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Commercialization

Let The Space Billionaire Trash Talking Begin!

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 9, 2021
Filed under , , ,

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

35 responses to “Let The Space Billionaire Trash Talking Begin!”

  1. rb1957 says:
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    Really Keith ! Competition to bring the price down !! so regular folks can afford it !!??

    on a different tack, where does the 96% figure come from ?

    • Bill Hensley says:
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      I expect that’s the fraction of the world population that lives in the U.S. The U.S. Air Force awarded astronaut wings to those who flew above 50 miles altitude.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      US population = ~4% of Earth’s population. US gov’t recognizes 50 miles up as space. BO is puffing their chests over about about 6 miles of elevation. The level of schoolboy childishness here is excruciating.

  2. Steve Pemberton says:
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    Well Jeff then we’ll have to put an asterisk next to your name since you aren’t going into orbit. The tourists riding on Dragon won’t need any asterisks.

    Better yet, how about just cheering on all of the people who are going to space and not try and marginalize their experience, just as I assume you don’t want your customers to feel marginalized just because their spaceflight experience will be brief.

    • Terry Stetler says:
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      This is all distraction on Blues part. Eric Berger’s reporting ULA is not at all happy about the BE-4 problems, no matter how Bruno spins it, and the issue is attacking attention of Space Force brass.

      • Steve Pemberton says:
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        Seems unlikely that distraction was the intended purpose. The general public knows nothing about BE-4 problems, and I’m pretty sure that Bezos doesn’t think that the people in industry, government and military who are concerned about BE-4 would be distracted by clamorings about the Karman line on suborbital tourist flights. I think the more likely explanation is simply ego and/or rivalry.

        Like the infamous tweet from Bezos in 2015, “Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!”. Bezos just couldn’t seem to compliment Elon without including himself in the picture and inferring superiority (i.e. we were first).

  3. Jonna31 says:
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    Meanwhile SpaceX is sitting over there launching into orbit about every 8 days or so, landing those launchers, launching crews of 4 to the ISS and building and soon test flying the largest rocket ever built. Neither Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic are serious companies. Neither of them matter. Richard Branson’s little stunt airplane is the epitome of the limited ambitions of mid 2000s commercial space that SpaceX was one of the few that avoided. And Blue Origin has been so painfully mismanaged that ULA’s can’t get BE-4 engines for Vulcan, and New Glenn is behind schedule as to be irrelevant when it launches.

    This whole billionaires space-off has been nothing but an delegitimizing embarrassment for the incredible progress commercial space has made the past decade, and will the next.

    • Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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      I’ll take a moment to remind you that Blue Origin’s New Shephard booster with its single B-3 hydrolox engine is actually a very good development version of the third stage of a B.O. New Glenn heavy booster when ( or if ) it flies. It was designed from the beginning to be an analog for a real world rocket that just happens to be adaptable to joyriding. Learning to land soft on a single throttled and vectored engine is neither ” limited ambition ” no irrelevant . I am no fan of jeff bezos or Blue Origin but New Shephard deserves some praise for its tech engineering regardless.

      Having said all that , the kudos for whatever Branson is doing should all go to Burt Rutan for both the mothership and the spaceplane , using Branson’s money to win the X-Prize.

      • Jonna31 says:
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        You’re giving Blue Origin far too much credit. New Shepard was only ever supposed to be a developmental vehicle. It was supposed to be a pathway to New Glenn. For most of its existence since its first launch 6 years ago, its sole purpose was to demonstrate technologies and techniques that would be scaled up with BE-4 engines on a more capable, fully reusable orbital rocket..

        But something happened along the way. Jeff Bezos hired a bunch of old space and defense industry fossils, to whom crashing a rocket on landing is a big no-no. To whom SpaceX’s iterative development model is entirely foreign. And they completely failed to make meaningful progress, instead launching New Shepard once or twice a year while losing contract competition after contract competition with the government. The US government does not take Blue Origins seriously, and for good reason.

        So what is New Shepard now? A way for Bezos to illustrate that he hasn’t been wasting everyone’s time for a decade. A way to show his company is able to get an return on investment, at least to some meager degree. Perhaps he hopes that by personally takig a flight, it’ll make Blue Origin’s ambitions be taken more seriously in its hunt for the next round of contracts.

        It’s a complete farce though, because Blue Origin’s principle problems aren’t technical. It’s managerial. Bezos hired the wrong people and the wrong people still run it. In the time it will take for them to get New Glenn flying SpaceX will have twice modernized the Falcon 9 to make it more capable, launched the Falcon Heavy and then developed and did initial launchings of Starship.

