New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight
blueorigin.com
blueorigin.com
The stage 1 simulator, and integration & test facilities: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=...
"Tank Cleaning and Testing" facility: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=...
Launch Complex 36: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=...
It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.
It seems obvious that you have to build the factory before you can build a rocket but Musk has figured out how to get around that.
He did it the old way at Tesla for the Model 3: built out the factory before building the car, his "alien dreadnought" highly automated factory that then went through "production hell" and was 2 weeks away from bankrupting the company.
He then built a giant tent in the parking lot of his factory, and iterated on a factory design, took that design and used it to build giga-Shanghai, producing vehicles of higher quality than his American built ones.
Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design?
Anyone who's ever done manufacturing? Anyone who's ever built something with their hands? Anyone who realizes that when assembling anything from 30,000 parts, it's going to take a lot of time and iteration to get your build quality to an acceptable level?
Now, this may all come as a shock to software people, but anyone who has actually built stuff out of real, physical objects, would be aware of this... And why you should never buy a version 1.0 of anything.
I legitimately don't understand why software engineers think that other professionals can't understand the concept of iteration. When GM builds a car factory, they aren't doing it from zero. They are building it on top of a hundred years of manufacturing experience and iteration. When Tesla was building its first car factory, it had nearly-zero years of institutional manufacturing experience and iteration. Of course a big up-front build was going to be a disaster. It's why they still can't figure out how to align the interior panels in their cars.
Here's a random video of a GM SUV production process -- just filled to the brim with robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ow7gmZTIpo
They're obviously aiming to cut cost and build time as much as possible, so they automate where they can without sacrificing quality for things like spacing gaps. Over time, that'll be automated too. GM as an example spends like $30 billion/year in CapEx -- that'll buy a lot of robots!
Tesla is playing a different game based on first principals. "How low can we get cell cost?", "How can we get range to 300 miles without extra costs?"
Obviously finance is important. If you run out of cash you can go bankrupt. But in the long run whoever is innovating the fastest without going bankrupt wins.
There is no doubt Tesla is a revolutionary company and as a "car guy", I'm ecstatic that they somehow bootstrapped a new American auto manufacturer. Their commitment to reducing electric car costs likely put a huge dent in the trajectory of climate change which as an unequivocal good. My only point is that they could have done all that and built a "normal" manufacturing plant in the South somewhere and never have been two weeks away from shutting the company down vs. trying to "First Principles" design a new way to build cars that had them reinventing the wheel in messier, more expensive way.
Tesla also doesn't include showroom costs in their COGS, but they can't sell cars without them.. (all other autos only include the revenue they receive from their dealer networks as the top-line revenue figure).
These are the kinds of thing that makes people suspicious about their ultimate financials.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/2783335-how-teslas-deceptiv...
I don't care at all about stock prices, I'm actively shopping for an electric car and Teslas are near the top of my list since they're so technologically advanced, but they're just not very well as a manufacturer or as a responsibly run corporation which annoys me since I'm in corporate finance.
As an example, if Tesla and GM both had $10,000 cars for sale. GM's "Cost of Goods Sold" would include the manufacturing costs, costs for R&D and their revenue would only be $8k since the dealer networks have their own books - but then GM isn't responsible for all of the showrooms and sales staff, etc.
Tesla's revenue would show $10k, but would only include the cost to manufacturer (the R&D expense is "below the line") and they wouldn't include any costs to have hundreds of showroom locations - even those those showrooms are necessary to sell cars at any volume, and Tesla has to pay for out of that $10k sales price.
It's obviously not apples-to-apples to compare those "GAAP Gross Margin" between those two things.
There are a lot of weird short seller conspiracies out there but “In order to increase apparent profitability, Tesla uses different accounting than every other auto company” is a factual statement and so is “If you use actual industry GAAP, Tesla isn’t yet GM profitable.”
I hope they get there! I hope they sell 10M cars per year.. but to hold them up as a manufacturing leader is pretty silly.
If you are so certain that you are correct and these are a fair comparison, can you please explain how his breakdown between the two is either incorrect or not relevant to your point?
Multiple states in the US require companies sell a certain amount of zero-emission vehicles or buy regulatory credits from companies that do sell that amount. Tesla is one of these companies they buy credits from. They were paid 1.6 billion USD in 2020 for these credits. That is more than double their 2020 net income. [1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/tesla-profitability...
That said, what they are doing in Boca is clearly very impressive and its much more then just an integration facility.
It failed spectacularly and nearly bankrupted them and they had to scramble to implement standard processes in manufacturing. Fremont factory is still clusterfuck as a result. Then when they were building Shanghai, they decided to follow more standard playbooks from a start.
