Blue Moon | Hacker News Reader

Blue Moon

blueorigin.com

360 pointsgoshx227 comments

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/jeff-bezos-unveils-blue-moon... has more information.

(Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872667, which we'll merge into this thread.)

It’s been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly made it boring.

You can put stuff on top of it! There is a club! The presentation opened with the most uninspired call to inspiration. And then pivoted to a call to fear. We’re gonna have to ration due to energy shortages! In a couple hundred years. Fusion? 1) It’s gonna be raw resources and real estate, not energy, that we run out of first. 2) Amazon, the company, is doing all it can to reap profits at the expense of the environment with seemingly no regards for the health of the real Amazon and other natural treasures. 3) Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty, so that argument falls flat. Not to mention the whole presentation managed to avoid mentioning SpaceX explicitly and ended with a self-referencing “Big things have small beginnings” photo of Bezos, kinda sadly insecure.

I for one don’t want to live in a “manufactured” world that is “manufactured” by Amazon. My head just kept going to “Amazon Prime Planet”!! My god it will be efficient, cheap, on time, and chock full of externalities that we can all ignore because instead of being off-shored and hidden in warehouses, now they’ll be off-planet. This is how we get the dystopian future none of us deserve or want.

(edit: Also, did Bezos just rip off the tag line from Prometheus, a movie whose central thesis is the inherent dangers in attempting to engineer life and worlds!? Bezos: “Big things start small.” Prometheus: “Big things have small beginnings.”

> Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the “immediate” social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty

What.

Amazon as a company have created enormous value for all of its clients, created thousands of jobs and value for it's trading partners. It's one of the forces that work to eradicate poverty in modern world, not the other way around.

Yes, it has created value for its customers and investors. It has also generated enormous externalities. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, and the point is one of the main points of my argument. The other being, this is just uninspired and unoriginal. It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play, that feels more like my know-it-all uncle lecturing the family during Thanksgiving about how we all finally see that his warnings about climate change are being proven true and that means we all have to buy Soylent Green from him. And everyone around the table just stays quiet because we are afraid he is serious and just want him to stop talking.

Amazon’s unconstrained growth relies on a model that allows for limitless externalities and this requires limitless resources both as direct inputs to production and cheap or free pricing of waste handling and social costs, in order to capture the value creation and offload the costs for its customers and investors.

Would world had been a better place without Amazon? You may think that it's hurting mom and pop shops. But that's not really true. Without AWS, we would still have 100 people sysadmin teams everywhere and many startups won't see light of the day. Without Amazon fulfillment centers, who get most flak for automation and worker issues, there are many things we won't have in life. Kindle gave me access to books that I would not be able to read otherwise. Alexa save time and energy.

Continue questioning them about employment practices and keep them ethical (they are raising minimum wage to $15/hr) but Amazon hate is often misplaced.

But cutting the benefits so that workers end up poorer.

Also kindle workshops are considered sweat shops, and that’s by Chinese standards so imagine...

You are making a lot of claims without any actual explanation what those things are supposed to be.

> It’s a presentation by an ex-hedge fund guy on a profit play

Yeah, the last 20 years almost of him investing in his dream that he has been talking about since he went to school is clearly a massive for profit play.

Thats capitalism... And due to capitalism Amazon has launched on of the most efficient infrastructures in the world. Their warehouses and logistics systems are state of the art. Launching a Space Company is a GREAT THING. It puts pressure on SpaceX, as competition has proven over the years to be the father of invention and innovation. Of course with growth comes externalities such as a increase global footprint. However, these things are judged in a silo. Without Amazon, there would not only most likely be another "Amazon", but in the unlikely scenario that it is not aggregated long term with one centralized company, a vast meriad of mom and pop shops would have a much larger footprint and be much less efficient. I hate all the anti-corporate tendencies that have been prevailing on hacker news lately.

Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.

What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.

My point is that Amazon is polluting less than multiple small companies doing Amazon job. Should they pollute less? Yes. Are they polluting less than others? Also yes. You see grand total numbers of pollution created by Amazon and compare them to other companies and those numbers are terrible, the issue is that Amazon, one company, is pretty much whole industry and should be considered as such. It's like comparing USA pollution to Cameroon. In raw numbers USA will be far worst, on the other hand, per capita numbers are not so nice on Cameroon side of things.

TL;DR Amazon is not ideal but still much better than it could be.

I'm honestly underwhelmed. This is not more capability than Apollo (uncrewed variant of whose lander could land about 5 tons). A really high deck making egress difficult. Apparently expendable. Given Blue Origin's resources, they should be shooting far higher.

There's a bunch of small companies pursuing expendable lunar landers of similar capabilities. I worry Blue Origin will just crowd them out.

A reusable upper stage or reusable lander (or both) would be more interesting and more important. Bezos is/was the richest man and Blue origin is given roughly a billion dollars of capital every year, and a relatively modest expendable lunar lander is their big announcement? And even that they may have difficulty executing on in a timely manner.

I don't think Blue Origin can't do this. I just think it's far too modest of a goal for a company with free rein over a billion dollars in additional annual capital.

...and I'm also skeptical of mass drivers (of the typical type) and lunar mining. Plenty of shade thrown at Mars, but Mars has vastly more resources.

Additionally, the architecture of the lander is disappointing. A crasher stage (ala the Surveyor spacecraft which used a kick stage for deorbiting) for most of descent would be far more efficient. It'd allow a much smaller and cheaper descent stage and much lower to the ground, making egress much easier.

Of course it's less capable than Apollo - we don't have anywhere near the lift capability of Saturn V anymore, and this program's budget is a rounding error in the $200B (inflation-adjusted) that went into Apollo.

I think people underestimate just how insane the investment was in that program: in the neighborhood of 0.25% of GDP for a decade.

