In asking NASA to accept his billions for the Moon, Bezos admits his mistake
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Offering to personally bankroll the lander is better than not offering to personally bankroll the lander, but this still doesn't meet the bar. There's a business plan for Starship that has nothing to do with convincing the government to use it to land on the moon. If the government doesn't use it to land on the moon, they're going to build Starship anyway, launch more satellites than anyone ever thought they would require, and go to Mars.
Blue Moon was always intended to have one customer. That's why Bezos presented it in DC instead of Kent or Texas. If you read the rest of the letter it becomes even more clear:
> We built the National Team – with four major partners and more than 200 small and medium suppliers in 47 states – to focus on designing, building, and operating a flight system the nation could count on.
Why would you go out of your way to build something this way? The best reason I can think of is to give 94 out of 100 Senators the chance to brag about creating jobs in their home state.
> It also eliminated the benefits of utilizing the broad and capable supply base of the National Team (as opposed to funding the vertically-integrated SpaceX approach) and locks every trip to the Moon into 10+ Super Heavy/Starship launches just to get a single lander to the surface.
It's hilarious to see Jeff talk about vertical integration as a bad thing, especially at the same time that he's trying to sell the government a cloud services provider that designs its own chips, generates its own power, and is actually part of a larger company that uses that cloud to run a retail website, for which it has its own package delivery service.
In fairness, if you want to use traditional aerospace supply chains, they are probably optimized to work through 47 out of 50 states - because their biggest customers were DoD contractors who wanted to help Senators make those claims.
Also, in this case, Blue Origin is only building half of the moon lander. The other half is Lockheed Martin and friends. It might have made more sense, in theory, for Blue to design the whole lunar lander instead of just the bottom half. The NASA reports specifically called out the integration risks from this approach as a problem. I don’t know if it’s actually faster to outsource the upper stage of the lander to LockMart or if they just wanted to take advantage of LockMart’s proven ability to win massive government contracts, but you don’t go out of your way to talk about how many states you’re doing business in unless you’re making an appeal to Congress.
https://blueorigin.com/news-archive/open-letter-to-administr...
The three main points:
>Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2B to get the program back on track right now. This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up.
>Blue Origin will, at its own cost, contribute the development and launch of a pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit of the lunar descent element to further retire development and schedule risks. This pathfinder mission is offered in addition to the baseline plan of performing a precursor uncrewed landing mission prior to risking any astronauts to the Moon. This contribution to the program is above and beyond the over $1B of corporate contribution cited in our Option A proposal that funds items such as our privately developed BE-7 lunar lander engine and indefinite storage of liquid hydrogen in space. All of these contributions are in addition to the $2B waiver of payments referenced above.
>Finally, Blue Origin will accept a firm, fixed-priced contract for this work, cover any system development cost overruns, and shield NASA from partner cost escalation concerns.
PS: Did I mention Im an astronaut now?
For example, if we're to progress forward from results of Apollo, we'll need Moon surface infrastructure. That's landing sites - with radio beacons, optical illumination and transport capabilities for payloads. We'll need Moon houses - places to live on the Moon for some longer time, like e.g. half a year in a row - and for that we'll need pressurized units, radiation protection, spacesuits, storage for aforementioned payloads... Is it possible, for example, to send something - maybe small - from Earth to Moon really fast - preferably faster than 2 days - if we need? Like, a critical device or a small amount of particular material? Starship isn't going to to that, not alone at least. How about really bulky units - do we need to assemble them on LEO or Moon surface? Caterpillar once wondered which equipment would be needed on the Moon - do we need raise those questions again? Space Studies Institute, by late O'Neill, who inspired Bezos, did some research into mass drivers ( http://ssi.org/category/mass-drivers/ ) - can BO help deploy something like that on the surface of the Moon?
We don't need landers alone. We'll soon need a whole range of equipment for Moon exploration, there will be more and other needs, BO needs to participate.
Don't assume that Blue Origin isn't working on something just because you haven't heard of it yet. The Blue Moon lander design seemingly came out of nowhere at the specific point in time that Blue wanted to announce it and bid for HLS. You could infer that they were working on the concept for some time before that. (As a point of disclaimer, I worked at Blue Origin on a six month contract last year, and I am unable to confirm or deny any further inferences you may make from this publicly available information.)
It's easy to imagine the end goal of millions of people living and working in space. If millions of people are already living and working in space, you can build stuff, in space, out of space rocks and parts of the Moon pretty easily. The difficult question is how to bootstrap that process in a commercially viable way. O'Neill thought that our need for clean energy would force us to resort to building massive solar power receivers in space and beaming the energy down to earth using microwaves. That hasn't panned out, at least not yet. Others thought that there would be opportunities to manufacture semiconductors or drugs in zero gravity. Neill Blomkamp made a film about the concept that eventually, rich people would just start building space habitats as the ultimate gated communities, and then life on Earth would really suck; as a big fan of the concept of space colonization, I sort of resent him for that now, though I appreciate the allegory.
Not even Jeff Bezos could afford to get an entire Stanford torus built even if he wanted to, and he probably wouldn't make the money back by selling real estate on it either. The trick is to find some way to generate more money that you can reinvest back into the system while you're building out the path to the ultimate goal. Without a solid business case, you're left with the rationale of:
1. You need space infrastructure to build space infrastructure.
2. Infrastructure investments take a long time to pay off.
3. The government usually pays for infrastructure for these very reasons.
4. Let's get the government to pay for space infrastructure.
That conclusion has two corollaries:
1. The government is your customer. Do what makes the government, as a customer, happy. If this means acting like a big, old-fashioned defense contractor, oh well--that's something I'm critical of too, but it's a reasonable thing to try.
2. You can't sell the government anything it doesn't want to buy.
The government wants to buy a moon lander. They aren't necessarily stupid; you kind of need the moon lander before you build out any other moon infrastructure. But the moon lander is the opportunity on the table right now. If the government buys the moon lander from SpaceX and then decides that they want to buy a mass driver or a moon Quonset hut or a moon backhoe, maybe Blue Origin will pursue those opportunities and it'll work out for them.
Regardless, even though the US government accepts donations[1], they typically have to be given without restrictions[2]. So he could donate $2b (or sell off enough shares to pay $2b in taxes) but the impact on the HLS budget would probably be negligible. Making a contractual change is probably the most effective way to get NASA a second lander option (except perhaps hiring a bunch of lobbyists)
[1]: For example, https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
[2]: a few very specific parts of the government actually are allowed to accept restricted gifts, but NASA is not one of them. IIRC this caused issues when they were looking at selling naming rights for launches and payloads