Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

I am not saying they fudged things or that it was easy, just that it wasn’t the kind of litmus test you see on an actual orbital rocket.

Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.

I honestly think you have it backwards: the media has been very kind to both Bezos and Branson, particularly the latter. This isn't surprising because the media doesn't really get orbital dynamics any more than they get most technical topics. Nevertheless a lot of them act as if Branson's and Bezos' flight were some big technical achievements or progress forward, as if they can just evolve the designs around the current limitations.

They cannot. Hybrid engines have garbage ISP, the entire design of the Unity is completely worthless for high speed period let alone reentry, every $ spent on it is pointless beyond a quick joyride that will relatively soon be obsoleted by real space tourism. NS is at least vaguely sort of more useful for BO, it has a hydrolox engine so it's not doing anything for them on that front but they got to work on their landing a bit somewhat more easily.

But the value of space comes from actually getting to orbit and then beyond, and that's a fantastically more difficult problem due to the delta-v needed, the rocket equation, our material science, etc. SpaceX's approach of focusing on the real hard problem which delivers serious revenue and opportunity then working backwards on economics, always with focus on orbit as their lodestone, has clearly been much more effective. BO is older than SpaceX and has yet to even once get to orbit or deal with reentry. At all. It's hard not to look at so much of NS and just see such a waste of years and dollars.

>What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design.

I guess? It had been flown and landed multiple times and it had a lot of margin to work with since it's just a big sounding rocket. They did a hyperconservative work-on-the-first-launch Old Space development process.

>Musk didn't do that.

You think Musk wasn't puckered launching 6 astronauts and tens of billions of dollars worth of other people's precious cargo to space? Musk didn't do that because it wouldn't have proved anything and been a pure waste and distraction from the actual serious mission.

>Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.

Branson is a daredevil and that design is garbage on a host of levels.

>As for the BO rocket being totally automated

So is Dragon 2. So will Starship. That's normal and good, it's manual that's bad. But it's also not a special achievement that justified 6 years after first launch and landing.

On reddit, what usually happens is that SLS defenders try to misrepresent attacks on SLS as an attack on all of NASA, parenthood, and apple pie. And so the world turns.

I'm not talking about NASA headcount, I am talking about NASA contracts which support private sector companies and aerospace engineers.

The USA wants to maintain the domestic capability to for launches, and this means funding technology and expertise. If you don't award contracts domestically, in 10-20 years the capability is gone. No domestic contracts => no jobs => no grads => no rocket engineers.

NASA's model has always been to award contracts to the private sector companies. This is why you have SpaceX, Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed launch capabilities.

>I think the idea of paying for aerospace jobs in this way doesn't work.

I'm not sure what you mean by paying for aerospace jobs. NASA funded private sector manufacturers before and continues to fund it now.

I agree the the US manufacturers were ripe for disruption, and SpaceX did a great job of doing just that. However, the entire market and jobs exist to chase these government contracts. Do you think that SpaceX would exist if it wasn't for NASA and DOD launch contracts? I don't.

How often? You'd need a pretty lucky collision to knock something into a higher stable circular orbit.

You seem to be referring to the Kessler syndrom. If that happened, it would not mean that we could not send probes to space anymore. It only becomes unviable to have satellites at the altitude of the debris field. We could still launch through it into higher orbits or onto interplanetary trajectories.

Except they didn't. Bezos did.

> Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time.

Society does not. It's always "Bob won Olympic gold!" Nobody else is mentioned.

> And, again, they do the actual work.

Um, sacrificing and earning money so your child can pursue Olympic dreams is actual work. The full time coach for them does actual work. (There's a reason families will hire the best coaches available for $$$.) The sports doctors who optimize their health and manage their inevitable injuries do actual work. Their nutritionists do actual work.

There's no such thing as an Olympic athlete who did all the work, not even close.