Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronauts on lunar surface
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
Blue Origin press release: https://www.blueorigin.com/news/nasa-selects-blue-origin-for...
Of all four submissions, it's the one from the Daily Mail that we vote to the homepage, how?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...
NASA needs multiple lander options; putting all their cards on a lunar Starship landing was always a bit ridiculous, even if it seems reasonably likely to happen. So if you want the Artemis program to actually succeed, this is likely a good thing. However, with Congress in a deadlock around the debt ceiling, and SLS costing $4B per launch, this is only going to add to Artemis's serious funding challenges.
If you're interested in the space industry in general, I'll cover this more next week in the weekly Orbital Index newsletter (https://orbitalindex.com) which I co-author with blach.
On top of that, this is about promoting investment into infrastructure and vehicles that may one day take us to Mars, you can't just encourage one company to develop that. There needs to be a whole ecosystem of competing companies, we don't want a SpaceX monopoly.
Gosh, I wish USA had access to potable tap water. Having less than 20 hours of electricity a day in winter is also a problem.
That's why you test the hell out of one good one before you ever put humans in one. We didn't have alternatives for the Apollo missions. Failure just wasn't an option.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/multimedia/images/08-09...
Sure, multiple vendors sounds like a nice idea, but rarely in real life does the 2nd vendor's product just act as a drop-in replacement. You might have 2 launch platforms with SpaceX and Blue Origin, but the payload meant for one will not just be able to be launched from the other. If you want that, then NASA needs to design the plans (or pick one set of plans) and then have multiple contractors building the agreed upon thing
Their doing option 2, I think, and I agree with that.
Sure if money was magic you would like to have 10 options. But in reality that money is now not available for lots of other-things that are useful and could improve the moon missions in various way.
why buy one when you have two at (more than) twice the price?
I don't think gov should act like a single consumer, instead they should err on the side of producing an ecosystem of solutions to spur an economy around the problem.
So, two is cheaper than one long term, I hope.
And it wasn't actually unsustainable, it just wasn't sustainable while at the same time building shuttle.
Hacker News becoming more like reddit every day with trash comments like this.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
> According to Blue Origin's lunar lander head John Couluris, Blue Origin privately contributed 'well north' of the contract's $3.4 billion payout.
To put this into perspective the DoD will happily invest north of $1 Trillion for a single fighter pilot development program (F-35) and I doubt Lockheed is willing to front any of that...
Back in 1996 when the DoD awarded initial JSF prototype development contracts to Boeing and Lockheed they actually prohibited those contractors from putting in their own additional funds. There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base after the end of the Cold War and the DoD couldn't risk having any of their few remaining prime contractors fail.
Or everyone took the money and ignored what Present Eisenhower had to say.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...
After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.
I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.
> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down
Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.
We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.
This is why SpaceX doesn’t mind co-investing on Starship.
So yes, SpaceX will 'lose' money but they will have a very versatile rocket that can use for everything.
Support successful companies at a lower level. Encourage competitors. Cannot have just one option - especially with an owner as fickle as Musk.
Edit: And their Dragon capsule. SpaceX has been a very reliable partner for NASA. Don't believe the anti Musk sentiments spread by far-left journalists.
Really? The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
Also, you can't support companies on 'a lower level' if you want to do thing like land on the moon.
The question is how could NASA budget most effectively used to turn humanity into an advanced space flight spices.
The way NASA evaluated and financed these contracts is very questionable if those are the goals they had. But unfortunately their contracting is and was very restricted on a set of very particular minimum requirements. No extra money for over-achieving, even if over-achieving would have been incredibly useful.
P.S: And btw, with SpaceX they are trusting a real proven space company that has man costumers, lots of revenue and so on. BlueOrigin is just a Bezos hobby project that literally depends on multiple billions a year on Bezos private money, they have basically no revenue and want have for years.
The man has been flirting with antisemitism and that was just last week (I'm not Jewish btw, so this isn't personal). I cite that as an example and not one of many reasons I have to despise the current incarnation of the man.
Just because NASA is his cash cow, doesn't mean they should trust him as far as they could throw him. Alternatives are required.
The man has done incredible things, supported by an incredible team, but looking on from the outside ... he's just one blood sugar spike from screwing the whole thing up.
It all depends on how you do the selection and how you value the selection.
SpaceX will have a huge payload capability that NASA didn't bid for. And therefore SpaceX gets no money for it.
This is just how NASA choose to do this. They could have instead award contracts sized based on the capability both long and short term a projects add to NASA plans.
So the pricing may actually make sense for all parties involved. It is interesting that BO plans to launch this on New Glenn but aren't going the Starship route of just landing New Glenn's upper stage on the Moon directly (even though with Jarvis it's intended to land on Earth?). But for NASA's purposes hedging on a more traditional lander might be preferable anyway.
They don't say 'in 30 years we want to be able to do X, what are the steps we need to take'.
SpaceX has that approach luckily they can get some money from NASA to further that program.
https://apollo11space.com/apollo-program-and-private-compani...
Generally the competition and the bid takes place before the awarding of the government contract, doesn't it? This is rather like having two companies build competing bridges and then deciding which one to use after both are built, or am I missing something?
I suspect the Bezos lobbying machine had a hand in this decision:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/king-hill-how...
