Yeah, but he wrote a great song about mind games and love is the answer.
SpaceX’s next satellites will be implementing peer meshing between satellites using laser connections. This will eventually make it the fastest global internet connection there is. One of SpaceX’s profit sources will be very expensive dedicated connections to stock exchanges around the world.
In other SpaceX news, Musk says they are planning to have a fully integrated, orbital Starship sitting on its Superheavy booster at the launch pad by Aug 4, nine days from now. It will be the largest rocket ever built.
No date on when it will launch, as there will be extensive ground testing.
The speed at which his team is working is astonishing.
Just because I accept that billionaires contribute to some degree doesn’t mean I have to think they are a net benefit to society. I personally believe that, without billionaries, we could have the same amount of wealth, spread out better, with few if any compromises. You’d just need to combine more people to do things, or have more companies making things.
I won’t say that competition spurs innovation. But it does spur price reduction. It’s not so much about making things worse for the other person. It’s just about making more money. Any money your competition is making is money you could make instead. Price reduction can also spur some level of innovation, too. But it’s hardly the only driver of such.
Anyways, my point is that the competition would help bring down prices, actually making things better. The more billionaires, the less competition, as they arrange it where those with less money can’t compete. That’s even better for their bottom line than having to outcompete them.
That said, none of this made me get angry about the space launch stuff specifically. I do think it’s incredibly stupid, and do not think it will spur innovation. I do think they’re being dicks. But the impact is so little that I can’t really work up any outrage. Maybe in a world that was better, I could. But this particular thing doesn’t kill people or anything.
I actually think it’s more something to make fun of them for. They didn’t go to outer space in any real sense. They experienced zero gravity like a bunch of other people have done. Due to the other stuff, I don’t feel bad for that, so it can actually be a bit of fun.
Possibly more to the point: it spurs quality.
Price reduction by itself often actually reduces quality. It’s usually cheaper to produce junk and/or poor service than to do a good job of whatever’s being done. But if the customer can go elsewhere: that’s an incentive to provide better service and better goods.
Just to remind us: Exactly which innovations have been spurred by ‘competition’?
I’ve heard this claim, even from my econ days, but it’s rare to have a specific innovation linked to a specific competition cited in support of this statement. So… what are they?
I asked this question on Econ Twitter and the most serious answer I got was ‘Netflix’, which itself is merely a business model which took advantage of two US Government created entities: the US Post Office and the Internet.
You’ve set up a strawman. All innovations are a result of a long sequence of incremental advancements. Every apparent innovation can be described as “well, they just combined X with Y”. But that was only possible because X and Y individually went through a long series of improvements. That’s true of airplanes and iPhones and reusable rockets and everything else.
My observation from being in the tech industry is that everything is a thousand or a million times worse than it should be, and that humans are really, really bad about understanding how bad things are and how to improve them. The only way out of this rut is to have some external comparison.
My company has had significant competition for all of its life, but on occasions we’ve pulled out ahead for a time. What happens? It’s not quite that we get lazy, but we flail a bit. We work on unproductive things, things that might seem nice in theory but aren’t actually valuable to users. We can get away with this because there’s no external pressure. And because of this, actual improvements slow down.
The competition keeps us honest. If the competition hits a performance or efficiency target, we both know it’s possible and that we need to achieve that as well. There’s usually no one “innovation” that can be identified, just a zillion small improvements that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
It works in both directions, of course. All the competitors have the same problem. But they have different cultures, different specialties, and manage to avoid the groupthink problem by being separate. The diversity gives the technology as a whole a better ability to move forward.
As a result, in the time that I’ve been there, our product really did get around 1000x to 4000x faster, and far more capable at the same time. Much of that was due to outside improvements (also due to competitive forces), but much was not. And we got stuck in so many ruts along the way that we definitely would be nowhere close to that level without competition.
Papa John’s Garlic Sauce
Jeff Bezos and his company have invented a whole slew of processes and inventions to drive down the cost and improve the efficiency of delivering goods from a central location. Have you seen his automated robot warehouses? They are amazing.
