Well, duh. The point is that as a society we’ve chosen to starve this source of innovation by prioritizing tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s why I made this comment that you chose to ignore:
What could NASA now be doing if we hadn’t kneecapped its budget to placate Grover Norquist? I don’t know, but I bet it would have been more impressive than shooting a billionaire into space on his own private dildo-craft.
I didn’t ignore it; it’s not something I thought was worth disputing. I think taxes should be increased on the ultra-wealthy as well (though taxes on unrealized gains are dumb).
What I dispute is the idea that you can point to this particular end result and conclude that something is wrong with the way NASA has been operated. Ok, so one billionaire has built a dildo-mobile. At the same time, their research and commercial outreach enabled SpaceX to exist, and NASA and others have reaped rewards from that partnership. And that’s just the latest in many decades of research and development. One could argue that their research underlies virtually all of modern aerospace in the West.
So yes, I would like to see NASA get more funding (though I disagree that a NASA-centered effort is the best means of reaching Mars). Billionaires also aren’t the biggest obstacle to fighting climate change.
Not at all. His wealth comes from unrealized gain on his Amazon stock.
You likely have unrealized gain on your home, and quite possibly stocks.
No one wants people taxed on unrealized gain.
Do you believe he pulled off some magic trick to realize a $5.5B space mission using only unrealized gains? Be serious. The man controls a king’s ransom of liquid wealth.
And he paid taxes on whatever money he took out of Amazon stock. Here’s the ProPublica article that much of the recent furor came from. For the period they cover, they show Bezos as having $4.22B in income and paying $0.97B in tax. That’s a 23% tax rate.
The rest of the increase was unrealized. If Bezos wants to cash that out (and he probably will have to, since Blue Origin is still a money pit), he’ll have to pay tax on it. But not until he does so.
Now, personally I think 23% is still way too low, given that I and many other middle-class people have to pay much higher rates. I think capital gains rates should probably converge on normal income tax rates as you get to very high incomes. But it’s not like it’s zero. It only looks like it’s close to zero if you include the unrealized gains.
It was not a $5.5 billion space mission. The cost to fly on New Shepard is somewhere around $250,000, so that may be taxed as a personal benefit. .
Blue Origin is not a personal vanity project. It is a corporation with a product and services to sell. New Shepard is only a small part of it. Blue Origin is making the engines for ULA’s Vulxan rocket, and they are currently building New Glenn, a heavy lift commercial orbital rocket.
New Shepard has already earned $100 million in ticket sales
The only thing Bezos might be on the hook for is the cost of his ride, unless he can declare a business reason for it. If he sells Blue Origin, he will have to pay taxes onbthe gain, if there is any. Just like everyone else.
Elon Musk started out beng called a rich guy playing with rockets that blow up. Now, between ISS cargo and astronaut missions and other NASA launches he is saving taxpayers billions per year.
He’s saving the space industry a whole a lot more, and through rideshare is making space research accessible to universities and smaller private firms. And Starlink will do more for rural internet access than the Biden administration’s $100 billion rural broadband infrastructure project.
Well, maybe someday.
They are judging a system in beta test, with about 10% of the satellites up. They already have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and the full constellation will handle many millions.
Why the cuurent beta test state is relevant is beyond me. And the reviewer says he pays $200/mo for rural broadband. Starlink cuts that in half. And if the guy is on satellite now, it’s geostationary with horrific latency. Starlink competes with ground cable for latency.
Yes, all your remarks are just echoing what the author of that article said, so I don’t think there’s any disagreement about the specs here.
I think the fundamental point is that Starlink isn’t an inimitable overwhelming triumph of our current “free enterprise” system so much as an indictment of it.
That’s a strange takeaway. Rural customers don’t have good broadband because it’s very expensive to run fiber for long distances. Corporations have decided they’re unprofitable and the government has decided (for the most part) that the resources are better spent elsewhere.
Starlink fills that gap nicely. Rural customers had been using geostationary satellite internet, or flaky ground wireless, but that left a gap for low-altitude satellites to move in. A couple players have tried previously, not found resounding success, but proved the concept. SpaceX drove costs down further and now seems to have found a winning combination.
It’s true that there was a lack of competition, but again that’s because it’s fundamentally expensive to serve rural customers. A lot of them don’t get water or sewer either, but for some reason there’s not much uproar about that.
That’s the point, AFAICT. There’s a certain amount of bait-and-switch in simultaneously pitching “Market systems are innately superior because governments can’t accomplish difficult things like Task X cheaply!” and “Well, of course a market system isn’t going to accomplish Task X, it’s too expensive to be profitable.”
IIRC as a former rural inhabitant of an area without municipal water or sewer, that’s at least partly because for very many rural residents there are feasible standalone alternatives to networked utilities: namely, wells and septic systems. You can’t drill your own internet in your backyard.
