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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Not spending nearly enough on rockets.

I too am disappointed about this. Elon Musk is a scrappy bootstrapper by comparison. Blue Origin could be reaching so much further than they currently are...

Just because Musk can run both Tesla and SpaceX doesn’t mean Bezos can run Blue Origin and frickin Amazon at the same time. That’s overseeing 500k employees. I think that it’s a safe bet we’ll see a lot more from Blue Origin when Bezos steps down from Amazon.

Probably. I’m more complaining about ambition though. Blue Origin isn’t trying to change the game fundamentally in he way SpaceX is. Regardless o whether they are hitting deliverables, the deliverables aren’t interesting.

Blue Origin has just as ambitious goals as SpaceX. Millions working in space, industrialization of space to the extent that it actually starts reducing industrialization of Earth, etc. They even have a rocket on the drawing board somewhere, New Armstrong, that will likely be a 1-for-1 competitor with BFR, if not larger, and with full reuse (like BFR).

But as far as actual execution, yeah. SpaceX is way ahead and Blue Origin has been incredibly slow. Um, I mean "gradatim."

But don't they have different goals? I thought Blue Origin was a little more bootstrappy in that they aren't trying to rely on federal funding / subsidies and are trying to get revenue from tourism

I think it's more of a development life cycle problem, Elon started earlier and rocketry ain't easy. It's less a problem of money as it is in scaling up an R&D operation to effectively use the money. Scaling organizations of people is bottlenecked in enough ways that the added domain difficulty of rocket science creates a situation where throwing money at the problem has diminishing returns.

Is building rockets the most important thing? How about climate change, famine, education etc? I imagine the trick is to spend money on lobbying rather than solving the problem, to leverage tax payers money.

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