New item: NASA awards lunar lander contracts to Blue Origin, Dynetics—and Starship.
So who you rooting for to be the first to the moon: Jeff or Elon?
[Clearly it can’t be [del]Dianetics[/del]Dynetics. I bet they don’t have a single billionaire in their company.]
I know bezos is involved in space travel but this is the first time I’ve seen his company listed as a news item. I assumed they were behind space x on technology.
I want everyone to “win”. Competition is good.
It’s really tough to judge Blue Origin, though. They appear to be moving very slowly, but they are also extremely secretive. It’s clear that they’re doing something–they have a working suborbital rocket, and their large methane engine seems to be nearly ready–but all of this is a very long way from a large orbital rocket (New Glenn) and lunar descent system. I won’t write them off, but it’s pretty hard to get excited about them given the lack of information. They’re worse than ULA these days (with Tory Bruno at the helm, who has proven to be an excellent media presence, despite ULA being the epitome of old-space).
SpaceX of course is the complete opposite. They are very public about their success and failures, and have been doing exciting things for a long time now. It’s hard to believe how fast they’re moving, from the Falcon 1 only 12 years ago, to the Falcon 9 1.0, to F9 1.1, to Falcon Heavy, and now Starship. And this with their booster landings, including the dual simultaneous landings with the Falcon Heavy boosters. Oh, and Dragon 1, and Crew Dragon, and fairing reuse, and a zillion smaller things I’m not mentioning.
If I had to bet, it would be on SpaceX. They are just moving so much more rapidly than anyone else that it’s hard to imagine them not being the first. We shall see, though.
I do want Starship to succeed more than anything, though. The Moon is nice practice, but the real destination is Mars. And no one but SpaceX has anything resembling a plan for Mars yet. And even aside from that, Starship will open up numerous possibilities for Low Earth Orbit. It may even make LEO vacations practical for non-billionaires.
I know what you mean about Blue Origin. They’ve launched their New Shepard about a dozen times, maybe more. All of them unmanned, only one failure. You’d think they’d be ready to launch a manned flight by now, but AIUI, they’re still going to do a couple more unmanned first. And they don’t give much in the way of advance notice of their launches. I’d like them to succeed too, but they make things difficult for any fans.
I mean, even New Zealand beat Blue Origin to orbit. C’mon, Jeff. Gotta make it to orbit to sit at the grownups table. (BTW, I really like Rocketlab and the Electron rocket)
Even if Blue Origin were doing all the same things as SpaceX, they would still be boring as hell because they are so secretive. Show us the failures: we know space is hard, everyone blows up a rocket once in a while. You get more respect for your successes when we see the failures, too. And take some damn risks once in a while.
They probably think of that as The Competition’s Way and have deliberately chosen to use a different overall concept. I’m not sure what they think their advantages are aside from having access to Amazon’s cash.
I can see expanding from an online bookstore to an online general goods store and I can see interest in a lot of transportation/distribution and inventory management. I can see why they’d be interested in electric cars, self-driven cars, drones, robotics, AI. But I’m not sure how rockets would be much help to Amazon unless it plans to offer something with little tangential link to its main offering. Can we still say “core competence” or will that get you smirked out of the room?
I once had the idea they could use New Glenn to distribute packages, but it was, shall we say, a flight of fancy…
Seriously, BO is not a part of Amazon, any more than the Washington Post is. They both are wholly owned by the main stockholder of Amazon, but that doesn’t make them part of the same organization. Amazon is going to be launching their own constellation of internet satellites, but according to them, BO is not going to automatically get the contract to launch them.
Thanks for the information.
So, why is Bezos getting into this? 'Cause it’s the billionaire thing to do? Are multi-billionaires using prestige projects like countries did during the Cold War?
“Getting into” is a bit out of date. Blue Origin has been around for 20 years. It’s not for prestige, or they would publicize their doings a lot more. I think mostly it’s because Bezos was a space nut as a kid and he had $billions he wasn’t doing anything else with.
Like **dtilque **said, BO is separate from Amazon. Which, arguably, is part of the problem. It’s Bezos’ little hobby project, so when it comes to putting his time into Amazon vs. BO, Amazon gets the attention. Whereas for Musk, SpaceX seems to be his real love and Tesla (although he spends plenty of time there) is secondary.
Bezos has said that his goal is to move industry off Earth (lunar manufacturing, asteroid mining, etc.) as well as have large off-planet habitats. A bit different from Musk’s goal of colonizing Mars. Both kinda sci-fi, but… Musk and SpaceX seem to have the drive, while as of yet BO does not. Maybe Bezos expects to live to 200.