I worked for a large industrial company. We talked constantly about the competition, and how to take market share from them. By inventing things. I have my name on several patents, all done in competition with other company’s products.
Early cell phones were gigantic and dumb. Endless rounds of competition drove down the size and improved functionality. Qualcomm spent huge amounts of money on new chipsets to enable cheap low powered spread spectrum communications, purely so they could gain market share over competing tech.
Elon Musk is disrupting the launch industry, To compete, other launch providers are inventing like crazy. ULA’s Vulcan design was modified to have reusable engines in response. New startups in small launchers have responded with 3D printed rockets that can be launched cheaply, and one of them is now building a larger reusable booster.
Part of the rapid advance in space is a result of competition between Bezos and Musk. Or was, until Musk ate his lunch. Branson and Bezos are competing for space tourism, which has generated lots of innovation from both.
In any industry, every time a tender goes out for bid, companies compete with each other to win it. That competition includes inventing things to lower cost or improve quality. I can give many examples if you would like.
The auto industry is in fierce competition. All of them work tirelessly to produce new models with features that beat the other manufacturers. ABS, air bags, GPS navigation, rear cameras, collision avoidance sensors, etc. All appeared in cars for the ‘rich’ in an attempt to win market share, and eventually trickled down to the rest of us as other car manufactuers responded and prices came down.
Your iPhone or iPad or Android phone is filled with patented hardware invented to compete in the market. Look at the state of camera tech. One company comes up with a high res sensor, and everyone follows. Another invents a chip to implement low-cost LIDAR, purely to compete against other phone. Other companies respond with their own new unique features, and so it goes.
Look what competition has done to improve battery tech.
I could go on forever. Competition and the freedom to act on it and available capital to invest is what drives invention and innovation.
I’d like to hear some opinions on the story I’m linking here. Is it accurate to say that taxpayers will pay to defend this? Does anyone know?
From the article:
In a court filing on Friday, Blue Origin said it continued to believe that two providers were needed to build the landing system, which will carry astronauts down to the Moon’s surface as early as 2024.
It also accused Nasa of “unlawful and improper evaluation” of its proposals during the tender process.
Nasa also cited the proven record of orbital missions by Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm as a factor in the award. Cost is also thought to have played a role: SpaceX’s bid was the lowest-priced by some distance.
In July, Mr Bezos offered to cover up to $2bn of Nasa’s costs in order to be reconsidered for the contract, but he was rebuffed.
US watchdog the Government Accountability Office (GAO), meanwhile, rejected a complaint from Blue Origin and defence contractor Dynetic, saying that Nasa had not “acted improperly” in handing the contract to just one firm.
Hearing from an expert would be nice. My expectation though is that yes, taxpayers will pay for the defense. The DoJ has a page on attorney’s fees, and my non-expert reading is that the “American Rule” (each party pays their own fees) is the default, and the only exceptions are via specific statues. These statues are largely (entirely?) there to encourage suits against the government, and authorize payments to parties that prevail in a suit against the US. I don’t know if any allow for the reverse.
Hopefully, the courts will simply throw out the lawsuit for the nonsense that it is. You can read the GAO (Government Accountability Office) ruling here, if you like:
They tear the Blue Origin and Dynetics arguments to shreds. Among the juicy bits (page 68):
For example, Blue Origin complains that NASA impermissibly relied on an unstated evaluation factor when it assigned SpaceX a strength for its “crew-centric” design that focuses on crew safety, health, and comfort. Specifically, the evaluators credited SpaceX’s design, noting several features including:
[a bunch of redacted stuff]
We think this representative example is exactly why discretion is due when NASA is seeking innovative research and development approaches to fulfilling important scientific and engineering objectives.
BO is whining that how dare NASA take crew comfort and safety into account when they didn’t specifically say that was important. The GAO rightly points out that NASA always had the right to some discretion in their evaluation. I can’t see a court contradicting that.
I look forward to learning if the Starship medbay contains a holographic doctor.