I think people underestimate the rocket equation. In the last fifty years very little progress has been made on the basic ratios between rocket fuel, size and payload. If you want to land on the moon, in 1960 or 2026, you are still going to need the same amounts of fuel and supplies. Your landers will by necessity be similar too.

Sure, but rocket launch costs are orders of magnitude higher than the cost of fuel to launch payloads. Once we nail down reusability, then we'll see space access become much more affordable. And once we have ships that only operate in space, we'll be able to carry much more fuel along (aerodynamics and structural strength are much less important).

The problem is that, no matter how cheap your fuel is, you have to build a launcher that can lift off while carrying all that fuel. It's expensive to make a pressure vessel that strong and light and large, engines that powerful, etc.

If launch gets cheap enough given current launcher sizes, you can get into in-orbit assembly, but that requires immense investment into robotics or a lot of spending to support (machine-assisted) human construction workers. i.e. you can't launch Apollo as a single package on Falcon 9s no matter how many you can afford, and if you want to send it up in multiple packages you need to either make the spacecraft bigger and bulkier and more expensive so that it's modular, or send up a few times the mass of the resulting spacecraft in assembly robots or construction workers' habitats.

(That's why Starship is so exciting even if it doesn't end up meeting Musk's cost targets, and why SLS has been so enticing for NASA despite its shitshow of a development process - putting up a single large payload in one launch is an advantage in and of itself.)

Most of the weight of Apollo package at the low earth orbit was fuel. Fueling in space was not considered I suppose as this was too difficult with technologies from sixties. These days it is considered possible, so launching Apollo-size package to the Moon should be possible with much smaller rockets and refueling in the orbit.

Please note that the ISS was assembled on orbit from many small components and subassemblies: the largest module was IIRC about 22 tonnes, while the ISS itself is around 420 tonnes. The Soviets pioneered this with Mir, and ISS was designed around a core that was originally intended to be Mir 2.0.

So we have quite a bit of experience assembling one big structure in orbit—a 25 year learning experience, basically, which has given us a toolbox of standards for docking adapters, compatible modules, external manipulators based on the Canadarm, and experience in on-orbit refueling and resupply.

Starship is big and (in theory) cheap, yes, but it's not obvious that we can't do this stuff with smaller and pricier tools.

Apollo didn't go for on-orbit assembly because they were in a blinding hurry (JFK set the "by the end of the decade" goal in 1961-ish) and it's taken us 25 years of plodding to get there. But we could do it now.

Not to toot my own horn too much on here, but I've written a fair bit about these issues going forward: http://heffern.net/rob/index.php/2018/08/25/note-1-kismayo-s...

The current NASA spending is ~$22,000/kg to get into orbit. Elon and NASA both see that getting down to ~$200/kg by 2070, only 50 years away.

When we're talking about $200/kg, the launch site's location relative to the equator will become a BIG deal. You'll see a ~4% difference in cost per kilogram (wildy estimated here) if you are more than 17 km off the equator. That means if you wnat to launch your 160kg-self more than 17km from the equator, it'll be an extra ~$1400.

For a lot of reasons that my posts explain much better, buying certain Somalian real estate is a VERY good move right now. Granted you have to be muslim to do so.

I remember when the Shuttle program was scrapped that the consensus was that reusable vehicles didn't offer the economy they promised, so what has changed since then?

Doesn't matter if you can reuse something if refurbishing costs as much as building a new one. Space just has a more sensible design with better materials and computers.

And SpaceX is doing a totally different thing. They are not putting anything like the shuttle in orbit (humand+cargo). Shuttle's other big thing was that it returned all of its engines to the ground for reuse. All shuttle threw away was the big orange tank. SpaceX had abandoned that concept, returning only the first stage and dumping the second/third stages into the sea. We will probably never see anything like shuttle again.

Starship is very similar to the shuttle in that it will be a reused second stage carrying humans and/or cargo (humans optional unlike Shuttle). Hopefully unlike shuttle it will be able to be reflown without extensive, expensive refurbishment.

Shuttle also had the insane design decision of requiring human crew to be sent up on every single flight, rather than as an optional payload.

Shuttle returned all of its engines by throwing the srbs to the sea. Maybe using a cheap replacement to those and expending it on each flight would be cheaper. At the same time spacex decided against reusing the second stage, essentially making that decision for it's own stack

The shuttle had to make tons of major design compromises in order to get funding, and that basically reduced its utility, limited its launch rate and capacity, and blew out the operational costs.

Critically, the shuttle dumped its engines into the ocean, which meant extensive rebuilding and refurbishing was required in order to make them flightworthy again. The fastest reuse time for a Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster was almost 3 months (and before it was nearly 2).

The most expensive component of a rocket is the first stage (particularly its engines), and SpaceX lands those on a pad, which means no costly saltwater removal. SpaceX is aiming to reuse a rocket within 24 hours this year (So far the fastest they've done is 71 days, but they're being cautious).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

At least for launch, I doubt we'll improve those mass ratios for a long time to come - chemical rockets hit theoretical limits at exhaust velocities/specific impulses of e.g. ~5.5km/s for hydrolox, and SSME already got within 10-20% of that theoretical maximum. All of the systems that can get better specific impulse, like thermal rockets or electric thrusters, have thrust:mass ratios waaaaay too low to get off of Earth on their own. (Possibly nuclear thermal rockets? But I don't think people will be overjoyed firing those off in an atmosphere.)

If you reuse vehicles and refuel in orbit, you don't need to be more efficient.

If you have large reusable rockets and refuelling, you can carry a lot more. Thankfully SpaceX is working on just such a plan, which would mean landing far more mass on the moon and being able to take a lot back.

Their lander will look completely different (starship).

The biggest changes will be in-orbit refueling and rapid reusability. That makes 100 tons to Mars orbit feasible.

I think most people (myself included) do not understand how much technological improvement costs.

Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a guy who worked at ITER, and he was pretty bullish (and he had no reason to bullshit me) on the prospect of fusion as a viable energy source, but frustrated with the internal politics of ITER. So I asked, "well, what would it take? If I could call up a bunch of rich people to get funding, how much would it take?" He casually said, "oh, probably 1.2 to 1.5 trillion dollars". And then I understood why it was a multinational conglomerate that was funding it, and not a bunch of rich people.

Isn’t that just another way of saying the ITER approach is infeasible? So it’s basically a jobs program

I haven't met a fusion scientist that thinks ITER isn't going to work. Ones that don't like ITER just think there are better ways.

Compared to the world's energy costs, it's small potatoes. Fusion will be ready when the world needs it.

> Fusion will be ready when the world needs it.

50 years ago?

2016 estimation for the project was $20B [1]. Your number is over 50 times larger.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/world-s-b...

Ah, maybe that's why it's taking so long...

The number is $20B for a "technology of the future" project because if you would propose a number 20x larger the project would never get started.

How are you going to justify $1.2 trillion to tax payers for something ephemeral that might work or not, all while their kids cannot get toilet paper in school?

$20bn is kind of "normal" in government spending and those numbers are quickly forgotten.

On the other hand, the yearly US defense budget is already half of that amount and the loud voices do not care.

I understood the 1.2-1.5 trillion number to be the cost of "fusion as a viable energy source" not the cost of ITER. ITER itself, to be clear, won't generate electricity. It's a demonstrator project that proves the viability of some of the technologies that would be prerequisites to an eventual successful electricity generation project. Its planned successor, DEMO, will be even bigger, and will be the first one that actually generates net electricity, but even that won't be geared towards commercial use on the grid -- nobody will ever build these things for commercial use, even if we get to the point more energy comes out than goes in, if they cost tens of billions apiece. Even if both ITER and DEMO go exactly to plan, multiple additional major technological advances will be necessary before the any of it is commercially viable.

To put that number into perspective, the 2015 US Military budget was --4 trillion-- 600 billion dollars [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

Defense Budget (Billions) 637bn

Total Budget (Trillions) 3.97tn

I think you used the wrong number.

Oops, you are right!

Defense budget is $800 bn now.

Still. 2 years of military spending, in a peaceful world, for near-unlimited free power forever. Kind of puts it in perspective.

Even under the most optimistic estimates, fusion power will be nowhere near free. Those plants will be tremendously expensive to build and operate. Meanwhile solar power + storage gets cheaper every year...

Can anyone actually make an estimate with any reasonable degree of accuracy if the sum they need to estimate is in the trillions of dollars?

For example, it seems that in research usually when people say that something is a decade away what they really mean is that they have no idea. Is there a good reason why that is not the case here and the 1.5 trillion would be well spent?

Was that a while ago, before the management shakeup?

> I just think it's far too modest of a goal for a company with free rein over a billion dollars in additional annual capital

When you look at it as an investment not as a research project it makes much more sense.

It is reusable if it can be refuelled with hydrolox from a surface ISRU installation, while a kicker stage would lock them into a non-reusable architecture.

Also a reusable upper stage is a separate problem. I'm always disappointed when I read comments along the lines of 'lets not bother solving this problem, because I have this other favourite problem instead'. So what? That doesn't make this particular problem go away.

No, a crasher stage can do a flip and burn after separation, allowing the crasher stage to put itself back in orbit. And empty stage with only itself as a payload requires just a tiny amount of fuel to do this.

...and this would all be easier to reuse than the descent stage here.

I think part of the reason why crasher stages aren't in any program of record is that you have to consider abort scenarios where the staging fails.

> I'm honestly underwhelmed. This is not more capability than Apollo

You underwhelmed by a privately financed moon program?

You underwhelmed by the completely new Hydrolox engine that can also produce power threw fuel cells? This engine can be reused for other landers as well if NASA wants to finance something bigger.

You are not easy to please. Just because he has billions doesn't mean he want to put all his money into this project, he is planning for 20-40 years.

This is their proposal that is in line with the 2024 manned return to the Moon. In the longer term I'm sure they have much more ambitious ideas.

I was waiting for this announcement. It is unclear to me how "real" this is; Bezo's claims they can meet the timeline of people on the moon in 2024. Since they aren't flying a heavy booster like the Delta IV heavy or the Falcon Heavy yet, and those platforms took about 10 years to go from concept to first flight. Bezos is suggesting he can do that in 5 years. Perhaps he's considering using the Delta for FHeavy as the first stage booster and building the upper stage{s} himself. Either way, its great to have someone pushing for more progress.

The second successful FHeavy flight cut into the potential demand for New Glenn so the challenge is to remain relevant while building nation-state level infrastructure. Exciting to watch!

Supposedly, New Glenn will be ready in 2021. I wouldn't be surprised if this requires New Glenn's bigass fairing— I don't think anyone is currently flying anything with the same size capabilities (although neither is Blue Origin, at the moment)

Unlike Elon Musk, Bezos has a tendency to set more accurate timelines.

This is not to say that Space X’s achievements are not incredible. They are. It is just that Elon Musk projection timelines are pretty much always bunk, while Jeff Bezos seems to be better at projecting achievement timelines.

Again, what Space X and Blue Origin have achieved are incredible, and yes Space X has an entirely different set of technology that is capable of sending huge payloads to deep space...

I’m just saying Musk’s timelines are completely unreliable. Bezos’ aren’t (historically).

But SpaceX still moves faster than Blue Origin, even though SpaceX promises to move much faster and then fails to do that.

They're going about it very different ways so I think from a typical bystander it is hard to see. We won't really know how accurate your statement is until we see New Glenn and if BFR ever becomes a reality. But historically BO has been right on the mark with their timelines while SpaceX (and a lot of other Musk stuff) is at least a year behind schedule.

Wrong. SpaceX is objectively faster. The New Glenn is about the size of the Falcon Heavy in terms of payload.

The BFR is a whole different class that is gone be more in line with the hidden BO project the New Armstrong, but we don't really know what that is gone be.

