Whether the feedback/concerns from Amazon are warranted, that’s up to the FCC to decide. If they decide incorrectly, that’s when I’d start to bring the torches.
Amazon is clearly abusing the process.
It's clear to everyone and their mothers that Amazon is abusing the process.
Find me one comment that says "yeah, Amazon is totally right about that and SpaceX should not get the permits they are asking for".
Abusing a process warrants a bit different response than "oh well, the rules can be abused so it's just fine for Amazon to abuse them".
What makes it even worse is that Bezos publicly complained that this kind of abuse of process is delaying progress in space. It's on tape. You can watch it.
To me this is evil: knowing that some things are bad and doing them anyway when it benefits you.
Oh, you've got first-mover advantage? How about I force you into court for the next 6 years while I build a competing product?
A veil, if you will
The ideological campaign to turn pure greed into a moral virtue has been far more successful for businesses than for individuals. Probably because the millenniums of moral thought that condemn individual greed is a tough thing to displace, and human moral intuitions are less intuitive to apply to a composite entity like a business.
We're much better at calling individuals out on bad faith behavior than we are at companies.
Not to me. SpaceX certainly claims so, but they are hardly impartial and I'm not familiar enough with FCC regs to make that judgement myself.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-...
Say you buy a house somewhere and submit an application to the city to modify the kitchen or something. Your neighbor objects even though it is none of their business what your dealings with the city council on official matters related to your property are.
Clearly , you are "hardly impartial", now?
Lots of good quotes from the pushback
" In fact, Amazon has not had a single meeting with the Commission this year about how it intends to resolve the Commission’s interference or safety concerns, but it has had 15 meetings in that same span just about SpaceX. While Amazon has waited 15 months to explain how its system works, it has lodged objections to SpaceX on average about every 16 days this year."
So you have one company actually launching and serving customers, and another who has done nothing, not even updating FCC on its plans in 15 months! And then every 16 days is lodging objections?
Let me understand this clearly - is it the FCC jobs to protect Amazon from being slow, or to advance consumer access to internet and communications? Because we should be pushing HARD for the folks actually delivering.
I consider the complaints abusive only if they are entirely without merit and are just taking FCC's time for nothing (which they might still be - but just SpaceX saying so is not enough for me).
The blue origin plans as an example have no clarity on so many key elements its not even funny - but SpaceX is not protesting them saying they are speculative.
There are many other filings also very speculative. Or that haven't even done debris mitigation work (they use a non US home state to try and avoid the work).
No fuss for any of these, but they are out of the woodwork if SpaceX does anything.
The mind boggling hypocrisy of it all is crazy. They have time to file 200 page complaints, bring big teams to complain. They expect us to believe they haven't evaluated the SpaceX approach before doing their own designs (one complaint, blue origin, despite tons of money, claims they can't / don't look at the spaceX designs).
It's not clear to me. I'm actually quite worried about SpaceX's increasing presence in space put simply because Musk has shown very little care for risk - especially if it's to someone other than him (e.g. testing "self-driving" on public roads, showing exceedingly lack of QA and attention to detail in most products, and generally bringing the "move fast and break things" mantra into applications that are life and death).
For example, SpaceX Starlink satelites (just Starlink) account for over half of close encounters and are expected to account for 90% of close encounters in the future. [1] It only takes one major screw up there to completely ground the human race for the foreseeable future.
So how much do you trust SpaceX to not screw over humanity by setting of a Kessler effect? I don't at all, so in that regard I'm all for SpaceX facing the highest level of scrutiny in all things because I do not consider them a trustworthy enterprise.
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[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-collision-al...
They had no human fatalities ever, which is remarkable for a 19 year old aerospace company (obviously there weren't many launches with people, but accidents happen on surface, too; this is heavy industry after all). And they haven't lost even a dead payload in what, last 100 launches? And if you happen to watch the launches from time to time, you will know why: they do not hesitate to scrub if they do not like something.
This is the opposite of the mentality that brought us the Challenger and Columbia disasters and I am happy that someone can actually square this level of prudency with rapid technical development.
As for Kessler syndrome, orbital decay is very strong at Starlink heights. Even if the entire fleet were abandoned, the orbits would be clear within 3-5 years. Nothing stays long at this height without active help of engines. The thin wisps of atmosphere still present will slow it down and drag it back to burn.
To actually start blaming the employers with some level of plausibility, I think you would have to show that rate of small aircraft accidents for their employees is significantly higher than average for similar unaffiliated group of youngish men who like to fly small aircraft.
There is some background nonzero level of death in flying small aircraft (or suicide, alcoholism or other common ills). Unless it can be shown that the levels of such ills among employees of some Acme.com is significantly higher than background noise, it is not fair to assign blame to Acme.com.
Even then there can be confounding factors, but that is a different story.
Whether punishment was sufficient is a different question.
The world is too complex to fully codify in rules and punishments, abusing loopholes (or taking punishment as cost of business) is still reprehensible. I do agree we should try to increase punishment/close loopholes when possible, it’s just always will be a losing battle.
They have received unfair advantages from the government, and to levy those advantages to get more advantages is improper.
This is the part that is wrong. The responsibility of the agency is to review these applications, not to babysit and pander to the whims and fancies of Amazon because they feel they're important enough to be listened to as part of internal agency deliberations.
Amazon is free to submit their own proposals and COMPETE with Spacex. What they're doing here is an attempt to STIFLE COMPETITION by levying additional undue burden on the government agency involved in the process of reviewing their competitors submissions with the hope that this additional burden slows down the process significantly.
We are within our rights to call out Amazon before, after and during FCC review.
> Amazon's request would prevent the commission from seeking public comment on SpaceX's application, SpaceX said. "The commission should recognize this gambit for the obstructionist tactic that it is, reject Amazon's request, and quickly put the amendment out for public comment," SpaceX said. The public-comment process will allow "any issues [to] be fully vetted," SpaceX said.