Lots of interesting news this morning from Blue Origin's normally quiet press room. Also of note is a series of videos showing progress at their Cape Canaveral rocket factory & launch facility:
It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.
Those are some impressive facilities. Billions of dollars for a factory and a launch complex for a rocket smaller than the massive one that SpaceX is building in tents at Boca Chica, Texas.
It seems obvious that you have to build the factory before you can build a rocket but Musk has figured out how to get around that.
He did it the old way at Tesla for the Model 3: built out the factory before building the car, his "alien dreadnought" highly automated factory that then went through "production hell" and was 2 weeks away from bankrupting the company.
He then built a giant tent in the parking lot of his factory, and iterated on a factory design, took that design and used it to build giga-Shanghai, producing vehicles of higher quality than his American built ones.
Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design?
> Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design?
Anyone who's ever done manufacturing? Anyone who's ever built something with their hands? Anyone who realizes that when assembling anything from 30,000 parts, it's going to take a lot of time and iteration to get your build quality to an acceptable level?
Now, this may all come as a shock to software people, but anyone who has actually built stuff out of real, physical objects, would be aware of this... And why you should never buy a version 1.0 of anything.
I legitimately don't understand why software engineers think that other professionals can't understand the concept of iteration. When GM builds a car factory, they aren't doing it from zero. They are building it on top of a hundred years of manufacturing experience and iteration. When Tesla was building its first car factory, it had nearly-zero years of institutional manufacturing experience and iteration. Of course a big up-front build was going to be a disaster. It's why they still can't figure out how to align the interior panels in their cars.
Yep. I know Tesla has manufacturing people who get it, but some of Tesla fans are just lost in the wilderness. "Tesla's plant has so many robots!" -- that's every car plant these days! Nobody wants to pay for labor or deal with recalls for inconsistent welds.
Here's a random video of a GM SUV production process -- just filled to the brim with robots.
They're obviously aiming to cut cost and build time as much as possible, so they automate where they can without sacrificing quality for things like spacing gaps. Over time, that'll be automated too. GM as an example spends like $30 billion/year in CapEx -- that'll buy a lot of robots!
That is the problem. The Execs at GM are MBAs who are good at pulling financial levers. "Reduce costs by X%", "Increase R&D budget by Y%".
Tesla is playing a different game based on first principals. "How low can we get cell cost?", "How can we get range to 300 miles without extra costs?"
Obviously finance is important. If you run out of cash you can go bankrupt. But in the long run whoever is innovating the fastest without going bankrupt wins.
This is pretty meme-y. Elon's got a degree in physics and econ... Mary Barra has an engineering degree and managed an auto manufacturing plant. Which is probably why GM makes a profit on every car they sell and Tesla.. doesn't...
There is no doubt Tesla is a revolutionary company and as a "car guy", I'm ecstatic that they somehow bootstrapped a new American auto manufacturer. Their commitment to reducing electric car costs likely put a huge dent in the trajectory of climate change which as an unequivocal good. My only point is that they could have done all that and built a "normal" manufacturing plant in the South somewhere and never have been two weeks away from shutting the company down vs. trying to "First Principles" design a new way to build cars that had them reinventing the wheel in messier, more expensive way.
GM (and all other auto manufacturers) include their R&D expense in their COGS since they acknowledge they must release new models every year. Tesla, doesn't.
Tesla also doesn't include showroom costs in their COGS, but they can't sell cars without them.. (all other autos only include the revenue they receive from their dealer networks as the top-line revenue figure).
These are the kinds of thing that makes people suspicious about their ultimate financials.
I don't care at all about stock prices, I'm actively shopping for an electric car and Teslas are near the top of my list since they're so technologically advanced, but they're just not very well as a manufacturer or as a responsibly run corporation which annoys me since I'm in corporate finance.
As an example, if Tesla and GM both had $10,000 cars for sale. GM's "Cost of Goods Sold" would include the manufacturing costs, costs for R&D and their revenue would only be $8k since the dealer networks have their own books - but then GM isn't responsible for all of the showrooms and sales staff, etc.