And Elon now is taking how manufacturing is really hard.
The whole Tesla model 3 story is “nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated” moment.
https://www.space.com/spacex-unveils-inspiration4-all-privat...
They are actually falling behind faster then they are catching up.
> I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.
This such a strange thing to consider. The logic that if you just go super slow for long enough, then once you start you will automatically go super fast? Why would that be the case? Of course once they put one kg into orbit, they will put more kg into orbit faster then SpaceX did in 2008. But that is strange definition of 'pay off', in fact its the opposite, its that you didn't get 'pay off' for 10+ years.
Believing that once they finally launch something after 20+ years of moving incredibly slowly, it will simply take of like crazy and they will launch some huge number is just not how the rocket industry works.
SpaceX has scaled faster then literally any space company ever, and is increasing the speed of its scaling over time. funds.
SpaceX has the highest reliability of basically any rocket, no other rocket is human rated, rated for all DoD and NASA flights and has the lowest insurance cost in the industry.
The simply fact is, BO and SpaceX have existed for the same amount of time. BlueOrigin had massive amounts of money put in it, literally billion, many, many billions and they will invest a number of extra billions before they get to their first orbital launch, or probably first significant revenue. Basically all paid of of pocket by Bezos.
SpaceX started with an investment from Musk on the order of 80M and everything since then has been raised threw revenue and private investment.
This race has started 20 years ago, it doesn't start when BO put 1kg into orbit.
In fact, I would argue Bezos whole strategy has been an utter disaster. BO was started to test out landing things, but before they ever even tested orbital landing, SpaceX has already mastered it. Bezos could have invested in SpaceX around 2010 and put the rest of his money into what is need in-space and he would be 10x further along in his plans.
If Bezos goal was millions of people living in space, it would make way more sense to take all those billions he invest in New Glenn, into building moon water mining system. Rather then being a slow copy of SpaceX that is always 10 steps behind.
Together they could achieve so much more, but apparently another heavy lift launcher in a market that already has to many is what he wants to spend money on.
The announced delay was already baked in, everyone watching the space believed the delay, now announced, was already real. So there's little "news" here for an industry watcher. Many expect the first orbital launch might slip until 2023.
However, Blue operating in the open? Releasing announcements and working openly - that's the real news. And new! It's different and I certainly hope it's evidence that Bezos is brining Amazon's famous speed to his private space company.
If this is indication of a greater culture change is highly questionable.
I don't think this will happen, but that announcement reads a lot like delay announcements that shadow a future cancellation. ('we continue to remain committed ...', 'persuing other opportunities', 'growing market ...' (it isn't) ...)
There are two aspects here:
A) With the way Blue Origin operates, I highly doubt New Glenn can be competitive with Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy financially, at least without heavy discounts funded by Bezos. More so once Falcon Heavy gets the upgraded fairing they are developing for government launches.
Blue might still get some business from the US government and from Starlink competitors that don't want to help fund Spacex, but the market seems very limited. We are already at a point where Falcon 9 can handle most payloads, and there are no commercial use cases for larger payloads on the horizon.
Which brings me to the second point:
If Musks claims for Starship regarding cost and reusability come true, no one will be remotely competitive with that rocket. It's in a whole different league with a huge payload capacity and full (1st + 2nd stage) reusability.
Starship has a chance of reaching orbit maybe late this year, but more likely in 2021. The question is if Bezos will be willing to pump billions into Blue Origin for the 4+ years until they can catch up with their own second generation rocket, currently nicknamed New Armstrong.
A first New Glenn launch would probably mean start of scheduled service in late 2023, at which point Starship might already be launching regularly.
Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.
Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.
It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.
Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.
The money has to come from somewhere.
Either it's from Bezos, or it's from launches with a price that won't make it easy to win many customers in the very small market of large payloads.
- Full autonomous driving by 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021... He said it was 6 months from release in Jan 2017. That was obviously a complete lie.
- You could sleep in your car with Autopilot driving by 2019
- Tesla vehicles will be assets that make you money. "1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020"
- Tesla will make a mini-sub in a couple days to save that youth soccer team stuck in an cave
- There will be fewer fatalities per million miles if Autopilot is engaged than if it wasn't. Suprise, fatalities/mile is actually higher with Autopilot.
- "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"
- Tesla Roadster would be out by 2020
- Tesla Semis on the road by 2019
- Teslas will be able to swap batteries faster than you could refill an ICE vehicle instead of recharging your battery
- Taking Tesla private
One should definitely be wary of Musks often inflated / over-optimistic claims, but Starship has a good chance of holding true to most of what was promised.