> "There are a lot of opportunities for influence once you get your own people insinuated into the elite clubs, schools, and other social venues in D.C."
not exactly an endorsement for NASA considering how little they've accomplished in recent decades. To me it makes sense to focus on funding the R/D "primitives" for space technology rather than funding essentially duplicate projects reinventing the wheel. That's what worked for Apollo, the new strategy has been a colossal failure and SpaceX alone has hiding a lot of NASA's flaws
If the bridges have a high chance of multi-year delays (ahem Starliner), that's exactly what you should do.
They did finally deliver some BE-4 engines to ULA though.
Seems like the NASA award is only is only paying for some minority of the total cost.
The chief goal of the Artemis program is to solve difficult bureaucratic problems at NASA. As an engineering or exploration program it makes no sense on the merits, and the sooner it dies the better.
Starship is also about 50 times more capable than the Apollo LM.
Artemis is also supposed to be preparing for Mars, which Apollo didn’t do.
Artemis is also less well funded than Apollo.
I’m not sure why Starship HLS gets the hate it does. It’s by far the best choice NASA could’ve made, and it’s cheap enough that NASA can select a second lander provider, allowing redundancy.
Starship gets hated on because it's vaporware being promoted by someone with a long track record of creative promise making across multiple fields of endeavor.
They knew in the 60's that the Apollo architecture was sub-optimal. The reason they chose the one giant stack architecture of Apollo was because it had a better chance of making Kennedy's 1969 deadline than a refueling deadline than a multi-launch structure which would have been both cheaper and more useful for non-lunar missions.
The reason SpaceX was chosen for Artemis 3 probably had only to do with their very low price. NASA has no problem spending ungodly amounts of money on their own projects (Orion, SLS, their now cancelled spacesuits) but when they switch to private companies they try to save as much money as possible. It is likely that NASA could have funded all three Artemis launchers while still staying below what they would have spent on Altair.
SpaceX does transfers a lot more complicated than fuel (including human beings) all the time and it's fine.
> land a tall rocket vertically on lunar terrain
is the real hurdle here, along with differences in gravity. Though lack of said gravity does make the landing part a lot easier.
That it could get 2 people to the moon for a few days. While Starhip can get 5-10 people to the moon for a few months including lots research capabilities, showers, ground artifacts and much more.
You are basically comparing a scooter to a truck. How does that make sense?
There is a reason that non of the contractors went with that kind of architecture when the original contract was bid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...
Is this bait? Public funding of space flight lead to spaceflight and landing on the moon.
That's the problem with publicly funded spaceflight: it's subject to the whims of both politicians and public favor, meaning that if it doesn't happen within the span of a single favorable administration it's probably not going to happen. That's extremely limiting, because spaceflight (especially the crewed variety) is extremely difficult and operates on decadal timelines.
So for example in the case of SpaceX, a good chunk of their revenue comes from selling their launch services to other companies and selling Starlink, and it's an explicit goal to keep R&D cheap. This lets them start projects even without NASA's interest (as they've done with Starship+Superheavy). If NASA expresses interest somewhere down the line that's great, but the project's going to happen anyway. It's not living or dying by the whims of congressmen.
This in turn allows them to have a grander focus that they continue to work towards over the course of decades since they aren't having their direction jerked around constantly.
That last part needs fixed.
Grumman (now Northrop Grumman) made the Apollo lunar lander paid for by public tax dollars.
Private entities making money off public initiatives is a big reason why we're having the economic troubles we've been having the past few decades.
Did space history begin when Elon Musk launched his first rocket...?
The comment that started this chain didn't say "we should do it like we used to", rather it said "we shouldn't do it like this". The fact that that "this" happens to describe how we've always done it doesn't change the meaning of the comment. People are allowed to suggest doing new thing that haven't been done before.
I really think the best way to do it is to get a better public service. Well this is all talk though, I don't know how to achieve that, whatever.
My best example is the AX-5 hard shell spacesuit. Public funding research done at NASA Ames, not commercialised, not brought up to flight readiness so it’s hardly going to justify some secrecy, and all the documentation is basically nonexistent other than some thin on the ground engineering documentation in non-public access engineering journals. Amazing engineering work and basically none of it is published in and open way.
Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a good read if you're into SciFi.
I'm guessing none. Unless NASA has a creative definition for advance payments.
Small thinkers are satisfied keeping their imagination on Earth alone, but small thinkers don't lead massive leaps of prosperity.
Bezos: Space will be industrialized and earth will remain some kind of national park
Richard Branson: He doesn't give a shit other then to self aggrandize himself further as far as I can tell.
They already do? SpaceX has been flying NASA astronauts for awhile already...
It's so common, it's not even newsworthy anymore.
In the 80s standards declined and astronauts ended up dying. Afterwards NASA tightened up again.
What you go a long time without accidents you forget the benefit of being meticulous with safety. I believe there's a name for this.
You'll see, SpaceX is gonna get people killed, NASA is gonna commission an investigation, and find that NASA was sloppy by accepting SpaceX's sloppiness.
And then when somebody gave the most basic information you instantly jump to 'i know all about this and why it is bad'.
Given that you didn't know SpaceX flew astronauts, it clearly you don't have the slightest clue about the standard for safety applied by NASA, how and why they work with SpaceX. You heard 'Musk' and jump to 'oh NASA is bad'.