places, making ranger stations, and maintaining all of that.
It's also not impossible that some mega rich people decide to fund private projects that only have a slim chance of making a profit. Most of them will fail, but they'll still need workers while it's ongoing, and that still means you're giving knowledge to humanity when those workers figure stuff out and train others.
>And "Living on Mars". No thanks, I'll pass on that too.
That's fine. It seems rough because it is (understatement of the year). But there's always going to be a subset of the population who just want to get out and explore and colonize. The risk is not for everyone, because yes, sometimes you go exploring and die for a stupid reason completely out of your control.
Besides, we really don't have any full-time Martian marketing agencies to influence everyone's perceptions of life on mars. So of course it seems terrible. :)
Breaking free of gravity, moving industry
Beyond the planet's surface into space
Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies,
Total productivity and nothing goes to waste
Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids
While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased
If you want a more "vivid" and detailed view of how this may look like (good and bad sides), I'd recommend "The Expanse" book series (and TV show) - a hard sci-fi about humans who just begun expanding throughout the Solar System.
There are lots of useful things to do in space, but we need to bootstrap a profitable economy in space to get there.
Sorry I cannot see the relationship between moving industries into space and total productivity or earth becoming a paradise.
Moving things between space and earth will always be costly and people will still want to live on earth. If we can solve waste, productivity issues in space why should we not be able to also solve them on earth?
The idea here is that industries tend to be close to where their inputs come from; there are many more resources up there than on the planet, and once we bootstrap space mining it might be more economical to move various stages of manufacturing to space than to keep them downwell and drop raw materials from the sky. Moving mining and manufacturing means also moving the big sources of pollution.
"Total productivity" and "Earth becoming a paradise" are dreams, of course. This is a song, not an economics report. But it outlines pretty well the things people might reasonably want to do in space, and why.
Currently space is a $330 billion a year industry providing things like pictures of the Earth, communication, etc with a bit of science thrown in. And there are a bunch of other useful things people want to do in space which are currently infeasible because access to space is too expensive. If access prices go down we should expect the dollar value of the off Earth economy to go up and more people up there to do things like repairs.
EDIT: And Blue Origin and SpaceX both use liquid fuel rockets exclusively which cause very little ozone depletion. There combustion byproducts are entirely made from oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with no nitrogen or chlorine mixed in.
EDIT2: Also, apart from the danger of ozone depletion there really isn't any harm in "poking holes in the atmosphere". The atmosphere is a fluid, it flows back together just fine after the rocket passes.
I really appreciate your skeptical view. It is awesome to hear it. I obviously don't share it at all.
My arguments would be what others already pointed out, that tourism is irrational industry and the crazier the ride, the more people will be interested.
I am really overjoyed that something is happening on space front.
>tourism is [an] irrational industry and the crazier the ride, the more people will be interested.
The comparison is foolish.
NASA's estimates a trip to Mars would take 21 months [1]. I don't know where you work, but I doubt you have 21 months of vacation accrued. If you do, do you have the $250k per ticket? If you do, do you have mental / psychical health to be accepted? If you do, do you accept the flight risks? If you do, do you accept that time does not stop on Earth (loved ones aging, loved ones dying, etc)?
If you do, you're _incredibly rare_.
This isn't flying 6-hour flight to Mexico to sit on the beach.
A good and honest opinion for 2017. But probably not for 2050. You see, vision is something you go for the long haul, not a couple decades. The world will evolve a lot, specially in the sense of using Space, Moon and Mars as the foundation to colonies.
One thing i do believe is the possibility to mining space (specially asteroids, like this -> "NASA to explore asteroid made of $10,000 quadrillion worth of metal", google it).
I imagine SpaceX and Blue Origins playing a huge part (if not all) in the future of this kind of exploration.
The thing about living on Mars, is ... it's gonna be exactly like living on earth socially speaking. There will be morons, suboptimal structures, chaos, forced order, etc etc. A bit like living at the North Pole, without the air (until they complete pressurized bases).
