Boeing seems to be in a race with Blue Origin to see who can destroy their reputation fastest. So far, I think Boeing is leading by a nose. They’ve been failing hard, and the latest is their Air Force One contract:
This follows the problem-infested Boeing C-46 program, the 737 MAX debacle, the 787 Dreamliner which went billions of dollars over budget and created a plane riddled with ossues, and the Starliner capsule which has now failed twice - once in the air and once on the launch pad - after Boeing signed off on it as flight ready.
Also, Boeing tried competing on the HLS contract against SpaceX, Blie Origin and Dynetics. Boeing’s proposal was so bad they didn’t even make the final list. Hell, they were beat by Dynetics which submitted a design that wasn’t even technically feasible.
This seems to be a common problem - my company did the same thing: moved all upper management to a central location in a big city, and all executive engineering to a ‘center of excellence’ in Silicon Valley while the actual engineering teams building stuff were scattered around various branch offices in North America and being managed remotely. What a frickin’ disaster that was. It killed our sales, caused our new projects to fail, closed our office and put me in retirement, and almost killed the entire company. The craziness of the management decisions we had to deal with was jaw-dropping. We lost customers in droves.
By now you’d think every technology company would understand the golden rule - don’t separate your managemrnt from engineering, and don’t separate your engineers from the customer. Centralization efficiencies are always touted by bean counters, but no one seems to understand how important local domain knowledge is, and how hard it is to manage complex projects remotely or understand customer requirements from your office across the country.
A NASA spokesperson says it’s received a stay from the judge overseeing Blue Origin’s federal lawsuit, meaning work on the HLS contract must once again come to a halt.
However, I relaxed after a followup:
This is a “voluntary stay of performance” that the court filing says “shall expire on 11/1/2021.” Oral arguments are set for 10/14/2021. So at longest the stop work would last a couple of months.
So, this isn’t a judge taking the anything super seriously, just NASA being proactive. Probably with the knowledge that there’s little harm in waiting a bit longer. Especially since SpaceX just got their first payment for the HLS work and won’t need another for a while (not to mention that they’re working on Starship development anyway).
I finally finished reading the report I linked to above, and it’s even more damning to the Blue Origin and Dynetics case than I first thought. The GAO really dismantles the protest case comprehensively. Several of the arguments can be summed up as “Even if we agreed with X, which we don’t, it wouldn’t matter anyway because Y”. Some examples:
There are complaints that NASA improperly negotiated with SpaceX without also negotiating with BO or Dynetics. Even if they were right, the time to file a protest was before the decision, because NASA clearly noted that they reserved the right to do this. If NASA was wrong here (which they weren’t), BO and Dynetics should have protested as soon as they were put on notice. They didn’t (making it obvious, IMO, that they only cared because they lost, not because they actually thought it was improper).
There are complaints about particular weaknesses assigned or not assigned to the different proposals. The GAO dismisses the complaints, but notes that even if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t add up to enough to make the outcome different. The final ratings would have been the same and the price would have still been a significant deciding factor.
The protestors complain that NASA partially waived SpaceX’s Flight Readiness Review (FRR) requirements. The GAO actually takes this one semi-seriously, and doesn’t quite buy NASA’s argument that SpaceX’s proposal technically fit due to ambiguity in the requirements. However, in any case, the protestors would only have a case if knowledge of the FRR waiver in advance would have changed their proposals. They wouldn’t have, since none of them were depending on a large number of identical refueling flights.
I don’t know if the courts will somehow see things differently, but it doesn’t seem likely to me. The GAO report was written by lawyers and they cited a great deal of case law in their argument. I don’t see why a court would ignore all that and accept that there’s actually a case here. I think BO’s tactics are just to throw everything against the wall and see if it sticks, or if nothing else try to slow down the process and possibly damage SpaceX. At this point, I see Blue Origin as being actively opposed to space development and a negative to the industry. As much as I complain about ULA and other old space, at least they fly.
It seems like you can be the richest man in the world and still be petty and envious.
I don’t think getting to Mars matters all that much but lowering the cost of putting stuff in orbit likely will, so SpaceX/Musk have something going for them. If SpaceX’s work stopped today, there would still be a lot of good done in lowering launch costs and starting to get genuine reusability. As a goal, Mars colonization is a reach. One-trillion-humans-in-space-habitats is the stuff of movies with too much CGI.
Musk seems to be doing it partly for ego reasons (he’s a billionaire) but not only for those reasons. His father was an engineer, a pilot and a sailor. His nerdiness and love for science-fiction novels suggest a genuine interest in space exploration and planetary colonization. Branson and Bezos seem to be doing it only for status now that they have pretty much everything they could want and to be Great Men of History. Musk is influenced by the sentiments of Asimov and Sagan, Branson and Bezos seem to think they’re the protagonist in some kind of Ayn Rand sci-fi novel.