Tesla's revenue would show $10k, but would only include the cost to manufacturer (the R&D expense is "below the line") and they wouldn't include any costs to have hundreds of showroom locations - even those those showrooms are necessary to sell cars at any volume, and Tesla has to pay for out of that $10k sales price.
It's obviously not apples-to-apples to compare those "GAAP Gross Margin" between those two things.
Your original statement "Tesla doesn't make a profit on every car" is a blatant untruth. That's an understandable mistake for a layman to make given the misinformation out there, but you claim to be in corporate finance and should have better standards.
I felt like “by the accounting standards used by literally every other company in the auto industry” was implicit. So apologies - “Tesla doesn’t make a profit on every car, If you use the accounting standards in place for every other auto manufacturer.”
There are a lot of weird short seller conspiracies out there but “In order to increase apparent profitability, Tesla uses different accounting than every other auto company” is a factual statement and so is “If you use actual industry GAAP, Tesla isn’t yet GM profitable.”
I hope they get there! I hope they sell 10M cars per year.. but to hold them up as a manufacturing leader is pretty silly.
If you understand the point about COGS, it's pretty disingenuous to try and compare GAAP between the two and make that claim. If you don't understand the point about COGS, you're not really in a position to denigrate his standards on corporate finance.
If you are so certain that you are correct and these are a fair comparison, can you please explain how his breakdown between the two is either incorrect or not relevant to your point?
He said that Tesla was unprofitable on a per car basis. The whole company including R&D, SG&A etc was profitable, so unless the solar part of the company was subsidizing the car business, that's a flat out falsehood. We can reasonably argue whether GM or Tesla are more profitable per car, but that wasn't the original claim.
Sorry for the late response, but, yes, their car business is being subsidized. They lose money on each car. It is not being subsidized by solar, however.
Multiple states in the US require companies sell a certain amount of zero-emission vehicles or buy regulatory credits from companies that do sell that amount. Tesla is one of these companies they buy credits from. They were paid 1.6 billion USD in 2020 for these credits. That is more than double their 2020 net income. [1]
I see, sounds like GM's financials are in good shape. I hope that helps them in 14 years when they are no longer making ICE cars that those dealerships make all their profits off of from maintenance.
Yeah there's no doubt they're in for a really big disruption - and I think dealers are just about the least sympathetic "businesspeople" in America so I won't mourn their loss.
You’re greatly misstating what happened at Tesla. They threw away book built over 100 years of how to build car factories with model 3, because Elon thought they’re smarter than everybody. He was big talking at that time that manufacturing is easy.
It failed spectacularly and nearly bankrupted them and they had to scramble to implement standard processes in manufacturing. Fremont factory is still clusterfuck as a result. Then when they were building Shanghai, they decided to follow more standard playbooks from a start.
And Elon now is taking how manufacturing is really hard.
The whole Tesla model 3 story is “nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated” moment.
Space-X has a large rocket factory. It's in Hawthorne, California. It looks much like an ICBM factory from the 1960s. Boca Chica is a launch and final assembly facility.
Yes SpaceX's Raptor engines would be built in Hawthorne, CA and tested in McGregor, TX like the Merlin before it. But at Boca Chica, TX they are not just fitting the components into the an already completed fuselage, but welding the entire air frame together, including the pressure vessel bulkheads and stacking the stainless steel rings into Starship and Super Heavy. As far as I know Boca Chica receives stainless-steel sheet metal and turns it into the rings segments. The rings have a 9 meter diameter, so cross-country road transportation would be a problem.
The engines are built in Hawthorne, CA before being shipped to McGregor, TX to be tested then are integrated into the final assembly in Boca Chica, TX. Every other part of the launch vehicle (besides avionics systems, also manufactured and tested in Hawthorne) is manufactured and welded on site.
