Hacker News Reader

You're the one turning it into a competition, in reality it is simply two separate companies doing different awesome things. Yes, obviously, going into orbit is harder than not doing so. But going to space sub-orbitally is still very difficult and cool, and the only reason there's a negative spin on BO's achievements is because people feel the need to compare it with SpaceX as if there can be only one.

Just be excited for the positive direction of spaceflight in general. Everyone benefits from both companies doing well, even if SpaceX is ahead of everyone else for awhile.

>Just be excited for the positive direction of spaceflight in general.

How about don't tell people in the comments section of HN how to feel about a story posted here?

Bezos is also turning it into a competition: https://mobile.twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/6791166363103600...

I wish I had the power to turn that into a competition, but I don't think they need me for that :)

Jocking aside, I don't think there can only be one. I am comparing BO and SpaceX the same way I'd compare google and apple. In the same industry but not doing exactly the same thing. And when Apple tried to go on one of Google's turf with maps, they sucked. When Google tried to go do phones, at first they sucked. Comparison is natural and welcome.

Here, it feels to me that BO is putting themselves up for comparison for no reason.

As far as the positive direction of spaceflight, I think that transparency is key. Space exploration needs more accountability and trust that ever has been available before _in_any_industry_ever_. And there, so far SpaceX is winning hands down, including versus the old players (soyouz, ariane, ULA...). When SpaceX says "one of our struts was structurally deficient, broke down, made the rocket lose equilibrium and ultimately explode", they're also telling their competitors "Watch this. We've learned it the hard way.". Same with fog icing the leg lock. In the grand scheme of things they are making space safer, and not only for their customers. I only see bragging and borderline (note the "borderline") bullying on BO's side

BO is making it a competition by clearly trying to one up SpaceX with the timing of their marketing releases etc.

I agree on the form (SpaceX is much more open and less advertish about its tries) and on how late BO is compared to SpaceX' technology.

But I feel that would be OK if BO hadn't mentioned space tourism in the past.

First, getting an assessment of how safe this "holiday travel trip" is compared to going to some exotic place by plane requires a hundred times the number of tests they have made. Compare their two runs to the number of kilometers that Google has driven their autonomous cars.

According to Wikipedia, in 2006, they claimed to go commercial in 2010, which tells me they are phenomenally overoptimistic. In the case of space exploration, this is really, really dangerous. Were they to go commercial too soon, a catastrophe implicating civilians could cause a space exploration winter.

Musk's vision is more rational. First, control as much of the solar system as possible while putting as few human lives at risk as possible, then, when civilians can live sustainably in another planet, orchestrate a colonization.

One part of the article that gives me hope is this:

> We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle.

Hopefully, they'll focus on that instead.

> they are phenomenally overoptimistic

Musk is no better at this; r/spacex notoriously jokes about Elon time being actually Mars time.

Why does this have to be a zero-sum competition? Can't folks just be excited about space tourism? SpaceX and Blue Origins are basically different industries right now, with slightly complimentary tech.

you're right, it doesn't have to be a zero sum game. They could be cooperating. Only the propensity of either of the competitors to claim their success without acknowledging the other's advancement makes it look like a winner-takes-all game.

As far as space tourism, I feel like it's just that : tourism. Reserved to more and more concentrated elite and pretty short sighted. There's no problem with being excited about it, but it's better to also do something meaningful about it, other than signing a check and posting some cool instagram picture of your 30 seconds vacation. Even if it's just understanding how much effort was put in getting you there.

Marketplace competition and non-zero-sumness are not mutually exclusive, at least not if you are a capitalist. The total money spent on spaceflight will be larger with both companies in the market than with either one alone, therefore it is not a zero-sum game.

As for acknowledging each others advancements - you don't see Sony or Dell going out of their way to mention Apple, for obvious reasons. This is normal behavior between competitors. I don't see why people are making so much out of Bezos' tweet; it was just a stupid joke.

Maybe because expectations of friendliness are higher when talking about space industry. It still feels more like few entities working towards the same grand goal than companies competing with each other.

The jabs Elon and Bezos are exchanging seemed funny to me at first, but now they seem kind of serious, which makes me uncomfortable. I expected they'll have fun together, not the resentment that seems to be flying between them.

> As far as space tourism,

space tourism will become much cheaper very soon, the last 3 weeks we have had massive accomplishments in space. To get comfortable going to another planet, surely people will need to be normalized to the idea of space, which is what the value of space tourism is, besides the obvious superlative nature of it.

I personally doubt that. No matter what, the fuel will still cost in the $100k, plus the marginal cost of the vehicle, launch authorization, coordination on the ground and having an emergency team ready to dispatch at a moment's notice.