That said, SpaceX is ahead in rockets but this moon lander is something SpaceX doesn't have or is even working on.

By 2008, a publicized timetable for New Shepard indicated that Blue Origin intended to fly unmanned in 2011, and manned in 2012. How is that "right on the mark"?

Blue origin is 19 years old and hasn't achieved orbit.

How 'fast' they each move is beside the point.

However, a quick Googling suggests that Space X has ~3 times the number of employees Blue Origin has and may also have had more money ploughed into it.

The point here is that Elon Musk is infamous for his widely optimistic forecasts while Bezos is more down to Earth (so to speak).

In 2011, SpaceX said they'd fly Falcon Heavy in 2013. It actually first flew in 2018.

On the other hand, Blue Origin hasn't yet reached orbit (something SpaceX did in 2008.) I do believe Blue Origin will be able to execute on Blue Moon, but they also need to demonstrate a _lot_ of hardware before boots on the moon.

In fairness to SpaceX, Falcon Heavy's long delays weren't a result of mismanagement or false claims. The delays were due to Heavy turning out to be largely unnecessary for routine operations and development being put on the back burner. Falcon 9's capabilities (particularly in the engines) were improved to the point where it could handle missions once thought to require Heavy. Those same continual improvements meant that it was a more efficient use of engineers' time to wait for the more-or-less final Falcon 9 design before starting serious work on Heavy.

But I do share skepticism on Blue Origin. It's hard to develop rockets in total secrecy. If New Glenn was anywhere close to flying, even in an expendable test configuration, we'd at least know that much even if they chose to keep the details confidential.

Unlike Bezos, Elon Musk actually gets things done. Bezos still hasn't done anything that SpaceShipOne didn't do in 2004 (and that carried people, unlike their current rocket). Their little hopper rocket is leagues away from a proper orbital vehicle. Bezos hasn't given any timelines for New Glenn (their first orbital rocket). People give way too much praise to Bezos.

That's not to mention all the blatant patent trolling and lobbying that Blue Origin/Bezos is engaged in which constantly tries to hinder SpaceX. (Ex: Trying to patent landing on a barge to stop SpaceX doing it. Ex: Successfully lobbying several congresspeople to delay down selection of launch vehicles for military launches (but failed to delay it).)

Blue Origin is big on talk and little on action.

Do you have any more reading material on the political lobbying Bezos is having Blue Origin do? That sounds quite interesting.

>Unlike Bezos, Elon Musk actually gets things done.

As a betting gal, I disagree.

source: $2MM investment in Amazon from back in 2014 has performed extremely well. Stock price isn’t exactly a golden metric, but Bezos knows how and what to prioritize and when to deliver. I would trust Bezos over Elon Musk with real money any day.

Your post makes it appear as if Bezos is devoting the majority of his time to one specific company or venture, and therefore not being the industry leader is some sort of failure. That’s extremely short sighted from my perspective.

The little hopper rocket you described is a better investment from my perspective than anything Musk touches. Hell, if all Bezos had was a literal tin can and merely a promise of using material from that tin can as part of a lunar lander 10 years out, I would still put more faith in Bezos.

My only experience with Tesla is with purchasing a Model S, which was horrible. I no longer have that vehicle. Good riddance.

> I no longer have that vehicle.

Fascinating. As a potential Tesla buyer, would you care to share your experience? Email welcome.

Amazon is not Blue Origin. SpaceX is not Tesla. The Musk/Bezos comparison is regarding spaceflight. And in that regard:

>> Blue Origin is big on talk and little on action.

The parent comment is definitely correct. Unless you mean patent trolling. Then Bezos has Musk crushed.

Not sure if you are serious or just trolling, there is really no reason to bring up Amazon or Tesla in this conversation.

> Blue Origin is big on talk and little on action.

I'm a little surprised on this. I see Blue Origin as being small on talk. They have been mostly operating in stealth mode. Public isn't really that aware of them, at least no where near the level of SpaceX. They only get publicity when they meet a milestone. Which the thing is that they haven't promised much, but met those milestones on time.

> Bezos hasn't given any timelines for New Glenn (their first orbital rocket)

2021[0]

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-fi...

> Bezos still hasn't done anything that SpaceShipOne didn't do in 2004

This is such absurdly reductionist take. Its a whole different level, just having something that can reach space compared to a reliable reusable rocket that can fly real costumers.

There is a reason SpaceShipOne was never used in production, its a tech demo.

> Bezos hasn't given any timelines for New Glenn (their first orbital rocket). People give way too much praise to Bezos.

They do have a timeline and they have actual costumers already signed.

And furthermore we have seen highly advanced engines, the BE-4 tested. That is a huge achievement.

> People give way too much praise to Bezos.

You are giving way to little. Do you know how few advanced rocket engines like that have been designed in the US? Not since the Space Shuttle. It might also very likely be the first ever methane engine to reach orbit.

I guess it is a lot easier to set more accurate timelines if you only reveal something after working on it for 3 years, like Blue Moon.

> Bezos is suggesting he can do that in 5 years.

It was “only” 12 years between Sputnik and Apollo 11.

You’d think we’d be able to do things faster now.

Its a fair point, just a matter of money and a limited number of manufacturers for the bits that make rockets fly. NASA had the advantage that as a single target they weren't overseeing three different SaturnVs, three different launch vehicles, etc. The horses here are Bezos, Boeing, and SpaceX.

There was Red Stone, Atlas, titan, Saturn I, Ib, and V. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. multiple contractors at each phase.

I understand, I wasn't arguing that there weren't multiple contractors, only pointing out that NASA had all of its resources making one system at a time. If we combined the space launch R&D budgets of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing into one pool and focused on one system, it might go faster.

You mean like NASA for the last 40 years?

Strongly disagree. If they were all combined, we would likely have the same level as any given Company’s progress, but no more due to the mythical man month factor.