In my mind, there's trillions of things to do here that we don't get to do. Sure looking at mars sky would be something amazing, but I'm not in a hurry.
Probably fewer morons given that the initial population will be comprised mostly of scientists, engineers, and people with the brains/gumption to amass enough wealth to afford a civilian ticket.
This is going to come off nauseatingly optimistic, but here's my take:
Made in Space is working on producing ZBLAN optical fiber in orbit, for sale back on Earth. [1] ZBLAN is an alternative to normal silicate fiber which has much higher theoretical performance limits, but worse performance in practice due to gravity induced crystalline impurities. Producing it in microgravity should allow it to reach its full potential.
They haven't launched the first batch yet, but their claim is that because optical fiber doesn't weigh much, and this higher quality fiber is so valuable, it's actually profitable at current launch costs to do this manufacturing in orbit.
The linked article ends with a quote from the CEO: "We believe in-space manufacturing of goods valuable to people on Earth will soon drive significant commercial activity in space, perhaps one day creating a space-based economic boom." Consider the lithography processes our chips are made with, or the single-crystal turbine blades that help modern jet engines and rocket turbopumps work as well as they do. There's an enormous variety of precision processes that could benefit from operating under an ambient acceleration between 0 and 1g.
Orbital manufacturing is probably the most believable short term goal for commercial space, but there are a plenty of extremely exciting opportunities out there:
- The Mars colony will be our stepping stone out into the asteroids and the rest of the solar system. The thin atmosphere and lower gravity makes lifting mass from the Martian surface about an order of magnitude less difficult than lifting from Earth's surface. The difference is so extreme, that if you assume commodities will someday cost about the same on both planets, structures in Earth orbit would actually be cheaper to build and launch from Mars and then tug over to Earth.
- The potential wealth from mining other bodies is unfathomably huge. A small minority of asteroids out there are actually chunks of proto-planet cores unleashed during the violence of the early solar system. A single rock like that has more accessible platinum, rhodium, and other heavy metals than all known accessible deposits on Earth's surface. This fact becomes a little less surprising when you learn that all of Earth's accessible deposits are nothing more than impact sites from rocks like this. The "original" heavy metals of Earth all settled deep inside the core while the planet was still molten, far too deep for us to ever reach. These heavy elements are unbelievably useful. The state of the art in a huge fraction of the "hard" problems in chemistry boils down to "We can do it with platinum group catalysts, but those cost too much for industrial use."
- Orbital superstructures. Made in Space's Archinaut project [2] is an early effort to free satellite designers from the size and weight constraints of delicate folding structures riding inside a single rocket fairing. It's still early, but once launch costs drop and/or we start doing heavy in-situ mining, we can reasonably start building kilometer scale stations. Enormous solar arrays to power all our new orbital industry, or 5,000 person orbital ring cities with a relaxing level of partial g and perfect climate control. I'd love to live in a place like that.
My favorite analogy for this is the settling of America. Settling the new world in sailing ships that took a month to cross the Atlantic was a terrible investment with hardly any foreseeable return. But then we made better boats, and new communication systems, and all sorts of other new technologies which created exponential returns from the colonies. The west still leads the world because of the unimaginable profits it made off the Americas. Settling space, and particularly Mars, is the biggest opportunity we've had since the 1500s.
Yeah, that is my question. Why living on Mars, where you don't even have drinking water available? Human population in a lot countries, such as Japan/China/Korea is going to shrink pretty soon. In US, without immigrants, the population is on the same track with those eastern asian countries as well.
And working in space...for what reason? For certain industry maybe, but is it a really a worthy goal to chase after? I don't know.
I think part of the reason os that it os a chance to explore and "tame" new lands.
I am from Brazil, that is a gigantic country with stupid amounts of land. Also I really wanted to live on a rural community and farm a bit, yet somehow it seems 100% of the land, even the most inaccessible places, have an owner, and prices of land a ludicrous (land in Brazil somehow cost more than same land in France plus real medieval castle in it...)
Well, trip to Mars won't be cheap, and by the point it is inhabitable for average people, it would have land owner maybe government as well, at that point.