By mass and size, Boca Chica produces the majority of the rocket. By cost and complexity - rocket engines (of Raptor kind) and control systems (of SpaceX kind - with all kinds of telemetry channels) win from Hawthorne.
I'm not a hater, just hard to even take Blue Origin seriously in comparison to SpaceX. Musk will be putting feet on Mars and we'll still be reading about all the great things Blue Origin is going to do. Virgin Galactic is going to reach Space before they do.
> It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space.
They are actually falling behind faster then they are catching up.
> I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.
This such a strange thing to consider. The logic that if you just go super slow for long enough, then once you start you will automatically go super fast? Why would that be the case? Of course once they put one kg into orbit, they will put more kg into orbit faster then SpaceX did in 2008. But that is strange definition of 'pay off', in fact its the opposite, its that you didn't get 'pay off' for 10+ years.
Believing that once they finally launch something after 20+ years of moving incredibly slowly, it will simply take of like crazy and they will launch some huge number is just not how the rocket industry works.
SpaceX has scaled faster then literally any space company ever, and is increasing the speed of its scaling over time. funds.
SpaceX has the highest reliability of basically any rocket, no other rocket is human rated, rated for all DoD and NASA flights and has the lowest insurance cost in the industry.
The simply fact is, BO and SpaceX have existed for the same amount of time. BlueOrigin had massive amounts of money put in it, literally billion, many, many billions and they will invest a number of extra billions before they get to their first orbital launch, or probably first significant revenue. Basically all paid of of pocket by Bezos.
SpaceX started with an investment from Musk on the order of 80M and everything since then has been raised threw revenue and private investment.
This race has started 20 years ago, it doesn't start when BO put 1kg into orbit.
In fact, I would argue Bezos whole strategy has been an utter disaster. BO was started to test out landing things, but before they ever even tested orbital landing, SpaceX has already mastered it. Bezos could have invested in SpaceX around 2010 and put the rest of his money into what is need in-space and he would be 10x further along in his plans.
If Bezos goal was millions of people living in space, it would make way more sense to take all those billions he invest in New Glenn, into building moon water mining system. Rather then being a slow copy of SpaceX that is always 10 steps behind.
Together they could achieve so much more, but apparently another heavy lift launcher in a market that already has to many is what he wants to spend money on.
I think this press release is sneaky great news as it's evidence that Bezos is shaking up Blue Origin's culture.
The announced delay was already baked in, everyone watching the space believed the delay, now announced, was already real. So there's little "news" here for an industry watcher. Many expect the first orbital launch might slip until 2023.
However, Blue operating in the open? Releasing announcements and working openly - that's the real news. And new! It's different and I certainly hope it's evidence that Bezos is brining Amazon's famous speed to his private space company.
I really hope that SpaceX gets some serious competition by another partially reusable rocket. We need multiple viable launch providers in the market.
I don't think this will happen, but that announcement reads a lot like delay announcements that shadow a future cancellation. ('we continue to remain committed ...', 'persuing other opportunities', 'growing market ...' (it isn't) ...)
There are two aspects here:
A) With the way Blue Origin operates, I highly doubt New Glenn can be competitive with Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy financially, at least without heavy discounts funded by Bezos. More so once Falcon Heavy gets the upgraded fairing they are developing for government launches.
Blue might still get some business from the US government and from Starlink competitors that don't want to help fund Spacex, but the market seems very limited. We are already at a point where Falcon 9 can handle most payloads, and there are no commercial use cases for larger payloads on the horizon.
Which brings me to the second point:
If Musks claims for Starship regarding cost and reusability come true, no one will be remotely competitive with that rocket. It's in a whole different league with a huge payload capacity and full (1st + 2nd stage) reusability.
Starship has a chance of reaching orbit maybe late this year, but more likely in 2021. The question is if Bezos will be willing to pump billions into Blue Origin for the 4+ years until they can catch up with their own second generation rocket, currently nicknamed New Armstrong.
A first New Glenn launch would probably mean start of scheduled service in late 2023, at which point Starship might already be launching regularly.
