Is that line even close to true? Last I heard Blue Origin was years away from revenue and far behind SpaceX in terms of capability and manufacturing.
http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/52/1600x800/landscape-14508878... http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/52/1450888612-bevsx.jpg
Even in an ASDS landing, it exceeds the Kármán line. I think the typical apogee is around 120-130 km.
Stage sep happens below the line, however.
It's not about the amount of thrust. It's about being able to carry enough fuel to sustain that thrust long enough, without the weight of the fuel making the rocket too heavy to lift high enough to reach orbit.
Fuel is heavy, and most of it is spent on... lifting fuel.
Having a nuclear explosion for example behind the rocket would surely be enough to push it into space... even on Jupiter.
Not quite, it's all about mass flow.
Musk and Bezos are both people I wouldn't bet against, but they're so drastically different in their styles. Musk is flashy, but gets shit done. Bezos knows how to get shit done quietly... and suddenly he's dominated and bought everything around you.
Amazon is successful because they are fine with taking losses, only just recently making a small amount of profit compared to their scale.
That may just be bloviating on his part, but it does seem at least sensible on the surface.
His biography definitely seemed to emphasize keeping SpaceX private until Mars starts to unfold
Being public means that the company is transparent, not that it is out of control.
Musk doesn't want to be beholden to shareholders because their interests (profit) might not align with his objectives (Mars). Presumably Bezos does not fear any such misalignment of interests between himself and his shareholders.
it depends on who the investors/share holders are and the balance between lots of small investors and a few large investors.
as long as investors see a way to make money out of the ceo (dividends or rock-star growth pushing share price up) they are happy.
and all of that pushes thinking towards making targets for the quarter or year.
and if it get's bad enough -> not enough money being made -> people being put on the board to mind things -> eventual ousting.
do you want a visionary to spend their time thinking of the next great idea or how to keep the money people happy?
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The least creative person has enough ideas to bankrupt even the biggest company if you start a team to implement them all as the idea occurs (a car obviously takes more people than a paper notepad, but you should expect to have all those ideas)
A visionary who never thinks about money will eventually run out, or worse bounce between ideas and never finish one. The person who only thinks about money will not invest in the things required to continue making money.
I've heard it stated that you need a visionary CEO and a close second who is a financial realist. The visionary has lots of great ideas, the financial realist reigns them in and forces the visionary to choose which vision(s) to focus on and finish; and let the others go. This works great until the visionary CEO steps down (dies, retires...), when you put the realist second in charge all the visionary projects are stopped, for a couple quarters the company makes more money, but there are no visionary things in the pipe so the company dies a slow death.
Amazon's reference point is Wal-Mart. They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business.
Another good comparison in Microsoft in 80's and 90's. MS dominated over IBM, Apple and others several decades with sup-par product everybody hated by attacking and destroying potential competitors, not by improving products.
Bezos knows what he is doing.
If you sink all of your profits into expansion, then on the books you made zero profit. If you made zero profit, you pay zero taxes. This is a common tactic with farmers. They use this year's returns to buy next year's supplies. If amazon stopped growing and suddenly reaped their profits, there would be a big tax bill to go with it.
It applies to at least: MSDOS, Windows, Office and most of its products, Internet Explorer, SQL Server
In fact it was so well known that's how things worked, it was a saying that they only finally got things right by version three.
MS-NET, LAN Manager and MS/IBM joint effort with OS/2 LAN Server were all inferior to Netware. MS battled decades against Novell with inferior products and shady market practices eating their profits. Finally Novell was taken down and crumbled when networking became a core system component in PC operating systems.
Throwing money against to superior product from smaller competitor until you can eat their lunch is proven tactic.
That seems... reasonable.
The switch to touch screen and adverts all over your library & store is really jarring. So much so that my tech friends now just buy second hand kindle 4s when their old ones break.
It's possible that library lock in will stop them migrating away from kindles when the supply of kindle v4s runs out but not I think certain.
Some purists would prefer to avoid buying DRM'd products in the first place (and I do when I have an alternative), but this is "second best" to me - I'll tolerate easily breakable DRM, but not one I can't remove.
The upside is reduced lock-in - it may affect usability (the Kindle app is still the best reader app I've used for Android as well - if anyone has recommendations for any actually usable ebook reader Android apps I'm all ears) but I know I can read all my books on any device, using free/open apps.
The only real benefit of kindle is the library selection and prices. The ereader software itself is mediocre.
I thought this tired narrative was almost over? For decades Amazon chose to invest in infrastructure and logistics.