I have serious problems with Comcast and others due to their effective collusion in urban markets, but that’s not what’s going on in rural areas. Infrastructure, whether fiber or water or whatever is just expensive. Sometimes it gets subsidized, sometimes not. But regardless, it’s not the customer paying those costs, it’s everyone else. Maybe in some cases we decide that’s worth it, but there’s always a limit.
True, but geostationary internet still exists. It kinda sucks, but wells and septic systems also kinda suck. Starlink is great because it brings people up to nearly landline speed and latency. It’s more expensive than cable in urban areas, but much less expensive in sufficiently rural areas.
Getting back to the OP, this came out recently:
From the open letter:
Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2B to get the program back on track right now. This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up.
Blue Origin will, at its own cost, contribute the development and launch of a pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit of the lunar descent element to further retire development and schedule risks. This pathfinder mission is offered in addition to the baseline plan of performing a precursor uncrewed landing mission prior to risking any astronauts to the Moon. This contribution to the program is above and beyond the over $1B of corporate contribution cited in our Option A proposal that funds items such as our privately developed BE-7 lunar lander engine and indefinite storage of liquid hydrogen in space. All of these contributions are in addition to the $2B waiver of payments referenced above.
Finally, Blue Origin will accept a firm, fixed-priced contract for this work, cover any system development cost overruns, and shield NASA from partner cost escalation concerns.
Well, that’s getting interesting. One of the reasons the Blue Origin moon landing proposal failed was because of the perception that BO had no skin in the game. In comparison, the SpaceX proposal used Starship, which is the center of their future spaceflight efforts. They’re developing it anyway and will have billions invested. The BO proposal didn’t have anything like that.
So Bezos promises to chip in $2B, do additional pathfinding work, and shield NASA from cost overruns. Which is credible since Bezos can in fact afford to do so. I’m still not a fan of their proposal, but this does close the gap a bit.
See this article [Edit: already linked by Kimstu]:
Look, I know you’re hyped up about Starlink. I feel you. I also wish I could tweet a photo of Dishy in my yard to every telecom CEO in the game and tell them to try harder.
But The Verge has long had a hard rule against reviewing products based on potential because the sad truth is that most tech products never, ever live up to their potential. And Starlink, judged on its capabilities right now, is simply not a real competitor to the long, long coax wire running from my house to the local cable company fiber plant. It’s not even a great competitor to my data-capped-and-throttled “unlimited” AT&T 5G service because I can reasonably work from home on that connection and I really can’t with Starlink. And in the end, Starlink’s traffic has to run over fiber in the ground anyway.
It feels like we should all be more honest about what this thing can do, what we hope it can do in the future, and why our existing networks aren’t doing that already.
Yes, I read the article. There are better, more technical ones out there. I’ve said this before in numerous ways, but let me repeat:
Starlink is not a replacement for cable. Starlink is not a replacement for fiber. Starlink is not for people who hate Comcast. Starlink is for people who wish Comcast were there to hate.
And for further clarity:
Starlink is in beta. They literally call it the “better than nothing beta.” Only about 4% of the constellation exists right now, and due to the nature of orbital mechanics that 4% cannot be concentrated in certain areas. It means that people only see 4% of the satellites that they will eventually see. Right now, people are generally only in view of a single satellite, and if that satellite passes behind a tree then you lose your connection. This will not be a problem when 25 satellites are in view.
Genuine question: Do those people in rural areas have cell phone coverage?
If they do, they must have at least 4G internet access. I don’t know what the cost of that is, but 4G should be adequate for most purposes, except perhaps HD video streaming, and 5G should soon be available everywhere.
I’m in a rural area.
I have DSL service from the phone company over the old phone lines, which is by modern standards very slow when it’s working, which it isn’t always.
I can hotspot off a Verizon phone. In this area, that is at best about as fast as the DSL, sometimes slighly faster; but it’s often slower, and sometimes so slow that even basically text pages with Java turned off or mostly off time out before they’ll load.
Satellite dish service is available, but I know people who tried that and went back to DSL because at least the DSL doesn’t go down when it rains. (Usually. Thunderstorm outages are pretty common; but that’s usually due to a tree falling on something someplace, or a lightning strike somewhere, not just to the rain.)
I am not in favor of filling up the sky with satellites in an attempt to solve this problem, as that seems likely to cause its own problems. I have some hope for eventual extensions of the fiberoptic line the county’s planning to put in.
Well, let’s not get silly about this. No, we wouldn’t have either of these things if Jeff Bezos paid more tax.
Humanity’s problem is that we don’t know how to get along with each other. Outer space is irrelevant. We aren’t raising our children like John Lennon would have us. Instead we’ve raised selfish pride seeking consumer gnats.
Musk, Zuckerman, Bezos are not doing us good. Jimmy Carter is more my hero.
Um, okay…John Lennon abandoned his first child, and doted on the second, at least for the camera.