        It’s pretty ridiculous. The commercial Space Industry could use a legitimate competitor to SpaceX. Blue Origin was supposed to be that. But really, it’s further than that than ever. In describing legitimate commercial space launch, we’re reduced to describing it as “SpaceX and Orbital”, which really now means SpaceX and Northrop Grumman… hardly the picture of a risk taking start up, with its retrofitted government surplus hardware.

        • Christopher James Huff says:
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          Blue Origin gets some credit for being about the only US competitor other than Rocket Lab that acknowledges the importance of reuse, but they’ve repeatedly tried to block and undermine SpaceX using legal and political machinations while not making much progress in making their own matching achievements.

          Elon on one such instance: “If they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.”

          That was 8 years ago.

        • fcrary says:
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          As far as commercial launch companies go, the list is longer than you write. It’s SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit (not Virgin Galactic), ULA and Northrop Grumman. And Astra should be making their first orbital launch in a few months. Although those are all small satellite launch vehicles, except for the SpaceX Falcon and ULA’s vehicles, and ULA isn’t much if you’re looking for competition with SpaceX…

          • Jonna31 says:
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            Yeah I take Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit seriously, but they operate at a different target market than the big launcher companies that Blue Origin wants to be a part of.

      • Christopher James Huff says:
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        New Shepard is way too heavy to be any sort of upper stage or even a booster, it was built to be a prototype VTVL rocket and to tolerate minor mishaps in handling and flight that might come along with that job, and with particularly fat margins for human tourist flights. And BE-3 is a largely-useless sea-level optimized hydrolox engine. The only use Blue Origin has for it is New Shepard, the “BE-3U” engine is actually a completely different engine that doesn’t even use the same combustion cycle. If Blue Origin were to start New Shepard today, I expect they’d use methalox.

        New Shepard was to be a simple first project to build company experience and a reputation on, with suborbital tourism helping to fund orbital rocket development. SpaceShipTwo had much the same goal. It didn’t work out in either case…Virgin Orbit split off years ago and is already putting payloads in orbit, New Glenn is in an advanced state of development and cost vastly more than New Shepard could ever bring in, and SpaceX beat both of them to orbit long ago and has developed multiple generations of orbital vehicles since. New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo have turned out to be expensive distractions more than anything.

        • fcrary says:
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          What evidence do you have that “New Glenn is in an advanced state of development”?

          • Christopher James Huff says:
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            They have concept art, and factories! Top notch industrial buildings, and big ones, with big parking lots. That’s got to count for something, right? Something logistics something…

            Seriously, the delays are now down to about a year each, I do expect they’ll be able to launch within a few years. The point is they’re well past anything they might have learned by developing New Shepard, it hasn’t been a technological stepping stone for quite some time.

          • Jack says:
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            Well….. they did build a really big building for assembling New Glenn. ? /s

      • Steve Pemberton says:
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        Actually it was Paul Allen’s money that funded SpaceShipOne which won the X Prize. Branson (and his money) did not come into the picture until the start of the SpaceShipTwo project.

      • Todd Austin says:
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        Paul Allen’s, actually. Branson never expressed the ambitions that Musk has. Why does that make his company not serious?

      • Zed_WEASEL says:
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        Having said all that , the kudos for whatever Branson is doing should all go to Burt Rutan for both the mothership and the spaceplane , using Branson’s Paul Allen’s money to win the X-Prize.

        Burt Rutan’s design decisions is at the root of most of Virgin Galactic’s woes. Hybrid engine, manual piloting and lack of comprehensive testing.

        • Todd Austin says:
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          To be fair to Rutan, I don’t think it was ever his intent to design a spacecraft that could act as a commercial suborbital space liner. He was designing an aircraft that could be pushed to reach space and safely return and meet the X-Prize terms. Branson thought it was a cool design and decided he could commercialize it.

          To Branson’s credit, he stuck it out for 17 years of bumps, problems, and major redesigns to take Rutan’s idea and mature it into something that could do what he wanted.

          Branson’s had his share of hits in his career, but he’s also had plenty of misses with ventures that were ultimately abandoned. In this case, he managed to turn a miss into a hit.

          • Christopher James Huff says:
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            The whole “Tier 1, 2, 3…” thing originated with Scaled Composites and Rutan. Tier 1 was suborbital tourism and transport (SpaceShipThree was to be a passenger transport), Tier 2 was orbital launch, Tier 3 was flights beyond Earth orbit, to the moon and other planets.