Instead we have multiple moonshots, bringing diverse approaches, and constrained by a budget. Since we know from Apollo that “if money were no object”, we can do this, it’s a good approach.

The reason we never moved on from Apollo is because economics matter. We were able to beat the tyranny of the rocket equation; now we are seeing if we can do it for a much smaller amount. And we have multiple bets on different approaches.

> It was “only” 12 years between Sputnik and Apollo 11.

12 years, and 4.4% of the federal budget (in the peak). In 2007 dollars they spend around $136 billion to get to the moon.

How much is that in 2019 dollars?

About 166 billion, based off of CPI.

On the other hand, fixing it to 4.4% of the Federal Budget makes it $208.8 billion.

That sounds like a huge amount of money, until you consider the Shuttle programme alone cost the taxpayer apporx $196 billion, inflation adjusted.

>Perhaps he's considering using the Delta for FHeavy as the first stage booster and building the upper stage{s} himself. Either way, its great to have someone pushing for more progress.

In the past they've talked about launching Blue Moon on SLS. Not that I expect that to launch real payloads by 2024...

That would be crazy expensive.

Blue origin can't build a moon rocket by 2024, so maybe they can settle for the lander. Here's the vision I bet they're aiming for: a Spacex rocket, a United Launch Alliance capsule, a Blue Origin lander, and a round of pork barrel in every Congressional district.

I'm seeing a lot of exponential technology. If Jeff B. takes more risk and focus, it could be possible. We'll see.

Not sure why you got downvoted

What on earth is exponential technology?

i think it's a buzz word for things that people think will gain internet scale cycle of development, one thing begetting another.

It's like velcro, but better.

Probably a play on the SV 10x mantra.

Mass ratio solution of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, of course.

Expand that buzzword into something concrete, please.

"Lander... mumble... O'Neill Cylinders!" does not count. That's hopes and dreams, not technology.

BO makes the engines for Vulcan so they'd probably be fine with a ULA rocket

Why can’t they use New Glenn?

People are generally quite skeptical of New Glenn, because not only has it not launched, but there's also no public evidence of construction of any non-engine hardware. Might just be that they play it closer to the vest than SpaceX and ULA, but the eternally-slipping timelines for New Shephard do not inspire confidence in their ability to get New Glenn into orbit soon.

ULA has not capsule. What are you even talking about? ULA is pure launch business.

Boeing has capsule that can't go to the moon, and Lockheed Martin is a contractor on Orion.

Sorry, I was thinking of the Orion capsule, which is made by Lockheed Martin, one half of ULA.

I'm all for anything that gets us back to the Moon, but this clearly feels underwhelming versus Starship.

It'd also be good if they got to orbit prior to marketing these grand plans. Gradatim Ferociter indeed.

I’m glad to see a different approach. SpaceX has the “outrageously audacious” space well covered. It’s good to have a competitor working on something more incremental in case it turns out that the giant leap isn’t viable.

Blue Origin is somewhat like the Waymo of space tech. They'll continue plodding methodically, indefinitely. And you can bet their safety/reliability record will be nigh near perfect.

Yes, Waymo is the market leader in self-driving technology (unlike Blue Origin). And there's currently no analogue to SpaceX in the self-driving car market. The incredible, complementary leadership duo that Musk and Shotwell present is unparalleled in both markets.

"And you can bet their safety/reliability record will be nigh near perfect."

Why do you believe this to be the case?

I think people believe Blue's much slower approach to space is because of more testing and planning. I am a skeptical person and believe you can learn much more by doing. As long as missions are unmanned then frankly why not take tons of risks and learn and grow lots faster. The approach Blue is taking feels like it should have diminishing returns in regards to safety and maybe even worse safety as the longer timelines may not play well with actual clearer and better thinking.

>And there's currently no analogue to SpaceX in the self-driving car market.

Isn't... Tesla analogous to SpaceX in the self-driving car market?

Tesla is too unstable to compare it with SpaceX I think.

Tesla self-driving is mostly just ADAS + marketing. I'd be very careful to assume anything higher than SAE level 2 in real-life scenarios that are outside of their testing grounds.

Some people paid with their lives for this assumption.

Nope.

SpaceX has a working product that is eating its competitors' lunch (from a nothing company to having almost half the launch market within 10 years).

Tesla doesn't have a self-driving product that works, just standard assisted-driving tech that every other car company already sells, plus dangerously overpromising marketing.

Wait, does Waymo have paying customers?

Their fleet size is way smaller than Tesla.

They're the leader in features for sure, but that's not what market leader means I don't think.

Yes, Waymo has paying customers that ride in cars that have demonstrated the capability to navigate populated city streets without a driver. I think calling Waymo the market leader is a fair assessment.

Oh as opposed to Elon Musk who had vertical landing nailed before they went out courageously and told the word that they are doing it.

Retropropulsive landing was the next step for SpaceX. The Moon is two or three or four steps down the line for Blue Origin.

>> I'm all for anything that gets us back to the Moon, but this clearly feels underwhelming versus Starship.

Rovers are incredibly underwhelming compared to what was done 50 years ago. Starship will get us back there, but anything short of a base where people can stay a while will not really be new.

This is a response to the NASA NextStep request for proposals for a Lunar lander targeting a 2024 mission. It’s not a clean sheet architecture like Starship.

https://www.nasa.gov/nextstep/humanlander2

You mean the grain silo that blew over?

Why does everything BO build have to be so fugly? Don't they care, are they not good enough that they can make it pretty and achieve their technical goals at the same time or are there hard constraints that dictate the ugliness?

Its kind of in line with the rest of Bezo's other companies' UI/UX.

Most Amazon apps are generally pretty fugly too (at least IMO).

classic trilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma

good, beautiful, real

Yeah, but then SpaceX.

Have I missed a lot of news recently, or is this some strange usage of the present tense that I wasn't previously aware of?