Now they're "making a small amount of profit compared to their scale"? Who's at that same scale setting the bar for profit? Remember that "scale" doesn't equal revenue.
I love EC2 but not a big fan of their other more advanced services. I tried Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE... for IaaS and they just didn't have the same richness of features and flexibility as EC2.
http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/59123ef6dd089554...
Frankly I'm surprised SpaceX hasn't had more mishaps given the breakneck speed at which they operate.
It's popular in some circles (not directed to your comment, here) to lionize Musk as some exemplar of how the government sucks and to promote privatized space exploration but that's just not in line with reality as it actually is.
SpaceX is currently launching space shuttle sized payloads for a price that is over 40 times less than the shuttle, and less than half the cost of other private competitors, and at a cadence none of them have ever achieved.
Re-use is the key launch technology of the future and its greatest and only commercial application has been done by SpaceX.
The extreme majority of government research for space launches has occurred since 1950. The extraordinary resources put into the US space program, including the research necessary, makes the Nazi efforts look hilariously trivial by comparison.
The bit about Nazis is entirely irrelevant.
> the achievements you note have little or nothing to do with their status as a private company and almost everything to do with taking advantage of government research from the past half-century
I would say that the aerospace companies doing cost-plus contracting for loosely defined projects with fuzzy requirements and no prospect for sustainable private operations are in a very different business than companies that do fixed-price contracts with the Government for specific services with an eye towards capturing a private market in the future. The cost-plus guys are IMHO government agencies in all but name, plus some fat paychecks and kickbacks going to a few connected people. The fixed-price guys are IMHO normal private companies that happen to contract with the Government for their normal profitable services sometimes. I don't think it makes much difference if the first business that funded initial development was all government contracts - the private market for launch services is real, and SpaceX has a plan for making a profit in it and is progressing towards capturing a solid market share in it.
But it's also true that without Musk there would currently be no prospect of significant rocket component reuse for another generation. Rocket launch costs would be double or triple what they currently are. It also seems very likely now that within my lifetime we will see launch costs to orbit close to 100th what they were just a few years ago. Some of us think that's a good thing.
A graph of the improvement in rocket technology from 1945 to now would look like a hockey stick early on, levelling off more or less flat for the last 40 years. Musk has bent that curve back up into a hockey stick shape again.
As it happens none of the re-usability programme (Grasshopper, the drone ships, etc) was actually funded by the government. That came from around a billion dollars of private capital investment. Musk talked about this in a TED talk.
Musk seems a little more down to earth (sic) here.
Amazon didn't turn a profit for years because they were heavily reinvesting in more/better infrastructure (their "fulfillment centers") and services. One of the biggest services out of this reinvestment is AWS, which AMZN built for AMZN, and then realized it was such a good product they started selling it to others (also part of Bezos' ethos and their large initial costs: if you can't sell your internal tools to other people, you shouldn't be using it)
However, Amazon is making a profit these days, and is still growing, so I think it's sustainable.
Uber, meanwhile, is/has been subsidizing many/most rides with VC money in order to get market share, which is an entirely different thing and more in line with your perception.
If SpaceX can get Falcon Heavy to work then no, so much of the oxygen will be sucked out of the launch services market that Blue Origin will be hard pressed to compete. At that point. I see them much more likely as a ULA acquisition to insure engine supply rather than a continual drain on Jeff Bezo's net worth.
If on the other hand Falcon Heavy continues to slip, or if their early attempts at launching them are unsuccessful, or they are unable to recover the three boosters (which I think is 'baked in' to the market expectations) then Blue seems to be in a position to take some of the heavy launch business, except that there isn't nearly as much of that business as there is the small/medium launch business.
Finally the dark horse here is the 'previously unexploited used for heavy things in space' which is to say some business or process that is tremendously more competitive in space than it is on Earth which grows the heavy launch business faster than SpaceX can scale up.
I don't think he's too worried
They are also already far into the development and production of a orbital rocket themselves.
They focus on the cone, and slowly build up. By 2021 they will fly the third biggest rocket in the world with some unique capability.
The BE-4 is a collection of parts thats never been fired together successfully.
2021 is hugely optimistic given BOs track record.
There are plenty of other reasons, beyond the money, I don't think it will be that long before BO really starts to compete.
They are more directly a competitor for talent. Rocket engineering is a small world.
Though ULA is buying engines from BO.
What's interesting to me is the dichotomy between Musk and Bezos vision for humanity in the Solar System. Musk is Mars focused almost exclusively. Bezos has talked about space habitats (O'neil cylinders for example [3]) as how he thinks things will play out. Certainly room for both.