"If Musks claims for..." Elon makes many claims, most of them never become true, or become true years later than he said.
- Full autonomous driving by 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021... He said it was 6 months from release in Jan 2017. That was obviously a complete lie.
- You could sleep in your car with Autopilot driving by 2019
- Tesla vehicles will be assets that make you money. "1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020"
- Tesla will make a mini-sub in a couple days to save that youth soccer team stuck in an cave
- There will be fewer fatalities per million miles if Autopilot is engaged than if it wasn't. Suprise, fatalities/mile is actually higher with Autopilot.
- "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"
- Tesla Roadster would be out by 2020
- Tesla Semis on the road by 2019
- Teslas will be able to swap batteries faster than you could refill an ICE vehicle instead of recharging your battery
It's notable that non of your quotes concern SpaceX.
One should definitely be wary of Musks often inflated / over-optimistic claims, but Starship has a good chance of holding true to most of what was promised.
Musk has claimed imminent 24 hour turnaround times, Red Dragon on Mars every 2 years since 2018, second stage reusability etc.
So it's acceptable to have some skepticism that SpaceX intends to drop the Falcon 9's (already very cheap) marginal cost from $1000/kg by 100 times to $10-$20/kg through Starship's fully and rapidly reusable operation.
If anyone can do it, it's Elon Musk. But it's good to keep in mind his deep aversion to any sunken cost fallacies.
Source? My understanding is Elon Musk believes blunt body re-entry vehicles landing with SuperDraco thrusters is the wrong architecture for Mars colonization, so all funding has been redirected to Starship development.
I was at NASA at the time. Not on that project, but some people at my center were. They did some proposal work trying to drum up some funding to make Red Dragon happen. The idea was a split-cost mission, where SpaceX fronts a lot of the R&D money and NASA pays a fixed price to ride along some science equipment on what is essentially a Viking-like Mars lander platform. This would have been not unlike the current Commercial Lunar Payload Services contracts, except for Mars and single-sourced. Do a one-off conversion of a Dragon capsule to land some science experiments on Mars, with SpaceX getting essentially free R&D money out of it because its 90% work they wanted to do anyway.
It got shit-canned for political reasons as it would have shown a commercial capsule to be more capable than Orion, which for a so-called "deep exploration vehicle" was pathetically unable to achieve any of the goals set for the Red Dragon mission. Can't have NASA or Lockheed Martin look bad, that just won't do. SpaceX was at the time trying to win more government launch contracts for the Falcon 9 and a continuation of the commercial resupply and commercial crew contracts which represented a much bigger prize than a one-off Mars science mission.
Rumor is that certain key senators and congress critters that are recipients of large amounts of aerospace lobbying dollars phoned up Elon and NASA Administration and stated in no uncertain terms that if Red Dragon happened then those programs would be zeroed out and SpaceX would never see a dime of government money again. I can't confirm these rumors; I can only say that the project died a very quick death before it even got off the ground, with NASA people working on it reassigned to other projects and not a peep out of Elon on the topic until years later. SpaceX would later decide that the super-drano landing approach wasn't working and go back to the tried-and-true parachutes and water recovery EDL architecture, but that was years after this version of Red Dragon was dead and buried.
ETA: Reading the wikipedia page on Red Dragon made me remember another aspect of the politics which got it cancelled. Most robotic exploration of the solar system is done by JPL, with the other NASA centers just providing scientific instruments or specific component expertise. The actual spacecraft and the whole project management and mission operations is done by JPL though, and they jealously guard that position.
