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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Seems that between Musk, Bezos and Branson, we have in essence restarted a space race but this time it's billionaires in the private sector versus governments. Some will surely say that they have better things to spend their money on (Bezos for sure) but I gave to say it's still mindblowing. I would imagine if you're one of those guys, you've basically have enough money to solve any problem, so these guys it seems are chasing harder and harder problems, space exploration seems to be top of mind among these problems.

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Mentioning Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the same breath as SpaceX seems disingenuous. It's like comparing an horse+cart with a modern car.

Maybe Electron and Virgin Orbit are in the race, but these hop 100km (or 80!) up and about 5 miles downrange are nowhere near the same league.

Understanding the difference between orbital and suborbital space flight need not cause one to be cynical and negative about things.

Especially since blue origin has a design that can scale up quickly, as SpaceX did with falcon 1 to 9

Falcon 1 put a payload into orbit though, so it's really not the same. Falcon 9's first flight was less than 2 years after Falcon 1 made it to orbit.

For myriad reasons Blue can't just "scale up quickly" in any meaningful way from NS to New Glenn, hence why it's going to take them 8+ years between the first NS and first NG launches. Being realistic about this is not cynical and negative.

that's a good point, i think orbit was the minimum planned for Falcon1. I don't believe SpaceX every just went to the karman line and back. I think all of their flights have been either crashes or fully orbital.

> Think all of their flights have been either crashes or fully orbital.

Certainly applies to the operational launches of all their rocket vehicles, however they've also done suborbital test flights with with Grasshopper, F9R, Starhopper, Starship (and maybe Super Heavy soon as well depending on if they do a sub-orbital with that first).

The important difference is that SpaceX has never considered the Karman line as a target in its own right (somewhat rightly, its only value is for "whelming" space tourism).

“Scale up”, a software term that has almost zero value when translated to aerospace engineering.

Will see how Elon's 100 of Starships per year will affect costs of transport to space.

I suspect that as they scale up their costs will increase due to logistics and maintenance costs not necessarily scaling linearly with launches. Furthermore, I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up and hence costs associated with launch failures also increase.

> I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up

So you're saying that after say the initial 100 launches

Launch 100-199 would have 5 failures

Launch 200-299 would have 7 failures

Launch 300-399 would have 10 failures

Why?

Generally doing more of something reduces the cost per something. Why do you think the inverse will hold with spacex?

"Scale up" is fine once you have a working design and can just pup out copies of that design by the dozen with mass production - what SpaceX is doing with Raptors (and did with Merlins) for example.

You need the demand to make that worthwhile though.

Falcon 9 was a direct extension of Falcon 1. New Glenn shares almost nothing in common with New Shepard. They don't even use the same fuel or engine.

Second stage of New Glenn uses a variant of the New Shephard engine.

This tweet summed it up well:

https://twitter.com/Charly923407591/status/14162863209561210...

The US was behind the USSR at the beginning of the last space race. Jeff Bezos is an extremely smart and talented guy, and is now focusing a lot more of his time on Blue Origin. I wouldn't count them out.

Blue Origin technically started before SpaceX and has an increasing delta in accomplishments... They're easily a decade plus behind and SpaceX doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Bezos is smart and talented... but it's hard to overcome a lead like that.

Bezos is a businessman, rockets require engineering.

Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.

Bezos can hire engineers to work for him. Amazon requires lots of engineers and that works fine.

Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.

Then why hasn't he done so earlier?

Because he was busy being CEO of Amazon, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Now he will spend most of his time on Blue Origin.

And the US was behind Russia at the end of the last space race, as Americans had to take Russian rockets to even get to orbit

This is what "trickle down" technology looks like. We are watching space flight move a rung down the economic ladder.

Nation states -> wealthy bigco -> billionare's pet project -> ????? -> normal people

(some steps omitted for brevity)

Not sure if you're being facetious. If so, I'll point out that it didn't take long to get from the Wright Brothers to regular civilian jet passenger flights, and it won't take long to get from Musk and Bezos to regular civilian space flights.

The wealthy early adopters provide the capital to refine and scale up the industry to make it practical and affordable for less wealthy late adopters.

Nation states -> wealthy bigco -> billionare's pet project -> hobbyist (e.g. Copenhagen Suborbitals) -> normal people.

when Copenhagen Suborbitals does this i'll cheer (and theiy're getting close). Bezos and his resources should be able to do better.