To be fair, I think Bezos has this too. I appreciate that he funded a few new seasons of The Expanse, which is one of the best hard sci-fi shows out there. I don’t know that there was a great financial argument for it, since the show never got a huge audience, so it seemed a bit more like him wanting to do it for his own sake.
Bezos also paid to recover some F-1 engines from the Apollo program that were at the bottom of the ocean, donating them to space museums. Again that appeared to stem from a genuine interest in space history.
I think the problem is that Bezos just didn’t spend the last two decades developing the technical chops to run a space company the way Musk did. He doesn’t understand enough about engines or staging or reentry or anything else to properly take a vision for a new vehicle to production. He hoped to make up the difference by hiring experienced old space people, but it isn’t working out.
But there is an area where Bezos’ experience with Amazon transfers over, and that’s with propaganda, lobbying, and lawsuits. It might not even be his preferred approach, but at this point there aren’t too many other options, besides calling the past 2 decades a waste and rebooting the company. And that still assumes Bezos is capable of learning this stuff, and willing to run BO full time. Bezos isn’t an idiot, so maybe it’s possible. But his $500M yacht and other luxuries suggest that he doesn’t have quite the drive he needs. Musk is living in a $50k prefab house in the arse-end of Texas so that he can run the Starship program in person.
I can’t remember an example, but I thought people had shown that Elon Musk doesn’t know much about engineering but instead just spews what he’s heard other people say.
No, that’s false. If you have a few hours to burn, I’d recommend watching the Everyday Astronaut tour/interview at their Boca Chica pad. Parts 1, 2, and 3. Musk clearly answers a large number of technical questions about Starship on the fly. That’s not something that a parrot can do.
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn’t come just from hanging out with people. You have to crack some books.
It’s possible that Musk was just repeating things he heard way back in 2001, but it’s possible to learn a few things in 20 years.
I’m sure Musk has made a few mistaken statements over the years (and more than a few when it comes to predictions), which people have latched onto as evidence that he doesn’t know anything. That doesn’t carry much weight with me. I once heard Tory Bruno (CEO of the United Launch Alliance) mix up meters per second with kilometers per second (implying that some probe was travelling a significant fraction of the speed of light). But it was just a slip up, like anyone can make. He’s also an experienced rocket guy.
It’s hard to argue with the evidence. SpaceX really is landing rockets on barges and reusing them several times. That’s not something a company can accomplish if their leader is incompetent. And it’s not something anyone else is doing, so there’s nothing to copy.
Musk regularly thanks NASA and his own teams for their support and hard work, also noting that they’re building off the work of others. He’s not doing anything alone, but to bring something like Starship to reality requires a significant grasp of the technical issues.
I guess I should add that there probably are cases where Musk is just repeating something that one of his team leads has said, and either doesn’t get it quite right or doesn’t provide a useful level of detail. Sure, but Musk isn’t designing every nut and bolt. His knowledge is always going to be somewhat approximate and dependent on others. That’s just the nature of a complicated system with a hierarchical organization. Competent leadership needs to grasp the technical issues well enough to make useful decisions about them.
It’s notable that Musk’s two main companies were about chiefly engineering and production. In the case of Bezos, it seemed to be chiefly about sales/marketing/PR. In this video, you can see Bezos being a little too obvious about appearing humble in front of the camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOmsLlZPaxA Musk, I don’t know if it’s out of lack of ability or will, often comes off like an awkward, slightly autistic teenager in front of the camera and he does stuff that’s a little foolish for his image; I can’t picture Bezos smoking pot on the Joe Rogan show.
I’ll grant it does suggest interest in space although it’s still PR-centric.
He’s brilliant. That’s seems pretty much be a requisite for being a tech billionaire. My comment was along the lines of what you say: He seems interested in space as in: Where do you go when you have a half-billion dollar yacht? What’s the next, bigger step? He seems to think it’s space. I think it’s a continuation of his megalomania. For Musk, I can believe that he’s been thinking about Mars since he was a teenager. There’s a quote I quote from Oglaf: “Once I did it for the money. Now I do it with the money.” I think if he hadn’t become a billionaire, he would want to work for a company like SpaceX as an anonymous engineer. For Bezos, I think it’s always going to be about being #1.
Agreed. These are things that you can just throw money at and eventually they will happen. They don’t require any deep knowledge of anything. But they’re an easy way to improve your image. I don’t really have a problem with people doing things that are simultaneously PR stunts and genuinely good, but it’s much less impressive if it doesn’t require any actual work.