Bezos isn't playing, he's going all in, selling $1 billion of shares a year to fund Blue Origin [4]. One way to look at this situation is Musk and Bezos competing to be king of transportation infrastructure for the Solar System. High stakes indeed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
[4] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bezos-is-selling-amazon-stock...
I used to wonder what could happen if the guys with billions decided to do something interesting with all their money. This is some of the most interesting stuff I've ever seen. Some guys buy sports teams, some buy hookers, some just fucking blow me away with their ambition.
Nowadays you haven't really arrived until you can afford to fund your own space program. :-)
Space travel may be another level above that.
Charles Foster Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.
Early on in their life as a company, they had 3 back-to-back failures. They were a laughing stock of the industry for the most part. The idea that this little (by comparison to NASA or some of the established private players) company could take on rockets and make them reusable was a joke.
But Elon (and IIRC Peter Thiel) poured more money into it in spite of this, and they were finally able to get moving and are now (at least in my mind) at the forefront of the industry in many areas.
Well, at a net worth of approximately 90 billion and assuming a 5% return rate, he can spend 4.5 billion dollars every year forever on the blue origin and never lose a pennY.
This is play money for him when you are that rich.
The first BE-4 will be done long before Raptor, and it will fly before.
The subscale Raptor was successfully tested nearly a year ago and is twice the power of anything BO has ever made.
The idea that if the had success they would 'trumpet it' is simply wrong, this has not been true in the past for Blue Origin and nothing has changed.
Raptor might be further along now but we don't have the information.
ULA isn't out at least until BO has a few good launches under its belt, which means BE-4 or something similar is reliable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6b043z/tom_mueller_...
That rocket is going to be the real game-changer. I would say that the Falcon 9 is evolutionary, you know, a reusable rocket that greatly reduces the cost of access to space. Maybe we can achieve ten reduction in cost over, you know, like what ULA or the Russians or the Chinese are doing, with the Falcon. But we want like a hundred or more reduction in costs; and that’s what the Mars rocket’s gonna do. That’s going to be the revolutionary rocket.
So once we’re flying that, all other rockets will probably be obsolete. <laughs> Likely Blue Origin is working on a fully-reusable rocket <inaudible> But we’ve really changed this industry that the other guys are really scrambling. It’s pretty funny to watch this, because when we first started the company 15 years ago, my fifteen-year anniversary was Monday, May 1st. <clapping> Thank you.
We started the company on May 1st, 2002. Well, I started there; I consider—. Elon incorporated the company I think in February, but he didn’t have any employees yet. But I consider when he had his first employees when he had his company. But anyway, over the fifteen years, we’ve gotten, you know, this far; and when I was first hiring people, you know, that’s when I heard <inaudible> money to develop this rocket. And then we built the Falcon 1, which had a single Merlin engine on it, could throw about 1k lbs into LEO; and they said, you guys, you guys were able to build a small rocket. But you’ll never be able to build an EELV-class, EELV-mission class rocket. And so we built the Falcon 9 and started flying it. And they said you’d never be able to reuse it; you’ll never be able to get to the space station. And at some point, you stop listening to it. And I think it’s great, you know, if people think what you’re doing is impossible then you must be doing the right thing. You can still find the YouTube video online where people are critiquing our recovery thing as being photoshopped or CGI’d. That’s pretty high praise, when people don’t actually believe you’re doing. <laughter>
And you know, we were ridiculed by the other big companies in the launch vehicle business. At first, they ignored us; and then they fought us; and then they— we found out; they found out that they couldn’t really win in a fair fight because we were successful and we were, you know, factors of two or three or probably even five lower costs than what they can do. So then it becomes an unfair fight, where they, you know, try to destroy you politically, and use other means. And then at some point, they figure out that they’ve got to do what you’re doing. So there’s a lot of talk at these other companies about how they’ll make reusable rockets; recover the engines, recover the stages, come up with a much lower-cost rocket so that they can compete. You know, there’s no way that they ULA would have considered buying engines from Blue Origin except for the pressure that SpaceX is putting on them. There’s no way that the French would have quickly abandoned the Ariane 5 and moved to the Ariane 6 design because— except for the pressure we’re putting on. So we’re really changing the world. The Russians are saying they’re coming up with a rocket that can beat SpaceX, which is entertaining, <laughs> which is entertaining, because they’ve been working on their Angara rocket for 22 years, and launched it once. And suddenly they’re going to be coming up with a low-cost one.
It could've that BO can't attract enough talent. Bezos might not be spending enough time at BO and perhaps the prospects aren't as great there.
Launching a liquid fueled rocket to space (even if it's just space) and then landing it is not easy.