Having come from nuclear engineering, I'd say it's pretty typical for people speaking of large conceptual engineering designs. Paper reactors, paper spaceships, etc. are often spoken of in present tense. The design exists now and it has a name - that's the way I interpret it.

Lots of space technology companies do this, and it's really annoying; e.g. Axiom Space [1] has a "services" page and Planetary Resources [2] has a "products" page, as if these are companies actually selling something. When they actually have, respectively, bupkis and two technology demonstrators in orbit.

[1] https://axiomspace.com/

[2] https://www.planetaryresources.com/

Disappointed there wasn't an Amazon box in the payload illustration.

I'd like to see us put two return rockets on the moon. Would increase the safety factor of all future manned missions significantly if a crash landing wouldn't necessarily mean death.

If you could safely verify the return vehicle is ready to go before sending the people, you could potentially use a one-way lander, vastly decreasing launch weight.

Unfortunately You’d have to have another launch for the return vehicle.

From an efficiency perspective sending both in one go seems a bit more efficient to me (but I’m not certain, it’s possible it costs exponential amounts of fuel)

And it just sits there in the hopes of never being used? That's one expensive ass insurance policy

Better safety factor would be having such regular visits that there's already another vessel in the area that can divert to assist.

https://www.blueorigin.com/engines/be-7 has a bit more information about the new engine, since there's basically none in the article. Looks like a small, restartable, low-thrust LH2/LOX engine meant for in-space use.

They say it's an expander cycle, given the ISP I assume a closed cycle expander rather than the open cycle expander they're using as the BE-3U.

So the question is going to be if you can lift this with a Falcon Heavy, given that New Glenn isn't even close to ready, and while the pace that Blue origin moves at is awesome compared to traditional space vendors, it's way behind where it needs to be for this, and where SpaceX is today.

Is there anyone else that feels like Blue Origin actually has a chance of making their own timelines, as opposed to SpaceX?

Don’t get me wrong, I love SpaceX, but the down to earth way in which Blue Origin appears to be working also appeals to me.

but hasnt spacex done more? i feel like blue origin is actually behind.

Considering the amount of money Bezos has, Blue Origin is far far behind. They only achieved suborbital flights with low-speed reentry landings.

Based on Bezos' psychology I'd guess that Blue Origin are under tremendous pressure to meet timelines, especially at the cost of trying anything fancy. Bezos is going to be solid in this game if he's able to apply his basic tool set. Plus I'll bet he's feeling fairly triggered by SpaceX. They will attempt to scale faster based on spreadsheet thinking. If SpaceX tries to compete with that, they will fail. They will need to refocus on innovation as soon as it becomes a numbers game.

Blue Origin is more likely to hit their targets, but SpaceX is more likely to actually do anything relevant.

Anyone announcing that the first generation of their motor will start hot-fire testing this year and be ready for service by X date is a liar or a salesman. There's many a kaboom between test and ship.

The other dates are to match the current NASA bid timescale, so they're pure marketronium.

If this is a lander what will they use to deliver the lander to lunar orbit? I'll admit I don't follow this sort of news very closely, but it seems quite exciting.

Presumably their New Glenn rocket

They've got New Armstrong pencilled in after New Glenn for taking people to the Moon.

I suppose after that would be New Sagan

New Glenn is quite heavy to carry some payloads to LEO which can later fl to the Moon.

I'd perhaps have New Young after New Armstrong.

Would New Sagan be the Amazon-sponsored lightsail-powered generation ship to Alpha Centauri?

Amazon Centauri, its been renamed as part of a sponsorship deal

>I suppose after that would be New Sagan

Oh, I don't know. Sounds like that sort of rocket would cost billions and billions of dollars.

They'll launch this paper lander on their paper rocket (New Glenn). Nothing exciting here because there's no hardware being built yet.

Considering they plan to fire the engine this summer, they seem to be building something.

BE-4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyn2gOimRfM

First new staged rocket engine developed in the US since the Space Shuttle (or at least at the same time with the SpaceX Raptor).

They also have gigantic production facility that is already built in Florida. Do you think its just an empty warehouse?

Welp, then I am going to say it: it looks underwhelming, both in capability and looks.

6.5t of soft-landed payload to surface of moon and 2.5kW of power via fuel cells if Twitter can be trusted. A grand vision of O'Neill cylinders and whatever in space is nice but how? How? Less gradatim and more ferociter would be nice.

Do looks matter for a lunar lander?

Of course it doesn't look as good as the awesome streamlined rocketship concept art I grew up with in the 1950s, I will grant you that.

Of course it doesn't look as good as the awesome streamlined rocketship concept art I grew up with in the 1950s, I will grant you that.

While SpaceX's concept for Starship does look that awesome. (In the form of animations and concept art, not in the form of steel water tower construction blown over on its side.)

Starship looks like it does because it has to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. If you don't, aerodynamic shells are just dead weight.

It looks like a step in the right direction to me. What's your baseline here?

At least someone is trying (and given the track record, will probably achieve it, Gradatim Ferociter indeed)

You are underwhelming by a privately funded moon lander? You realize how absurd this is?

NASA has been shit for 40 years in terms of manned flight and that's why this stuff is happening. And its not a budget issue, NASA had and has quite a budget.

They could fund way more interesting stuff, but they don't, so this is the best your gone get.

There seems to be alot of hate here that blue orgin is not 'shooting high enough'. This will get 'America' back to the moon and this is a great thing! Congrats to Blue Orgin team, and I wish them all the luck.

I'll take soft-serve over a soft landing any day:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/blue-moon-ice-cream-midwe...

That was also my initial thought. It's hard finding it in California but found one place (Rick's Ice Cream in Palo Alto) that sells it in the bay area.

Blue Moon Brewing is also having a ball w/ this https://twitter.com/BlueMoonBrewCo/status/112661146722524774...

Nice to see some advancements coming to landers from the private sector. Hope they will be able to work with other parties and move the technology forward and make it cheaper.