So it's acceptable to have some skepticism that SpaceX intends to drop the Falcon 9's (already very cheap) marginal cost from $1000/kg by 100 times to $10-$20/kg through Starship's fully and rapidly reusable operation.
If anyone can do it, it's Elon Musk. But it's good to keep in mind his deep aversion to any sunken cost fallacies.
It got shit-canned for political reasons as it would have shown a commercial capsule to be more capable than Orion, which for a so-called "deep exploration vehicle" was pathetically unable to achieve any of the goals set for the Red Dragon mission. Can't have NASA or Lockheed Martin look bad, that just won't do. SpaceX was at the time trying to win more government launch contracts for the Falcon 9 and a continuation of the commercial resupply and commercial crew contracts which represented a much bigger prize than a one-off Mars science mission.
Rumor is that certain key senators and congress critters that are recipients of large amounts of aerospace lobbying dollars phoned up Elon and NASA Administration and stated in no uncertain terms that if Red Dragon happened then those programs would be zeroed out and SpaceX would never see a dime of government money again. I can't confirm these rumors; I can only say that the project died a very quick death before it even got off the ground, with NASA people working on it reassigned to other projects and not a peep out of Elon on the topic until years later. SpaceX would later decide that the super-drano landing approach wasn't working and go back to the tried-and-true parachutes and water recovery EDL architecture, but that was years after this version of Red Dragon was dead and buried.
ETA: Reading the wikipedia page on Red Dragon made me remember another aspect of the politics which got it cancelled. Most robotic exploration of the solar system is done by JPL, with the other NASA centers just providing scientific instruments or specific component expertise. The actual spacecraft and the whole project management and mission operations is done by JPL though, and they jealously guard that position.
Red Dragon was partially an attempt by NASA Ames management to start a sustained planetary exploration program of their own. They had just come off the phenomenally successful LCROSS mission and were doing a bunch of other small technology demonstration projects to build out the (at the time new) idea of cubesats and ride-shared microsatellites. JPL's view of this was essentially "whatever, enjoy your little toy satellites. lol." Red Dragon as designed in ~2011 may have been larger, but was not fundamentally any different. It was just a big lander to ship a bunch of science instruments that didn't fundamentally differ from what had been already developed for other missions. But as I wrote above, it got shot down through aerospace industry politics. Note the wording on wikipedia: "SpaceX initially planned to propose Red Dragon for funding in 2013 and 2015 as the United States NASA Discovery mission #13 for launch in 2022, but it was not submitted." Who just doesn't submit a proposal? Nobody. Worst they'll do stamp 'rejected' on it, but it doesn't hurt to try. No, it got killed from within.
The 2014 concept was different though: it proposed a single-mission Mars sample return. Now I need to go on a little side story here and tell you about what Mars Sample Return--MSR in JPL speak--means to NASA, and JPL in particular.
The Mars planetary exploration campaign which started in the 90's and culminated in at least one mission at every 26 month launch opportunity, were flagship missions. This means they got the biggest budgets, and NASA did not compete for their design or management. It went straight to JPL. All these planetary probes were built by the usual suspect of aerospace contractors, of course, but the design, engineering work, testing, validation, and mission operations were all done by JPL. Not only is it the pride of JPL, it is also their lifeblood funding. So much of JPL's overhead funding comes from these missions, and the scientists and engineers pull their salaries from them. I worked with a guy that was 0.5 FTE (half-time) doing operations for Spirit & Opportunity, and another 0.5 FTE in an R&D role preparing for the next rover, which would be named Curiosity. These missions were selected based on input from the planetary decadal surveys, but they were scheduled based on what it would take to keep JPL (and other NASA) employees continuously funded at a constant level. That's why the Mars exploration campaign became a sequence of alternating rovers and orbiters at every launch opportunity--a jobs program to keep those amazing scientists and engineers employed.
However conventional wisdom, as reflected in the planetary decadal, said that there is only so far we can go trusting our remote instruments without verifying the data by bringing a sample back to examine in our way more sensitive laboratories on Earth. So the sequence of remotely operated planetary exploration rovers was scheduled to end with the Mars Science Laboratory (AKA Curiosity), and the next big thing would be "Mars Sample Return." Working within self-imposed constraints, the stratospheric architects at JPL put together a mission profile that would require THREE missions back-to-back: one to find and cache samples (this is Perseverance, which just landed on Mars), one to collect those samples and send them to Mars orbit, and one to intercept those samples and bring them home. All built and launched in sequence rather than at the same time, so the total mission duration would be spread over the better part of a decade. Like with SLS, this monstrosity of an architecture was selected because of self-imposed constraints that had nothing really to do with the mission requirements and everything to do with sustaining a JPL jobs program. Three separate missions over the course of a decade is a feature, not a risk factor. Indeed it's the whole point.