Nation state R&D -> billionare's pet-project PoC -> wealthy bigco Commercialisation effort -> Commercial service (for wealthy/business) -> Commercial service (for normal public) -> hobbyists & higher education

But what’s the actual purpose? Space tourism I get. But beyond that I’m struggling to see the uses of normal people having access to space travel. By comparison people having access to air travel has clear benefits.

Our planet will only last so long until the Sun becomes a Red Giant. At that point we will need to venture to at least the outer planets, if not beyond the solar system if we want to continue as a species.

Even in smaller time frames, I read somewhere that one of Bezos' plans is to move manufacturing into space.

And if/when we do get colonies on other planets and moons, some people would want to live there.

> Our planet will only last so long until the Sun becomes a Red Giant.

In, what, five billion years? I’m not sure we need Bezos to be focusing all his money on that timeframe.

We have no time to waste on climate change and corona virus.

Engineering and industry. Even small companies will be able to do innovation using microgravity, no gravity.

I am also sure that you could do cool sports events on the moon or a big space station.

I don't see a race. I see one company that does space travel and two dilettantes, who may or may not one day actually do something useful.

Blue Origin is the closest to actually developing useful orbital and beyond-orbital capabilities. They have their own new engine design that's not quite as impressive as Raptor but not bad and their own super-heavy lift booster in development. The thing you just saw fly is similar to "Starhopper."

Virgin Galactic is an expensive carnival ride and has nothing close to orbital capability.

For those that don't know: getting to orbit (let alone beyond) requires way more delta-V (energy) than getting past the Karman line. The German V-2 is (I think) the first vehicle to do that, but it was nowhere even near orbit capable. The first photo from space was done by the USA with a captured and modified V-2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_No._13

Virgin galactic does go to orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit

They launched satellites earlier this year.

The space tourism thing is just a part of what the company does.

Virgin Galactic doesn't go to orbit, Virgin Orbit does.

Wow... I didn't even know about that. I stand corrected.

SpaceX is still way ahead though.

"Ahead" implies the same end goal... Neither Virgin Galactic (the suborbital space tourism company) or Virgin Orbit (the orbital small-sat launch company) have the same end goal as SpaceX.

That's like saying Lockheed Martin (maker of the F-35) is "way ahead" of Textron (maker of the Cessna). They have different goals entirely.

> The thing you just saw fly is similar to "Starhopper."

I think you mean "Grasshopper" (the Falcon 9 VTOL test mule from a few years back). New Shepard is less than half the size of Starhopper, and the BE-3 engine has ~25% of the thrust of the Raptor engine.

You're seeing the very first steps of a long race.

That's right. Up until we have 100,000 people living in space we are just winging it.

Winner of the race will be the dominant company in said community of 100,000 or the most socially influential person.

Bezos, Musk and Branson won't be alive to see that, so they are shooting for George Washington type influence, the one reserved for the founder, the guy who was at the beginning of it all and gets remembered .

There is a race, but the competitors are China and SpaceX.

The question every time space exploration comes up is whether the money and effort is better spent in space or on more terrestrial problems.

With government-sponsored exploration, you at least ended up with public research and development that resulted in spinoffs that are useful on land. With a private space race, technologies like these seem more likely to remain a trade secret.

Also, when it comes to 'hard problems', physics is pretty predictable. Humanity has all kinds of social problems, which I'd argue are harder than these tech problems. For example, we'd have the capacity to eliminate hunger if it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that.

>>With a private space race, technologies like these seem more likely to remain a trade secret.

Much of what is developed is in the public domain. Patents and trade secrets only go so far. You can't patent or keep secret the concepts that these trials prove out.

The satellite of industries that develops to support space flight is also not affected by whether the fights they're supporting are private vs government, and neither are the skills developed by the engineers working these projects.

Private also has one distinct advantage: it can be self-sustaining, in being managed by an owner with a strong stake in the venture as a business unit.

> Patents and trade secrets only go so far. You can't patent or keep secret the concepts that these trials prove out.

I'd argue this is, if we're talking about practicality, is just crumbs though.

For example, scratch-resistant lenses were developed at NASA. Proving that it could be done wasn't the important factor that brought it to everyone's homes. What brought it to everyone's homes was the fact that NASA licensed

As another example, single-crystal silicon solar cells were first developed after NASA sponsored a 28-member coalition to develop an unmanned, high altitude aircraft. Private companies don't create coalitions like this and are much less likely to license or waive patents.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies#Scra...

Proving it can be done is important in its own right: it invites competition.