That stuff costs money and if you're only launching 5 people at once, it's still a high sticker for each launch. While "regular" vacation scales pretty well with the number of people you're going with, it's not going to be the case for space exploration.

On a regular vacation, most of the cost overhead for each additional person is the transportation cost. Here, the vacation _is_ the trip

I used to be critical of BO for exactly the same reasons, but this video changed my views, because I'm pretty sure SpaceX and BO roadmaps are going to be completely different:

- SpaceX wants to enter the traditional rocket market, and use that money to slowly but surely extend into reusing rockets. This means that the most important thing is actually putting stuff into orbit, which also means that they won't do any launch that has less than a Falcon 1 capability. SpaceX has so fare managed to land 1 rocket but not reuse it.

- BO wants to enter the space tourism and do that through rocket reuse. Since there is no space tourism market yet it all has to be funded privately though. However space tourism is an entirely different beast; the requirement, for the moment, will only be to hover over the Karman line and glide back to earth safely, which is much easier than what SpaceX is doing, which means they can concentrate their efforts on other more important parts. And we've seen that in the video: they've been able to reuse a rocket, ie do what everyone is chasing, and do it successfully.

Elon Musk wants to colonize the Solar System; he's in for the very long term. BO "just" wants to send people high and get them back to earth for cheap. BO has a much more attainable goal, but they have made a bigger dent into that by reusing their first rocket.

A big dent in a thimble is nothing alongside even a small dent in a truck.

You're not all wrong, but BO is being disingenuous, as top poster said. They're trying to make it look like they're ahead of SpaceX, which is laughable. If SpaceX wished, they have been doing years ago what BO is doing now. But they were trying to accomplish something more meaningful than a tourist resort.

Someday, they will be history books written about SpaceX alone. The same will never be true of Blue Origin.

Thats exactly what upsets me, not what BO is doing, but that they're so obviously trying to take advantage of the SpaceX hype and appear to be ahead of them.

Oh, and what about the fact that they have total control on the location and time of the launch ? Meaning they basically control weather to an accuracy no one launching anything useful into space has.

This is precisely what you want for space tourism, though: control over variables to ensure high margins of safety.

Even the format of the video itself screams "vaporware" to me. It looks like a trailer for a bad action movie, where some spacey something goes to space, separates and lands back in 15 seconds.

Maybe what you want for space tourism, though. You want as wide an audience as possible. Most folks don't know the difference between BO and Falcon 9. Most don't know the difference between a suborbital hop and achieving full orbital velocity. People keep buying tickets to Michael Bay movies. If we can get some of that money for reusable space vehicle development, seems good to me.

2 very good points. It's just that I'm probably not the target audience for any of their PR

If Blue Origin never takes this beyond a little pogo jump to the Karaman line, then SpaceX gets the last laugh.

If they do scale this to orbit and succeed, then good for them! It's not disingenuous, and we all win.

I don't see much to be upset about here. /popcorn.gif

I'm upset, but very little, and it's because of broken expectations - I thought better of both Elon and Bezos. Otherwise, as you said, both succeeding is a net win for humanity, so I cheer both.

Blue Origin has absolutely no intention, zero, nada, nil, to scale this.

Intention or not...

"The BE-4 is our fourth-generation liquid rocket engine, made to take us into orbital space and beyond. Using the latest design and manufacturing techniques, it’s made for both commercial and government missions."

https://www.blueorigin.com/technology#engine_stories_2

I agree, here's the comparison of what BO is doing compared to SpaceX. http://i.imgur.com/Z81NgAk.png

That compares things location wise, but it misses out entirely on comparing the speeds, the difference of speed is a huge element in comparing the two efforts, in fact it is the distinguishing factor.

Randall Munroe explains this very nicely in his piece on Orbital Speed[1]:

> But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.

> To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast…The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second. Only a fraction of a rocket's energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed.

Highly recommended.

1: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Nah, I watched the video. There's nothing disingenuous about it. You're simply turning it into a nerd fight. Microsoft vs Apple. iOS vs Android. SpaceX vs Blue Origin. I'm glad to see two companies working on the problem going at it from different paths. I hope they 're both successful.

But the critical function for both concepts is re-usability, with a reasonably fast turn-around.

Going to orbit with payload is no doubt hard, but has been done by 11 countries, not counting that within the USA multiple manufacturers have build rockets for NASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_orbital_laun...)

Re-usable rockets had never been done before (except perhaps the Space Shuttle, although a different concept). This is the 0->1, and now Blue Origin can work at incrementally flying higher with larger payloads.

Certainly not to take away from what Space-X has done - they've set many records themselves and operating commercial launches, which BO looks to still need time to do.