Enter SpaceX and the 2014 Red Dragon proposal, which was an all-in-one Mars sample return mission that launched on a single Falcon Heavy and landed a rocket inside of the dragon capsule that was powerful enough to send the collected sample directly back to Earth. Do it all in one mission, and at 10x - 100x reduction in cost. So cheap it didn't even need to be a flagship mission and could be outsourced to industry and academia (like New Horizons was).
JPL was not impressed. Play with your little toy satellites all you want, but don't fuck around with the golden goose. 2014 Red Dragon sample return proposal was a direct threat to the entire Mars planetary exploration program and semi-autonomous JPL's bottom line. They hit back hard trying to discredit the proposal with a bunch of underhanded arguments and agency politics. That's about the time I left NASA so I didn't get to see it fully play out, but apparently JPL won out because in the end the sample-return version of Red Dragon was deselected from funding.
There was apparently a third concept study in 2016 which I don't know the details of, and it was during or after that third experience that Elon finally pulled the plug and reallocated those resources to Starship. Though I guess you might say that the planned first Starship mission to Mars in 2026 (aspirational) is Red Dragon 4, just with significantly larger Starship instead.
Sucks for Red Dragon, but I'm looking forward to Starship!
As far as I remember, Tesla built a public battery swap station in a former car wash at Harris Ranch and real customers did use it. I also recall that the swapping hardware was demonstrated on video to do two pack swaps in the same time it took to re-fill a gas Audi. So I'm not sure what your point is with that.
The mini-sub was actually built, but not used. Not sure if I'd count that as "never came true".
As for the Roadster and Semi delays... the Semi is on the road (there are at least two of them), and it's not like Tesla is the only car manufacturer to miss shipping targets. Are the CEOs of those companies "liars" too?
He claimed the battery swap was going to be at Super Charger locations. Not that they tested it at an old car wash.
A couple of prototype Semis on the road in secret in 2021 is a far cry from commercial delivery in 2019.
And yes, no other car company CEO could consistently overpromise and underdeliver like he does and keep their job. Most automaker stocks don't have the religious fervor of Tesla.
Most automakers are quite careful about the dates they say, and the certainty the communicate around it. Nobody wants to get sued for making misleading statements to investors. Look at what is happening to Nikola for instance. They had one misleading video and it might put the company under. It already killed off their Badger pickup truck.
On SpaceX, he has been more careful about what he says because he does care about ruffling feathers at the NASA and Space Force. He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him. Also, that industry is filled with grifting rife with liars (see ULA and SLS) who make claims they could never deliver on.
By definition, someone who makes repeatedly makes factual claims that are false that are factually disprovable is a liar. No matter the industry.
Musk doesn't overpromise for investors or the public. His M.O. is to overpromise as motivation to drive productivity. Every day he manages to convince his workforce that they're at the cusp of crossing the finish line of w'ever insane goal he has set, and so they keep pushing hard that day (or they quit). At this point it should be obvious: Musk never hits his timelines, and yet he usually still delivers faster than any other CEO or company could ever dream of delivering.
His M.O. works because of his personality and his personal investment in operations. Few managers could ever hope to replicate that, and those who do end up failing horribly, or were merely trying to paper over some other deficiencies. But judging Musk by applying the same standards one would apply to Fortune 500 companies, expecting him to adhere to normative business culture (formal and informal), seems a little obtuse given the past 10+ years of history making abundantly clear exactly how and why he operates. 15+ years ago, sure, it was easy to write Musk off as a conman. But he's delivered in ways that nobody ever thought possible. At this point the only credible interpretation (not simply charitable one) is that he's perfectly sincere and earnest--that his methodology, including his "stories", serve a legitimate and crucial function. Musk is one of those few characters that come along every generation or so, breaks all the rules, and succeeds where pretty much everyone else would have failed. It's not always pretty, but it works. It is what it is.
Well, Harris Ranch is a Super Charger location, so... I guess that wasn't a lie? And, again, real customers did use it on real road trips (you can read user experiences on TMC).
Turns out people would rather take a discount for charging instead of swapping, so the swapping model wasn't financially viable. Sometimes plans change. Is almost every startup founder a liar because they pivoted after testing market fit?