Possibly. Or research somewhere. Musk went to Stanford to research supercapacitors, which at the time seemed much more promising for eventual EV use than they are today. (Arguably, Musk’s real reason for going to Stanford was to extend his stay in the US, and end up in Silicon Valley, but nevertheless he was accepted for their PhD program, and seemed to consider Stanford his back-up plan)
I think we can probably ascribe megalomania to both Musk and Bezos (and Branson for that matter). But Bezos, after earning his billions in a boring industry, now has to figure out how to apply it to something more visionary. Musk on the other hand earned his billions doing visionary things. As you mentioned earlier, even if you completely ignore the Mars aspirations, Starship will have a dramatic effect on lowering the cost to orbit and creating industry in space. It’s possible that SpaceX will not even lead the way, but that some other company will figure out how to use launch costs of $100/kg or less to mine asteroids or create space hotels or something else entirely. Cheap launch is a prerequisite for everything else in space.
Weird how “visionary-ness” works. If you’d asked people in the '60s to imagine 2020, they would probably have pictured hitching rocket rides to Mars in the smoking section while casually sexually harassing the flight attendants and would have been dumbfounded if you’d instead told them about people playing games on their phones and legally smoking pot at gay weddings while reminiscing about a black president and wondering if the next one will be a woman of color.
I remember an Arm VP of Technology who once said that he doesn’t look much past 5 years in the future because things will have changed so much by then that you can’t really predict things. I think he has it right but maybe that’s because I’m not a visionary. I find Bezos’ kind of futurism old-fashioned.
Where do you live that that doesn’t happen? In 2019 my town decided my house was worth $100,000 more than it used to be, so they added another $1,500 to my property tax bill.
Flatly untrue. From 2014 to 2018, the 25 richest Americans billionaires paid 13.6 billion dollars in federal income tax. Jeff Bezos, for example, earned an income of 6.5 billion between 2006 and 2018, and paid 1.4 billion in federal taxes.
The demagoguss on the left pushing the ‘billionaires pay almost no tax’ line are confusing income with wealth. Bezos’ riches come from the holding of Amazon stock. So long as he holds it, he doesn’t pay tax. If he cashes it in and spends the money, he pays tax on it. Just like you and me.
When you see a stat that a billionaire ‘earned’ X amount and paid no tax or paid a tiny percentage of tax, it’s almost alaays because what was ‘earned’ was not income but simply unrealized gains in a stock portfolio. ProPublica a left-wing think tank, came up with a bunch of crazy-low 'billionaire effective tax rates by dividing their tax paid by their increased wealth instead of their actual income. A bogus way of looking at taxes,
If Amazon stock collapses, Jeff Bezos could wind up broke, while never benefiting from the billions in unrealized gains he once had. That’s why you don’t tax unrelized stock gains. But the minute he sells stock to buy rich toys, it becomes income and he pays tax on it at the same rate as everyone else.
If you think the answer is to tax unrealized stock holdings, better think through the implications of that. For one, it woild destroy capital investment. It would be horribly unfair. How would you like to see your stock investments go up $50,000, be forced to pay tax on it, then have it revert to the mean afterwards before you had an opportunity to sell? You would have paid tax on nothing and lost money. There would be little incentive to hold stock in such a system. And everyone who builds a company would be at major risk of paying tax every time the company was assessed as increasing in value, even if the owner is undercapitalized and broke. It would be ridiculous.
The time to tax someone is when they take money out of investments for their personal use. And that’s what we do. Billionaires pay that tax like everyone else.
This more-or-less happened to a bunch of people via the AMT and incentive stock options. People could recover their losses, but only very slowly (often not in their lifetime). There were ways to avoid the problem, but only by losing the advantages of ISO options. Silicon Valley companies don’t really give options anymore for this and other reasons. Pretty dumb.
Well, 1.4 billion in federal taxes on an income of 6.5 billion is an effective tax rate of 21.5%, which is not particularly high. Non-billionaires with incomes as low as $225K could easily have a federal effective tax rate higher than 21.5%.
You’re right that it’s not true that “every person on this forum” is paying taxes at a higher effective rate than 21.5%, though. And also that taxing income and taxing wealth increase are two different things.
Yeah, this is the part that really galls people in my income bracket. I don’t begrudge lower-income people paying low-to-no taxes, nor do I want to tax billionaires into oblivion. However, when I’m paying >30% Fed taxes and they’re paying 20%, it’s certainly frustrating. And even worse when they suggest that capital gains rates (the only tax they do pay) be reduced to 0. Back when Mitt Romney was suggesting this, I did some math and figured there were years when I (with a 6-figure income) would have paid more tax in absolute dollars that Mitt would have with an 8 or 9 digit income, had he actually managed to reduce cap gains to 0. Capital gains taxes should scale to near parity with ordinary income at very high income levels.