So what? He sells $1B every year to fund Blue Origin alone. Maybe this is one of these transactions?
On the scale of Bezos' fortune, this is not a significant amount of money.
On the scale of Bezos' fortune, this is not a significant amount of money.
Not to mention, securities regulations vary significantly by legal jurisdiction, and most of the knowledge that people have about how securities are actually traded are informed by soundbites from media and dramatic representations in movies.
Hell, I worked at HSBC in various roles for several years, and took as much finance training as I could while I was there, and I don't really understand a lot of the rules and regulations in the jurisdictions I work in (mostly Canadian and US places).
We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it.
The comment also glosses over the ~70 currently active missions on NASA's plate[0]. NASA also had some major success with good media coverage for other missions to Saturn[1], Jupiter[2][3], and Pluto/Kuiper Belt[4].
Please don't belittle the amazing work that has been accomplished by all the people involved over the decades just because it's not part of pop culture. They've accomplished those things despite having to walk the political tightrope and nearly anemic funding.
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al...
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini
[2] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo
[3] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.ht...
I'm not trying to dismiss all the effort that goes into it, but from a, I suppose selfish, perspective it's a lot more important to enable humans to be a spacefaring species than it is to send probes themselves.
I guess I'm just too enamored with the Apollo missions and such.
Are not robotics many times more efficient money wise than sending a human? Robotics don't need near as much support as humans do, and can be sent one way without much moral quandary.
Can you imagine the costs and technology required to send humans out on a voyager mission.
We'll not send humans to the ground level on Venus, and humans would not see anything other than atmosphere from the orbit, compared to radar mapping of the Venuses surface, for example.
I guess the main benefit of sending humans is that exploration/troubleshooting can be more real-time (for the people in the spacecraft).
Where can we really send humans? Moon, Mars maybe, orbit of Mercury/Venus? We also probably want to get them back, so these missions will be complicated by the fact that we don't like to throw away highly trained specialists.
What can people do there that is not possible with robots?
In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win.
Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.
NASA alone spends some 10X-20X every year what Bezos does, but some how a dinky danky 1 billion is now "going after space like we should have been?"
I don't buy it. If NASA's ~22B budget is insufficient, then billionaires making toys for an order of magnitude less is an order of magnitude more insufficient.
SpaceX has already demonstrated such possibilities.
SLS current dev budget is over 7 billion dollars in 8 years, and they haven't finished assembling their first stack.
1) Without the billions NASA has awarded Space X prior to Falcon, there is no SpaceX.
2) Without the billions NASA awarded them during Falcon development for other projects, SpaceX would have not gotten enough money from investors, who rightfully valued the company based on their NASA contracts
I've never been in a private business without its fair share of lazy layabouts and corrupt executives except maybe the startups I've worked for.
NASA has more than 17,000 employees that do
- medicine and biomedical research
- all sorts of earth science research including things like geology, climate, ozone depletion
- astronomy
- design new mission hardware
- fund and maintain a portion of the ISS
- maintain 10 field centers
I mean, they have 46 current missions... https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/?type=current
Blue Origin is developing a rocket. Pretty big difference.
For example, why is NASA so involved with climate change? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem to have much to do with space exploration. It could be possible that actual NASA funds devoted solely to space exploration are a lot lower than the total spent by billionaires on space exploration.
They've actually written an article explaining that https://climate.nasa.gov/nasa_science/history/
So, why not do both, and prioritize the money accordingly?
Who knows what the next stages will bring? if we mine platinum and gold-heavy asteroids, we can make common use of previously-rare elements, or (as Bezos wants) foster an environment for heavy-polluting, but critical industry, to go off-world.
Never mind that the entire technological evolution necessitated by the process can be used to better humankind's lot.