> Most automakers are quite careful about the dates they say, and the certainty the communicate around it.
Oh, come. on. I'm going to pick on VWAG for a minute:
* The e-Tron was months late due to software issues.
* The Taycan has been out for almost a year and a half, yet features promised to be available at launch are still unavailable. OTA does not exist. Owners report that paid software features randomly disappear then come back a few days later. 12V battery problems bricking the car are rife.
* Porsche repeatedly and loudly claimed the Taycan was a track-capable car, and wouldn't overheat, unlike those silly children over at Tesla. Owner reports on taycanforum.com indicate otherwise.
* VW said the ID.3 would be available in 2020Q2, but didn't start shipping until 2020Q4.
* They sold and registered ID.3s to dealerships to inflate their sales numbers for December, despite claiming many months ago that they were sold out for a year. They've sold almost none in January. That's called channel stuffing, and regulators don't like it.
> And yes, no other car company CEO could consistently overpromise and underdeliver like he does and keep their job.
Really? I don't see anyone calling for Herbert Diess's head. Yet, every new EV from VWAG has been late. By your standards it sounds like he repeatedly lied about timelines. And it sure looks like VWAG lied to investors and regulators about the number of cars sold to actual customers in 2020.
> A couple of prototype Semis on the road in secret in 2021 is a far cry from commercial delivery in 2019.
You originally claimed that "Semis on the road by 2019" was an example of a Musk lie. Here is an article, with pictures, from March 2018 showing a Tesla Semi charging at a public supercharger. https://electrek.co/2018/03/08/tesla-semi-trucks-spotted-sup...
> By definition, someone who makes repeatedly makes factual claims that are false that are factually disprovable is a liar. No matter the industry.
Pot, meet kettle.
If all the risky tesla owners use Autopilot, then you’d expect the remaining human piloted miles would be safer.
Tesla accidents are already better than the average, presumably more to do with the price of the car rather than the tech... but I’m curious to see a real analysis rather than my speculation.
So 0/10 of these were actually lies.
Edit: missed the sub, which actually existed. Not a lie, although the whole episode was in very horrid taste.
Musk claims about SpaceX tend to be significantly less outlandish. (less, not none, he still throws some doozies out there) He doesn't need to sell a dream to shareholders. The customers of the product aren't dreamy eyed brand loyalists, the customers are mostly corporations and governments whose decision making processes are going to be driven mostly by accountants and lawyers.
My attitude about Musk's Tesla claims mostly fall in the category of "I'll believe it when I see it," but with SpaceX it's cautious optimism.
Even when it is proven that on tons of issues he has delivered. Sometimes with some delay but for the most part he has delivered.
People were laughing at electric cars, people were laughing at rocket with 27 engines, people were laughing at reusability, people were laughing at private developed rockets and so on. But nobody remembers those things because now everybody knows these things and they are not controversial anymore.
Amazing how people only remember what Musk got wrong. Lets ignore that he built the most successful space flight company ever, lets ignore that he build a car company that builds more BEV then VW and Toyota combined.
We do actually know how Starship is progressing, and even if its not late 2021, even if its late 2022 its still insane. Just shitting on him because it might not happen in late 2021 is just petty.
Great post. Just clarifying that New Armstrong will be the third generation, behind New Glenn (second) and New Sheppard (first).
That said, while Blue will probably have something called New Armstrong if they last long enough, even they may have no clear idea what would bear that name right now. "New Armstrong" is a name that Bezos dropped for a successor at the New Glenn announcement; even if there was some concrete plan attached to it, it may still not be much more substantial than the "Falcon X/Falcon XX" plan that SpaceX presented at a conference in 2010, and ditched fairly soon after.
https://spaceflight101.com/spacex-launch-vehicle-concepts-de...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Launch_service_custo...
[1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Geplante_Starts
https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/2305576/space-force-awa...
Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
But ya, definitely challenging.
To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
I could be wrong, but I don't think Blue has any plans (at least in public) for full re-usability.
Though New Glenn is a beast, it's not that much more powerful than Falcon Heavy, and both of those platforms still throw away the 2nd stage.
The push to scale up and become an operational launch company has only ramped up in the past several years.
They still move somewhat slowly and are fiercely private, but those early years were targeting different goals.
SpaceX mocked up a plan to reuse the second stage of Falcon 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE These plans were scrapped to concentrate on Starship.
If the Falcon 9 is big enough to have enough margin to support second stage reuse, New Glenn definitely does too.
However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy.
Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
[0]: https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-...
[1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-fi...
The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant.
Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan!
We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.