We have to eventually leave Earth if we want to ensure the survival of our race. A base on Mars that eventually can become self-sufficient is a great first step.
$78.4 billion in personal wealth. 94% held in Amazon, which is currently sporting a $433b market cap, up 50% in the last year and trading at a generous 200 times earnings.
I hope he sells more than he needs, faster than he needs, before this latest bubble (slight or extreme is open for debate) gives out. I wouldn't have guessed that Blue Origin could cost him ~$1 billion per year to subsidize. I'm glad he's doing it, very few people on the planet could afford to; of those that could, fewer still would care to.
He's a huge fan of Star Trek - he named his family investment office Zefram LLC after Zefram Cochran, a fictional character who invented the warp drive. If anyone on the planet wants to see the future of Star Trek become a reality, it's him.
The concept of Life Imitating Art isn't exactly about trying to make parts of Star Trek a reality, but I think it still applies here. Bezos probably would have been obsessed with space without Star Trek, but it still seems possible that it influenced him.
I'm going out on a limb, but based on this alone, I rank the Star Trek franchise as one of the most influential bodies of fiction ever created. I think of it as a catalyst, rather than a cause, but still.
Blue Origins seems pretty likely to tap into a much lower cost market for panoramic views of earth at high altitudes, similar to Virgin Galactic (had they not completely messed things up). Developing something that will get them into LEO is massively more difficult, with significant funding at $1B a year however (which is about 5% the total NASA yearly budget), hopefully they can make up their lag. I would love to see more and more ventures enter this market. The more the better!
I'm impressed by the burn-rate of $1B for a company that isn't actively launching on a regular basis... Does anyone have any idea how much capital SpaceX sunk before it got its Falcon 1 up and running?
I think it was under a billion. Elon Musk recently estimated that just developing the re-use capability for F9 probably cost about a billion dollars. Not the whole rocket, just the extra cost of development, testing and infrastructure to make it reusable. New Glenn might be able to beat that if it goes directly to reusability, but then again it's a much bigger rocket.
Reading the headline my first impression was that the rocketry hobby now serves as a pretext to pull out of Amazon without making investors nervous. Does not really add up though, as Amazon isn't really bubbly enough and Bezos can't possibly want that much cash for other reasons than for shooting stuff into the sky.
Every problem we have is easier to tackle if we are economically more prosperous. Bezos even states that he thinks most industry should be moved off-planet. If we can do that, wouldn't it be good for the environment?
>Bezos even states that he thinks most industry should be moved off-planet. If we can do that, wouldn't it be good for the environment?
I would think the energy and infrastructure requirements to move most industry off-planet, integrate it with terrestrial civilization at scale, and maintain continuous growth, would be far more environmentally damaging than simply keeping it all on Earth.
You don't need to move the entire industry off-planet physically to reach a state where there is little industry on-planet and lots of industry off-planet. Tools can be made in space with materials on-hand up there. With those, you can get access to more materials (asteroid mining), and build more tools, more industry, etc.
The only real barrier right now is efficient transportation. Ion drives look poised to solve that problem.
Also true. I think we're not going to get a good handle on what is achievable and what is optimal for a few decades at least. I have no idea what space industries might look like in say 100 years if the cost of access to space is less than 1% of what it is now, so I don't think it's a decision anyone is in a position to take right now. But short term, by which I mean the rest of my lifetime of 35+ years if I'm lucky, it's looking interesting.
I could not disagree more. We should adapt to climate change as it happens.
Besides, all of the resources we pour into forcing the climate to not change (which would be unprecedented!) are all for naught when that asteroid hits.
Hiding in space from an asteroid strike is a bad plan. Earth during an impact winter is still much much more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
Did you know that a lot of important climate change data comes from satellites? And that observations of the Sun, Mars, and Venus also supply important data related to climate change?
I'm not really sure about the amount of money needed to have an actual impact on a stock like Amazon but maybe somebody more knowledgeable might have an idea: Does this measurably lower the market valuation of Amazon? If there is constantly someone selling shares in those volumes there should be some effect, even if Bezos is obviously not selling $1B in one day but over the course of the whole year?
