Why can't they cooperate instead of compete?
It's not like they don't already have all the money they'd ever need or could use, and wouldn't the world be better off if they worked together than against each other?
It's not like they don't already have all the money they'd ever need or could use, and wouldn't the world be better off if they worked together than against each other?
Pointless as in I, an old man and an uncoordinated complete failure at athletics, can ride my bike faster than any of them can run.
Employing
> credit
Credit always goes to the leader. Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.
Anyone with the means could have founded Blue Origin, hired the same people, and gotten the same result. Jeff Bezos' money was necessary to the company's success, he was not.
>Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.
Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time. And, again, they do the actual work.
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.
From a layman's perspective, an idea like that would make superficial sense; they are all programming languages, after all. From a programmer's perspective, that would be a nightmare.
I think the companies are so far apart that extensive technical cooperation would slow them both down. Maybe they could share a weather service or even a drone ship fleet for landings, but not the core products and their parts.
Yes!
They need different runtimes, but there's a lot of infractructure they could have been reusing. It's a shame we have a couple dozen language silos that have to reinvent everything.
Rarely does a new language build everything from scratch, and the parts they build new are often progress.
I'm not blaming the authors. It's not any one language's responsibility to make tooling stacks modular and interoperable.
Another problem when multiple independent orgs pool resources and work together is you either end up with design-by-committee (which leads to overengineering and extra expense, both of which are anti-goals for SpaceX and BO), or deadlock when the parties can't agree. And you'd better believe personalities like Musk and Bezos would clash a lot if they ever did a joint venture on something.
If they clash a lot it's proof they're not good at cooperating.
So maybe the answer is that Musk and Bezos are good at competing, but not good at cooperating.
That doesn't mean that cooperation is a losing strategy, but just that one has to be good at cooperating in order to succeed at it.
I mean what if all the space companies decided to use one company's rocket engine and they failed to delivery...
I can only recommend Eric Berger's excellent book "Liftoff" to gain insights into SpaceX' way of working to get the Falcon 1 rocket off the ground and eventually into orbit. I cannot imagine Blue Origin having operated in a similar way at any point in their history.
That's all these companies exist for.
Basically every successful company has a massive amount of ego behind it but the question is if they actually achieve anything tangible and, eventually, profitable.
This might actually lead to a greatly increased risk of creating an impenetrable field of space junk if the thousands more satellites that SpaceX launches collide in to one another.
If that happens expect SpaceX supporters to start singing a different tune.
How often? You'd need a pretty lucky collision to knock something into a higher stable circular orbit.
Here is an article in Nature [0] discussing other risks, and mentioning that LEO is already in the early stages of Kessler Syndrome, while SpaceX alone is seeking to launch as many extra satellites as there are tracked pieces of debris already in orbit, with several other companies having similar plans. They also mention that debris in one orbit can cross to other orbits.
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.