And proving it can be done is aside from proving how it can be done. Once the general principle is proven out, competitors find ways to apply it that avoid infringing on the patent. The process of discovering the how involves expensive trial and error, that a large private sector can greatly accelerate.

I agree that publicly funded technology initiatives have their own strengths, but private technology provide far more than crumbs. Much of an industry's development is in the form of mundane, that is too unremarkable to be patented or held in secret, and for that, it makes no difference what the source of the funding is.

> With government-sponsored exploration, you at least ended up with public research

And you (the public) pay for it. With the Musk's of the world paying, the gov has more money for social causes.

If the public can't consistently support these kind of projects without constantly threatening their budgets, maybe they are better in the hands of private benefactors that value them.

> it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that

How can they help? There's enough money to eliminate hunger and keep billionaires. Hunger isn't just about who has money, it's about who could have money and maintain it.

>For example, we'd have the capacity to eliminate hunger if it wasn't for the pesky problem of inequality, and billionaires aren't exactly lining up to help out with that.

Hunger is basically a non-issue in all developed nations. See all the gray and purple nations on this map. In the US, for example, deaths from malnutrition are ~,1% of all deaths annually. Any money the billionaires might put into it would be better spent on traffic safety, reducing cardiovascular diseases, or researching cancer, and those are all by several orders of magnitude. https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

Also, aid sent to the countries that do have hunger problems (like much of sub-Saharan Africa) has simply crashed their agricultural economy, making the issue even worse. Local farmers can't really compete with free, after all.

So to paraphrase: doesn’t matter for developed nations, we don’t have an answer for undeveloped ones.

…doesn’t that suggest it would be worth a billionaire trying to find an answer for the latter? A way to help local farmers feed their population? It seems like an interesting problem space to me. Certainly more interesting than replicating space flights NASA already did decades ago.

SpaceX at least is not just replicating NASA feats.

I don't think Blue Origin is currently in the same league as SpaceX. One is making money putting payloads in orbit, actively disrupting the industry and developing new hardware. They other has a sub orbital rocket that is only good for joy rides and otherwise is a lot of talk and little results. Rocket Lab is a more substantial player in the space industry right now than Blue Origin is. Maybe some day they will get off their ass and actually do something noteworthy.

Space tourism will be noteworthy insofar as it will normalize more and more of the public to space travel, which in turn normalize the acceptance of the expenditure required.

Consider if "space tourism" ends up having no product market fit. There is no data currently that it is a viable business. Sure, there are a bunch of pre-orders, and owners of companies now making maiden voyages, but that's it.

A couple vaporized high profile customers will have a massive chilling effect on the industry.

I think Musk's "we are going to Mars, people will die" is the most sober/realistic take. This messaging will do a much better job eliciting a customer base that understands the product and that will lead to sustainable industry someday.

I hear those complaints, but aside from a snarky "then spend your own money on <whatever> then", they fail mention:

- anyone can spend money on things, if enough sub-billionaires spend money on something the same amount can be raised - there's no reason a billionaire needs to do it. On the other hand, large focused projects like this are arguably harder to crowdfund from a management perspective.

- The governments is richer than Musk. Taxation brings in more money, and is a much fairer way to contribute to these problems.

- the government is more empowered to deal with social issues. There are some things a private corp/citizen cannot do, at least without government approval anyway. The issues being tackled here are mainly engineering, that is "free" to solve. The items that they would "better" to fix are highly political, with a heavy side of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

- throwing money at something can make it worse. A pipedream has no metrics that could prove this, so they can always be optimistic. When a "clothe the poor" drive kills local tailoring businesses, for example.

- Billionaires pay taxes, usually more than most (generally, though they have more leverage to bargain for lower taxes. unfair? sure, but that's global free trade gets you). What remains is income - why should they fix the problems government could, but won't?

- A major component of this is envy/belittling effort (Musk looks too happy in PR pics, so he's "playing around") or belittling the goal (spaceflight is useless) - i.e. grievance from the ignorant. There are a bajillion "useless" pastimes and occupations relative to some rando's pet social cause, yet billionaires are easy individual targets when everyone is equally to blame - at least Musk probably works hard.

It's not really about the individual billionaires, that's missing the forest for the trees. That individuals can afford glamor rides to the edge of space in personal rockets is merely a symptom of gross inequality that has many more downsides than upsides.

Life expectancy is dropping, climate change is accelerating and while we can't solely blame any individual billionaire, they have as a group profited astronomically [:)] from the collapse of our institutions and middle classes, and from the wholesale destruction of livelihoods during the pandemic.