I didn't think Blue Origin had even put something in orbit yet. How feasible is this?

Anybody willing to bet he will announce building an 'Amazon Sphere' like structure in the moon? Feel like that project was an experiment for later use on his other endeavors but using Amazon's deep pockets to pay for it.

That’d be some office.

I'm confused. Does this actually exist yet?

The linked page says things like "Blue Moon is a flexible lander", and "Blue Moon can land multiple metric tons of payload on the lunar surface". Is there any actual hardware? Or is it entirely CAD drawings and renderings? They seem to be implying that the hardware currently exists and is ready to go (presumably for the Pence/Trump 2024 mandate), but the videos and pictures don't seem consistent with that.

Edit: I found a bit more info elsewhere [1]. They built a nice nonfunctional model of it. It sounds like it's relatively early in development, let alone integration. They'll start testing the engines in the next few months. This sort of hyperbolic marketing copy that abuses verb tenses and grammar is a huge pet peeve of mine.

[1]: https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-unveils-lunar-lander/

No it does not exist yet. This is a page devoted to pulling both private and public funding and something to wave in front of Congresscritters' eyes.

Pretty much. President Trump wants to put a man on the moon before he's out of office (assuming he gets re-elected and makes it to 2024). Mike Pence obsequiously tells NASA to make it so. Amazon wants more sweet federal contracting money, and prepares to bid for that contract.

I wish Bezos, Allen, Musk, etc. weren't burning their piles of cash to see who could be first to shoot other people at the moon, but such is the world we live in.

> I wish Bezos, Allen, Musk, etc. weren't burning their piles of cash

Allen did many things with his pile of cash (though none that I know of directly involved moon trips), but no longer:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/paul-allen-microsoft-spacesh...

RIP.

Allen doesn't seem to have been going for the moon (yet), but I wish the billionaires would not spend their hoards on private rocket companies. It's a bit gross that the article you linked calls them "philanthropists" for doing it. Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard, but he funded many wonderful small-town libraries, which remain valuable community centers over 100 years later. Bill Gates took his shot at world domination, but is now using his money to solve real-world problem like malaria.

It's their money, so they can do what they want with it, but rocket companies are pure vanity. Real, cost-effective philanthropy would mean improving the perfectly acceptable planet we live on, not trying to terraform Mars.

To the contrary, I'd argue spending on spaceflight in current day is significantly more challenging and laudable than solving some more "real-world" problems.

Those problems are quite important, but I'd prefer to live in the world where space problems are among those worthy of attention.

What I find really galling is how farmers bury corn in the ground every spring when there are clearly millions of people going hungry up here on the surface.

>> Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard, but he funded many wonderful small-town libraries, which remain valuable community centers over 100 years later.

That's a bit of an understatement of one of the worst monopolists and union-busters (even locking out employees and bringing in non-union immigrants to operate his factories) in America's history, but alright. [0]

Why didn't you mention Elon Musk and the Flint, Michigan water problem? (not to mention laptops and other donations he's made on two occasions now)

I think that's a real-world problem.

[0]: Also, he significantly contributed to the deaths of thousands through neglect of environmental standards for his own personal vacation and hunting spot. "South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club" will get you more information on him.

> even locking out employees and bringing in non-union immigrants to operate his factories

Giving work to immigrants. What a bastard. Everybody knows that Americans are better and more important then those dirty immigrants. They should only be allowed to get work if all white Americans already have jobs.

It's Amazon's way of working. Starting from PR/FAQ and working backwards.

Err well publishing the PR while it's still vaporware is not the Amazon way.

I don't mean it as shortcoming for Amazon. Their way of working have brought them quite far.

As for proving my point: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-de...

OT, but their web dev is an inconsiderate jerk. https://i.imgur.com/OCpESVs.png

I am still surprised by how often devs put full size images into thumbnails.

I have yet to gotten used to that 500x500 pictures are "thumbnail". I unconsciously expect them to be 32x32 or something... :-D

Isn't that just what you need to do to support 2x screens?

Absolutely not.

I would rather see two engines with enough TWR and gimbaling to be able to lift off with one failure. Plus then you can place the payload between them and not mess around with cranes.

.O##O.

/^[$]^\

Nice to see some private LH2/LOX propulsion being developed, but I was hoping to see some pictures of some real hardware, not just simulations.

Nitpick: the miss-alignment of the rendered shadow with the direction of shadows in the surface photos they comp over is maddening.

This whole mini-site looks like an extremely audacious undergrad aerospace engineering group project.

Except when I was an undergrad, it was all about going to Mars.

Joking aside...man, the antialiasing on those leg shadows...pay for a rendering team, guys!

The renders aren't that bad, but that is a terrible choice for the cutout image given the lighting angle with thin shadows.

The cargo unloading sounded familiar:

https://youtu.be/hmk1oHzvNKA?t=68

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nlO87evhY&t=949

I thought I was about to hear a Wilhelm scream but that's even better! Funny.

That did a 180 for me. I'm now a Blue Moon fan!

Also the city I live in doesn't have a, "how to get to the Moon" problem, it has a "homeless" problem. The planet I live on also doesn't have a, "how to get to the Moon" problem, it has a climate change problem, a pollution problem, a corrupt political system problem.

We've got lots of Hard Problems to solve before we need to go back to the Moon.

I’m not downvoting you (maybe mentally), it’s a valid point. It’s also been a long-standing perspective;

Whitey on the moon, from 1969:

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4

And from the Atlantic:

Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

(I’m personally for moon and space missions, there will always be issues to overcome)

Pretty sure the same was said about sailing out into the ocean, many centuries ago.

Or leaving the safety of the cave.

Exactly — THE WAY OUT IS UP:

https://marriottexpeditions.org/finalmarket

"At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities."

All that does is the widen the same doomed closed system.

The way out is in. It's mutuality and ecology.