> Does this measurably lower the market valuation of Amazon?
Only if this sale generates a significant drop in price, which it probably doesn't (after all that price has continuously risen in the last few years). I'm no expert but I believe if you sell in small quantities at a time and at market price, you won't lower that price.
Manufacturing for one thing. He has spoken on numerous occasions about wanting to offplanet manufacturing to space for multiple reasons. The question of course, is whether by the time we could be doing large volume manufacturing in space, if it isn't far more likely to be done by robots.
The manufacturing itself won't be cheaper. But you can save transport costs. It costs about 22000 USD to send 1 kg into space. SpaceX might improve this to 1000 USD per kg, but that's still quite expensive.
Manufacturing and processing materials to sustain martian colonies, exploration, or satellites. The cost will be high initially, but if we're ever to have any permanent foothold, local manufacturing will be needed.
That is science and tech for knowledge's sake, not a plan to make a profit. Certainly there are some things that will benefit from being manufactured in a low or zero gravity environment but so far nothing that will turn a profit off of setup costs that I'm aware off.
It's not that I don't admire the ambition. I do. But I really don't think that unfettered commercialization of even low missiles into space is a good idea.
From what I've read we do not know the potential effects this could have on the Ozone and upper atmosphere. We seem to be ignoring the precautionary principal with these projects.
> That is science and tech for knowledge's sake, not a plan to make a profit.
To be fair, there wasn't much business incentive (although certainly a lot of political incentive) to go to the moon in the first place. But it ultimately led to numerous new technologies and markets, most notably GPS.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a good investment, but the biggest wins are always the biggest surprises (Google, Amazon, AirBnB, Apple were all initially hated by investors).
By "local" manufacturing I was referring to manufacturing plants on Mars itself to support other initiatives on Mars, in response to a comment comparing manufacturing on Mars to on earth.
Raw materials transport seems the major constraining factor. Assuming some types of raw materials will be available on Mars, there's a high chance local Mars manufacturing of some basic goods will be more cost effective than manufacturing on Earth and transporting it.
Not necessarily on Mars. Earth orbit would be a good start, so would be Luna if you absolutely need to have a solid rock bed under you.
It definitely won't be cheaper initially, especially if you want that manufacturing to serve the needs of people down on Earth; but it will make more space development cheaper (you don't have to move mass upwell, and as we know, Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System). So space industry will most likely initially work on developing itself and reducing its own costs.
One the arguments Bezos floats for space-based manufacturing is to offplanet the negative environmental consequences of industry. His premise is, the earth is for habitation, space is for industry. Certainly seems likely to be very expensive, but he also thinks he can put down a foundation of space infrastructure upon which the next generations can build upon (with the implication being to bring costs down dramatically to enable a boom in all things space). He uses the Internet as a comparison, in that he was able to do what he did, because previous generations put down a technology foundation that made Amazon possible (he didn't have to build all of that).
There's abundant calcium, silicon, aluminum, titanium and oxygen on the moon. You bring in hydrogen and export tritium and a lot of the rest could be used to expand settlements and build up space infrastructure.
That is a more realistic view of manufacturing in space. Robots? Sure. I don't see "millions of people" doing that though.
And so far I've not heard of what or where they'll be mining. I've heard of getting water from comets but that's not really a profit maker either (unless maybe you make liqueur with it) so unless you've spotted one nearby made of precious metal I'm still not seeing the motivation for this.
The primarily resource would be datamining. Datacenters need energy and cooling. Both are available in abundance in space. Unlike any other industry, their processing material, data, doesn't have to be transported with rockets.
However, this doesn't create jobs in space, just jobs in space industries, since those datacenters are most likely fully automatized.
That works for the ISS, maybe a DC would just be bigger in scale.
There is also the link problem: if the space DC is geostationary, it will be quite far making for a longer round-trip time (RTT) and latency. If it's closer, it needs a lot of radio stations on earth to keep the space DC connected. And each radio station is roughtly the investment of a real DC on Earth.