  4. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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    Alan Shephard’s seminal flight in the crude Mercury capsule on the even cruder US Army Redstone rocket went to 116 miles altitude and 300 miles downrange. Sixty years ago.

    Now THAT was sub-orbital done right . What’s that Karman line thing ?

    • Todd Austin says:
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      X-15 flights are a closer match to the Virgin Galactic flight profile. Back in the day, capsule flights that required no real piloting (remember Ham the chimpanzee?) were known among test pilots as Spam In A Can. Cheers to Mackay and Masucci for the beautiful suborbital flight that they piloted today.

  5. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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    P.S. Let us all take a moment tor ecall that more than one private billionaire has already gone to orbit and back, thanks to the Russians. Remember Dennis Tito , even if he’s forgettable ? But I still have fond funny memories of Guy Laliberte , the founder of Cirque du Soleil, who flew to ISS back in 2009 and was kind enough to do a clown show for us from orbit. That’s both style and substance. Can’t say Bezos has any of that , and Branson not much beyond the superficial hype.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      While their net worths exceed $1B today, neither Tito nor Laliberte had that much when they flew.

  6. mfwright says:
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    All this is technically interesting on how very high altitude flights are done, but much of this is a spectator sport for almost everyone else. These suborbital spacecraft are high performance craft for the very rich, doesn’t affect almost all of earth’s population.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      Technical developments have often started as toys for the rich. That’s the entry point for expensive new tech. Using the profits, you can scale up and drop the per-unit price. (E.g. – Tesla, cell phones, …)

      • fcrary says:
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        That depends on the design and the technology. I don’t see any path forward for Virgin Galactic’s approach.

        • Christopher James Huff says:
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          Yeah. Virtually no component of New Shepard is suitable for an orbital vehicle, but at least the same basic technologies are applicable. SpaceShipTwo? The shuttlecock setup doesn’t scale to higher entry velocities, the air-drop setup isn’t suitable for passenger transport or anything but smallsat launch vehicles, the hybrid rocket lacks the performance of a liquid fueled rocket while having most of the complexity of a pressure-fed liquid rocket and additional costs due the fuel grain/nozzle assembly necessarily being expendable…the carbon fiber construction might be applicable, but given the thermal protection needed, it might be better to follow the example of Starship, the Bristol 188, etc and use stainless steel.

    • Bob A says:
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      I keep hearing comments that basically say because it was a sub-orbital flight its useless. They have no value except as rich play toys. If that is the case, then why don’t we shut down NASA Wallops Island and all the suborbital sounding rockets that are launched every year with various experiments. While we are at it there is the sounding rocket launches from White Sands, and Poker Flats, and Regan Test Site and Andoya Test Site and Esrange Space Center and Woomera Rocket Range. All launching experiments on sounding rockets into suborbital space. Some missions from NASA, some from Universities, some from private industry. Are they all worthless simply because they are suborbital?

      Now think about the folks who design the experiments carried on these sounding rockets. If routine access to suborbital space is possible not just on sounding rockets, but through human rated rockets, how might the experiments change?

      What if the persons creating these experiments could now ride along with them? How does such a new dynamic, never before available, change how you design your experiments? What new sub-orbital experiments can now be designed that will benefit from human interaction that could have never been flown on an uncrewed sounding rocket?

      Just because something was done 5-10-25-50-100 years ago doesn’t mean its worthless to do it today.

      • Christopher James Huff says:
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        Those sounding rockets go higher…a lot higher. The Black Brant used for the recent Dynamo-2 launch can get above 1500 km altitude…for Dynamo-2 it carried a bunch of ionospheric measurement instruments to about 500 km. That’s about six times higher than SS2 can reach. The sounding rockets also deliver their payloads exposed to the surrounding conditions, without possible interference from a big passenger-carrying rocket plane in the vicinity, and they do so at less cost: going by the ticket price, you could do 2-3 Black Brant launches for the cost of a SS2 flight. Likely considerably more with the added costs of mounting equipment and sensors on the vehicle.

        And if I could ride along with the experiment, I’d still automate everything I could, because I don’t want to buy another flight after fumbling something in the few minutes available of freefall. And then there’s the ethical issues of risking human life to perform some experiments with a couple minutes of mesospheric freefall…

  7. jimlux says:
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    It is quite amusing. And at least it’s rockets and space planes and spaceships, not megayachts.

  8. Joe Cooper says:
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    So the debate is did you go to “space” defined by a round number in English units or did you go to “space” defined by a round number in metric

    Are you an imperial astronaut or metric astronaut

    The next level in “nobody cares”