There are infinite resources available if we scale down our economies. Billionaires who live gigawatt lives need to be seen as the wastrels they are. We need to learn to respect the ant and the mouse.

Research into space technology employs countless people directly and also feeds into service industries and other sectors, reducing homelessness. Space technology also results in breakthroughs in understanding about our own planet and fuel efficiency, helping climate change understanding.

It’s shortsighted and harmful to focus only on bandaid solutions today. We have enough people in this world to solve many different problems.

Multiple problems can be solved at once. Everyone is passionate about different things - That's what makes the world go round.

Now everyone want to bet on future of future, but they forget the real problem like global warming (it's just one example its so many). Steve jobs have vision which is based on reality and solve the real world problem. Hope someone in tech industry solve the real problem instead problem which is never exists.

Many of us are working on it. It's a very difficult problem because so many aspects of the carbon economy are intertwined and baked into culture now. The "halo" effect around petroleum is extremely strong and disincents many incremental advances. Could be solved top-down with a carbon tax but that's a big change and beneficiaries status quo have more of an advantage the bigger the system change being attempted.

However many people are trying and failing anyway, and that creates a bed of appropriate technologies that eventually will stand on their own, and perhaps not too much slower than a top-down solution would work.

When is the accompanying AWS service announcement for MoonDeliveryAsAService?

wait how can they claim having precise landing etc. if the thing have never been tested? did they land it on the moon before ?

Testing here on Earth could give them some idea I believe.

Epic vid, great audible sounds of space ;s

Hmm, no https?

budget cuts.

It's https now.

Still not https on my browser. Have the dns records updated yet?

at the rate this is progressing there won't be a permanent moon habitat until the 22nd century. probably a good thing since space humans will need to be genetically modified and quarantined for life.

Astronauts train for years before going to space. Do these space tourism companies pretend that anyone with enough cash can do it?

Elon's stated goal re: astronauts and training is that the technology should be sufficiently simplified to let anyone go up with minimal training. The idea of a heavily-trained astronaut is old, and the new thinking is that the people going to space should be able to spend their time up their doing whatever it is they are good at - even if just vacationing - rather than learning how to fly spacecraft etc.

I know this is a Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin article, but I would fully expect the same to be true here. Jeff has stated multiple times that he sees millions of people moving to space stations for work and general life. Earth should be left void of manufacturing and mining and things, which could be moved to space (and asteroids, etc) leaving Earth to be more of a natural environment for life to thrive.

I imagine that's the end goal but I have a hard time believing we will be there in just a few years.

Time will tell.

Nobody's proposing "just a few years". Both Musk and Bezos have grand visions that require difficult, complex technical and financial problems to be solved.

First up is lowering the cost of escape velocity such that "casual" flights are financially feasible. This includes reusable components, a very low failure rate, and an ecosystem of employees, engineers, and culture that supports it.

If M/B achieves their stated goals in this domain, then the next steps can be practically executed.

A big part of astronaut training is knowing how to fly the craft and knowing what to do if something breaks. If the machine is automatically controlled and reliable, you don't need as much training. (Maybe they'll send a trained person or two along with the tourists?)

Not sure I follow that logic. More automation might mean you won't have to use your training as much, but how does it mean less training? In the event all the automation fails you still have to know everything an astronaut would need to know were there no automation.

For Starship, there's absolutely no way a human could fly it anyway. Even if it weren't fly-by-wire, a human could not control the drag fins and the engines precisely enough to land safely. Even on Crew Dragon, which will (hopefully) fly in the near future with crew onboard, there isn't a hardware joystick. If the vehicle fails to the point where the computers aren't working, your only option is to deorbit. These spacecraft weren't intended to be flown manually.

Someone has to fly and troubleshoot the spacecraft when the inevitable failures occur. Most of the astronauts can be basically passengers but there has to be at least one pilot who knows how to switch SCE to AUX without a moment's hesitation.

Space ships are computer controlled nowadays. You can't fly them in any meaningful sense, and they don't have manual toggle switches like the old moon landers. There will be no pilot except the autopilot.

No that's not how it works at all. Autopilots are generally incapable of coping with unexpected system failures or spacecraft damage.

This is the real world, not Star Trek.

To take a real world example, Falcon 9 is completely autonomous during flight - the controllers on the ground can trigger an abort, and perhaps change the flight plan from a range of preselected options, but they're not going to attempt to take over the rocket and switch it to manual mode or something. They observe, they don't intervene during a normal flight, and if something does go wrong, they're not going to be able to save the situation. There is no pilot.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree

This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot.

Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster.

Which just so happens to land itself.

The point I'm trying to make is that machines can land themselves perfectly well nowadays, and control software and its interaction with hardware is now too complex for puny humans to understand or interact with, so they're better off just letting it do its thing and land or crash - a human interaction during landing is not going to save the machine - things have moved on from the mooon landings.

The latest Soyuz capsules still have an extensive set of manual displays and controls for the cosmonauts to use when necessary. The point is not to hand fly the spacecraft during re-entry, but rather to deal with system failures or unexpected situations which the autopilot can't handle.

Astronauts train for doing astronaut things like spacewalks and other zero-g activities.

I would expect a tourist needs to demonstrate they have the fortitude to:

1. Not Die

2. (Possibly) not lose their shit (any definition)

These can probably be handled with a centrifuge after the tourist demonstrates surviving an extreme rollercoaster.

>(Possibly) not lose their shit (any definition)

This is the funniest thing I've read all day.

They get a ton of training so they can operate all systems. Tourists will have highly trained pilots with them and the only thing they will have to do is to not touch anything and do what they are told to do when something goes wrong.

> Do these space tourism companies pretend that anyone with enough cash can do it?

No pretend required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Tito

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_British

Note that ISS tourists did months of training to go into space for a few days.

Pilots train for years too. Does it mean plane passengers have to as well?

Not all astronauts are pilots

Reply on news.ycombinator.com