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Comment by basementcat | Hacker News Reader

There is currently a shareholder lawsuit concerning Amazon choices of launch providers. There are arguments for and against Amazon paying SpaceX for launch services.

For:

* SpaceX is very price competitive

* SpaceX may be able to launch sooner than other launch providers (Amazon may be able to "outbid" other customers for Falcon payload capacity)

* Every Falcon (or Starship) carrying KuiperSats is _not_ carrying Starlink satellites. SpaceX uses Starlink launches as a way to tune and optimize the Falcon launch platform. Launching KuiperSats potentially hurts the SpaceX launch vehicle and Starlink businesses in subtle ways.

Against:

* Social media trolling

* SpaceX does not have a reputation for working well with other companies https://spacenews.com/darpa-satellites-damaged-at-processing...

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> Every Falcon (or Starship) carrying KuiperSats is _not_ carrying Starlink satellites. SpaceX uses Starlink launched as a way to tune and optimize the Falcon launch platform. Launching KuiperSats potentially hurts the SpaceX launch vehicle and Starlink programs in subtle ways.

SpaceX will not remain constrained by launch cadence. Also, very Kuoper launch would make money for them funding further Starlink launches.

Space X is the one direct competitor. You never find your competitor.

> SpaceX is the one direct competitor. You never [fund] your competitor.

This would be astonishing to Apple (which buys phone components from Samsung), Google (which pays Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine on their browsers), or indeed Amazon itself (which sells Apple and Google products that directly compete with their own, buys software from Microsoft, licenses Microsoft software for some of their cloud services, etc.)

On the other hand, you’d be surprised to see Apple launch an entirely new product and then select, as a primary supplier, a side business owned by Tim Cook with zero track record of delivering the necessary service.

Jeff Bezos’ side business, Blue Origin, has been unsuccessfully trying to compete with SpaceX for years. This unsuccessful competition rose to the level of public feuding and lawsuits against NASA for selecting SpaceX over Blue Origin for their moon lander contract. Suddenly, Bezos’ main business, Amazon, launches Project Kuiper to directly compete with Starlink, and contracts with Blue Origin for launch services that Blue has zero track record of successfully delivering on, as well as ULA for launch services using Blue Origin rocket engines that Blue has zero track record of actually delivering. This is an obvious case of conflict-of-interest and self-dealing.

Amazon does not need to launch new products and services for the purposes of satisfying Jeff Bezos’ personal rivalries and grudges in the first place, let alone shifting Amazon’s cash flows into his struggling side business.

> Launching KuiperSats potentially hurts the SpaceX launch vehicle and Starlink businesses in subtle ways.

Literally way? This is just flat out false.

> SpaceX does not have a reputation for working well with other companies

That's totally ridiculous. SpaceX works with pretty much every sat provider in the world.

The link you sighted is literally a single small mishap when integrating lots of sats. How does this give SpaceX a bad reputation.

They have launched 1000s of sats, having one issue during integration is pretty normal thing to happen. Specially in a case like this where this isn't a very expensive sat. SpaceX has launched dozens of very expensive Darpa/DoD sats totally fine.

In comparison Northrop Grumman recently dropped a 500M sat. So Darpa/Dod have some experiance with things going wrong sometimes.

If anything:

Against: Giving money directly to your competitors.

These pros and cons seem to presuppose that Amazon launch a satellite ISP in the first place. If it doesn’t make sense for them to launch on SpaceX for competitive reasons and it also doesn’t make sense for them to launch on other providers because those providers aren’t cost-effective, Amazon could simply not launch a satellite ISP in the first place.

Con:

- Dependence on a mercurial billionaire’s company for a vital service - these satellites will eventually need to be replaced. The same billionaire also operates a rival service, it will be a conflict of interest not in your favor.

Musk is so incredibly 'mercurial' that he has been the longest running CEO of a space company and the company has performed exceptionally with incredibly reliability and literally most of the world, including Dod, NASA, ESA, tons of other government and most commercial space costumers in the world relay on it and have done so for a long time.

It seems people sometimes move focus and believe Twitter drama directly means SpaceX is some wildcard, while by literally every piece of evidence it isn't.

> it will be a conflict of interest not in your favor.

SpaceX has already made the policy clear that they will launch competitors sats. Should that change in the future, you still got the initial benefit now. And even if you don't want to relay on that 100%, you could still do 1/2 or 1/3 of the inital launches on SpaceX.

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