Cooling is not easily available in space actually. Its a pretty difficult problem. There's no air to convect away heat so you rely only on radiative cooling which can't move a lot of heat easily.
Solar power satellites would be a nice-to-have for the ultimate "clean energy" supply for Earth civilizations. I haven't looked recently to see exactly how practical they are though.
"While Musk loves electric cars and spaceflight, there's one thing he hates: space solar power. "You'd have to convert photon to electron to photon back to electron. What's the conversion rate?" he says, getting riled up for the first time during his talk. "Stab that bloody thing in the heart!""
One would assume that harvesting energy is practical (sans the launch cost), but practical way to transfer the energy back to the earth is the unsolved problem.
Descendants of the first space farers will probably make up the majority of the genetic pool that goes on to dominate the galaxy. Ah well at least we got nature and stuff down here, for now at least. :/
Is this perhaps a signal that it might be a good time for others to start selling Amazon stock?
I know if I were Bezos I would sell when I thought the stock was overpriced. I wonder if this is an indication that
Bezos and his team were brilliant for selling a bunch of convertible debt right before the 2000 crash. And let's not forget Bezos got his start at the quant fund DE Shaw.
> I know if I were Bezos I would sell when I thought the stock was overpriced.
You're thinking of the stock as an investment. To Bezos, though, it's an asset - something that can be sold when he needs liquid funds to finance an operation like Blue Origin. Perhaps he thinks it will be more profitable, or more fulfilling, or more fun. What's the point of having investments if you can't sell them unless they're overpriced?
Imagine a reusable rocket, like the SpaceX one, but bigger and being able to reflight in, say, one week.
If in every flight there were a satellite + space tourists, going to the space would be much more cheaper, and it's feasible I'm the near term. I see both SpaceX and Blue Origin offering "cheap" traveling to Space in less than a decade.
The concept video for the MCT launcher showed it landing on the launch pad, having a new second stage craned on to it, refuelling and launching in the same day.
The stated SpaceX goal is for 24 hour turnaround times. Right now their turnaround times are around 2 weeks, assuming that they can get a slot for the range.
This will improve once the pad that was destroyed is rebuilt mid/late this year.
Their current turnaround time is 2 weeks for launching two different rockets, while their goal is to launch the same booster twice within 24 hours. That's a bit different and even more ambitious. The first "flight-proven" booster (to use Elon's phrase) took 4 months to refurbish, and the lessons learned from that are incorporated into the next version of Falcon 9 (Block 5) in order to simplify and speed up the process (and probably fix some things they noticed on the landed boosters to improve the number of times they can be flown).
Given the lead time it takes to develop a satellite project and have it ready to launch, there may even be a danger that within a year or two SpaceX will have so many boosters on hand and ready to go that there won't be enough demand around to meet their capacity. They already have a handful of re-flyable boosters lying around. The limiting factor on SpaceX will be their ability to churn out second stages. I'm sure that would balance out eventually, but it could take years for the customer demand to catch up with them.
I always figured Amazon and SpaceX would just grow to be sister companies. Let SpaceX handle hardware and negotiations and let Amazon handle logistics and sales. Instant 45-minite Anywhere-On-Earth delivery service. I think there would be enough cash for them to share.
I have no doubt that Amazon wants to dig deep into space mining and being the backbone of the early solar economy. Who doesn't. It's gonna take a series of extremely smart investments for whoever does manage to pull that off. The barrier to a sustainable space economy is quite high.
I wonder why Bezos is spending so much of his own money (OK less than 2% a year). Musk has perfected the art of spending Other People Money- government loans, green subsidies, IPO. Plus he has good customer revenue stream in two of his companies.
I believe his foundation is allowing other people to contribute in the way he and Melinda have setup so well. With that said, I like that our largest influencers are tackling problems at various stages. Finding the ideal mix will take time (this is all in the last 15 years for the names being dropped).
I was trying to find difference between blue origin and F9 and found these old articles. [0] [1]
-------------
[0]http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9793220/blue-origin-vs-sp...
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a18711/blue-or...