Blue Origin seems to be on a mission to destroy any goodwill it had in the space community. Trying to legally monoever themselves through a failed bid process will not end well for them.
They should focus their efforts on executing better. SpaceX’s proposal was really the only one that had a chance of getting Artemis to the Moon in anything like the proposed timeline and budget.
Also, Blue Origin is having a hell of a time finishing their BE-4 engine, and New Glenn is years behind schedule and no one really even knows its etatus. Blue Origin needs to stop whining and get its act together.
It’s obvious in retrospect, but this really does highlight that Musk had a far better long-term strategy than Bezos from the beginning. Musk developed the Falcon 1 almost completely on his own dime. He knew that to be taken seriously, you had to get to orbit. Anyone can do suborbital bullshit. Only a small number of players can go to orbit. From there, SpaceX got ~$300M in seed money (from NASA’s COTS program) to develop the Falcon 9, which they did successfully. From there, they got more money to develop Dragon via the CRS program. And from there, they were largely self-sustaining, but the massive credibility they earned also got their foot in the door for CRS-2 / Crew Dragon, the current HLS program, and numerous other contracts.
Bezos thought he could just skip all that and buy or lobby his way in. And maybe that works if you’re Boeing and you’ve established yourself (cough) in other ways. But for a complete nothingburger of a company that is late on the deliverable to their one customer? It’s a joke.
Bezos apparently had a completely different read of the BO motto “Gradatim Ferociter” than the rest of us. Read charitably, it implies the same sort of start-small-but-build-on-past-successes approach that SpaceX took. But apparently it really means to slow-roll the entire development cycle and hope nobody notices.
I do still have a small worry that BO will somehow slow down the HLS contract with an injunction or the like, the way Amazon did with the JEDI contract (awarded to Microsoft, then cancelled after an Amazon lawsuit). But it’s not a big worry since there was no failed GAO protest in that case.
Thanks so much for the replies everyone. Bezos is definitely not doing his reputation any favors, in my eyes anyway. I’m eager to see how this goes.
It really is amazing how quickly BO trashed their reputation. I should emphasize that my own negative opinion is towards their management, not their engineers or other workers. Aerospace, and especially areas like engine development, is not a huge community and it’s largely the same pool of people working on the BO engines vs. SpaceX’s. It’s the upper management that is pulling this garbage, and by all accounts the engineers are embarrassed that the company is acting this way.
Bezos can still salvage things, at the expense of several years of humility while they try to build the reputation that they haven’t yet earned. He certainly has the money to see it through. But is is likely that Bezos will admit this and eat some crow? It seems unlikely.
The phallic appearance of the rocket didn’t help, and was probably deliberate too.
It’s also worth noting that protests and lawsuits are not, by themselves, a bad thing. SpaceX is no stranger to them. For instance, way back in 2004, SpaceX protested a contract between NASA and Kistler Aerospace. NASA killed the contract and pretty much killed Kistler with it. However, in that case the GAO informed NASA that the protest had merit and that they were likely siding with SpaceX. Healthy protests are good for the industry.
But this one was obviously doomed even before the GAO got at it, and from reading the GAO report they agree that there’s zero merit to it. We laugh at their protests and lawsuits because they’re meritless, not because there’s something inherently wrong with protesting.
Yes, I agree with that. Thank you again. You’ve been very informative.
And these days even Boeing is not doing that great at it… there’s for sure a lot more coughing going on in Seat-- I mean, Chicago.
Indeed. Boeing positioned themselves as the dependable alternative to SpaceX when it came to crew capsule development. Sure, they’re more expensive, but you get what you pay for, right? But they’re making rookie mistakes, like software that didn’t properly sync the mission time, or valves that corrode themselves closed when they leak nitrogen tetroxide into the humid Florida air (Florida humid? Who knew?!).
Reading up on how McDonnell-Douglas management essentially took over Boeing in a “reverse takeover” was enlightening. Moving headquarters to 2000 miles away from engineering has some fairly predictable consequences, though not always apparent in the short term.