The government is more corrupt, more attuned to the needs of the rich than ever, so you don't need to wonder why the government has failed to attend to the needs of the majority. The same class of people currently culminating in rockets launches toward space have been directing the flows of tax dollars for decades.

> from the collapse of our institutions and middle classes, and from the wholesale destruction of livelihoods during the pandemic

How are billionaires on the hook for these things?

I believe Bezos has been obsessed with space since before he even started Amazon. Apparently he even talked about this dream during his high school graduation.

I always thought that Amazon was just the way to make his space dream possible.

Bill Gates is chasing harder and harder problems, not these guys.

Gates is doing great work, no doubt.

But are they "hard" problems to solve? Most of the projects Gates takes on have already been solved in the developed world. He's primarily trying to distribute those successes to the developing world.

In any case, we can have both: rich people building the tech of tomorrow, and rich people trying to apply existing tech to the underserved. Both are good; both have utility.

I'd say climate change would be the real hard problem, considering we've already been to the moon.

Jeff Bezos' company has contributed significantly to the problem, I get his plan is to manufacture things in space, but who is that really designed to benefit.

The real hard thing to do would be to invest his personal billions into the issue, today.

The Space Race is still happening, but it's happening on other planets and with government money (see: Mars and further afield exploration). All these initiatives have been possible by the heavy lifting of NASA and other international government agencies over the last 6 decades.

Theses newcomers have drawn in attention and effort and are trying to reframe space as a business being funded by revenue - which has trade offs but in general is a positive development. The really challenging work without the glamor is still being down by the scientists and research agencies with the government. I do tip my hats to the accomplishments of all three of the new comer organizations. I just dispute that the narrative that they are driving the future. I think they are complementary.

To be clear - they don't have enough money to "solve" space exploration - it takes deeper capital than they have - though they are bringing a new business model to potentially stretch their capital deployments.

In my opinion, they are still doing incredible work. SpaceX and Blue Origin can both bring their rockets down - no government space agency can do this today (and govt space agencies had a 60 year lead)

Privatization helps because NASA cannot afford failures today, but private companies can. And since space is a new and risky frontier, failures will happen. That's why I believe that privatization is a good thing overall

I agree privatization is a benefit - i believe that was my final statement in that they are complementary. I think that the bulk work is still done by public agencies, however the privatization part capitalizes from a revenue perspective on the work done by the public agencies.

It's not dissimilar to how most energy technology makes its way to the private companies. DOE research labs do most of the work with college collaboration and then it gets released through private equity into the public domain.

NASA could have done this long ago. And had test project that proved as much. Suborbital human flight is just not very interesting for anything other then tourism.

> Some will surely say that they have better things to spend their money on

Hasn't Branson essentially cashed out of Virgin Galactic for a huge payday? Even his flight was just a stunt to sell 500 million in stock.

I can't help but thinking we've entered another Gilded Age.

"Space exploration" is lending way, way too much credence to this.

These two flights were ~60mi altitude. The ISS, for reference, is at 250mi. We've launched people there more than a hundred times, never mind having to put it there in the first place. The moon, which we landed and recovered people from in 1969, is 240,000mi away.

This is a hobby project, which is totally fine in that it's their money to spend, and it's kind of neat that we can generate enough wealth that private individuals could even imagine doing this, but let's not dress it up as more than that.

Edit: Musk/SpaceX is definitely in a different category. That actually seems to be shooting for space exploration, which is pretty neat, though I still think there are earthly priorities that we'd see much higher ROI from.

> it's their money to spend

Not everyone agrees.

Not everyone agrees the earth is round but we don't take their opinions seriously

Sure. I myself am not entirely bought into this position, but it is in fact the position of "our society." Figure we have to start by not calling these people explorers before making our way to questioning whether such extreme accumulation of wealth is optimal in the first place.

> questioning whether such extreme accumulation of wealth is optimal in the first place

But why is it anyone's choice? People are already taxed disproportionately, why can't Musk spend his money, or the money people invest in him?

The US is free to outlaw large accumulations of wealth, it would just lose a lot of people in the process (assuming emigration wasn't also outlawed).

People in the US are, equally, free to move to places with fairer tax laws.

Can you expand on this? I've never looked into who is financing this project. I've always assumed it was just Bezos' own money he was using.

Bezos sells ~$1B of his Amazon stock per year to finance it.

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