Red Dragon was partially an attempt by NASA Ames management to start a sustained planetary exploration program of their own. They had just come off the phenomenally successful LCROSS mission and were doing a bunch of other small technology demonstration projects to build out the (at the time new) idea of cubesats and ride-shared microsatellites. JPL's view of this was essentially "whatever, enjoy your little toy satellites. lol." Red Dragon as designed in ~2011 may have been larger, but was not fundamentally any different. It was just a big lander to ship a bunch of science instruments that didn't fundamentally differ from what had been already developed for other missions. But as I wrote above, it got shot down through aerospace industry politics. Note the wording on wikipedia: "SpaceX initially planned to propose Red Dragon for funding in 2013 and 2015 as the United States NASA Discovery mission #13 for launch in 2022, but it was not submitted." Who just doesn't submit a proposal? Nobody. Worst they'll do stamp 'rejected' on it, but it doesn't hurt to try. No, it got killed from within.
The 2014 concept was different though: it proposed a single-mission Mars sample return. Now I need to go on a little side story here and tell you about what Mars Sample Return--MSR in JPL speak--means to NASA, and JPL in particular.
The Mars planetary exploration campaign which started in the 90's and culminated in at least one mission at every 26 month launch opportunity, were flagship missions. This means they got the biggest budgets, and NASA did not compete for their design or management. It went straight to JPL. All these planetary probes were built by the usual suspect of aerospace contractors, of course, but the design, engineering work, testing, validation, and mission operations were all done by JPL. Not only is it the pride of JPL, it is also their lifeblood funding. So much of JPL's overhead funding comes from these missions, and the scientists and engineers pull their salaries from them. I worked with a guy that was 0.5 FTE (half-time) doing operations for Spirit & Opportunity, and another 0.5 FTE in an R&D role preparing for the next rover, which would be named Curiosity. These missions were selected based on input from the planetary decadal surveys, but they were scheduled based on what it would take to keep JPL (and other NASA) employees continuously funded at a constant level. That's why the Mars exploration campaign became a sequence of alternating rovers and orbiters at every launch opportunity--a jobs program to keep those amazing scientists and engineers employed.
However conventional wisdom, as reflected in the planetary decadal, said that there is only so far we can go trusting our remote instruments without verifying the data by bringing a sample back to examine in our way more sensitive laboratories on Earth. So the sequence of remotely operated planetary exploration rovers was scheduled to end with the Mars Science Laboratory (AKA Curiosity), and the next big thing would be "Mars Sample Return." Working within self-imposed constraints, the stratospheric architects at JPL put together a mission profile that would require THREE missions back-to-back: one to find and cache samples (this is Perseverance, which just landed on Mars), one to collect those samples and send them to Mars orbit, and one to intercept those samples and bring them home. All built and launched in sequence rather than at the same time, so the total mission duration would be spread over the better part of a decade. Like with SLS, this monstrosity of an architecture was selected because of self-imposed constraints that had nothing really to do with the mission requirements and everything to do with sustaining a JPL jobs program. Three separate missions over the course of a decade is a feature, not a risk factor. Indeed it's the whole point.
Enter SpaceX and the 2014 Red Dragon proposal, which was an all-in-one Mars sample return mission that launched on a single Falcon Heavy and landed a rocket inside of the dragon capsule that was powerful enough to send the collected sample directly back to Earth. Do it all in one mission, and at 10x - 100x reduction in cost. So cheap it didn't even need to be a flagship mission and could be outsourced to industry and academia (like New Horizons was).
JPL was not impressed. Play with your little toy satellites all you want, but don't fuck around with the golden goose. 2014 Red Dragon sample return proposal was a direct threat to the entire Mars planetary exploration program and semi-autonomous JPL's bottom line. They hit back hard trying to discredit the proposal with a bunch of underhanded arguments and agency politics. That's about the time I left NASA so I didn't get to see it fully play out, but apparently JPL won out because in the end the sample-return version of Red Dragon was deselected from funding.
There was apparently a third concept study in 2016 which I don't know the details of, and it was during or after that third experience that Elon finally pulled the plug and reallocated those resources to Starship. Though I guess you might say that the planned first Starship mission to Mars in 2026 (aspirational) is Red Dragon 4, just with significantly larger Starship instead.
The first eight are really bad predictions, not lies. The ninth was true. The tenth was a premature announcement of a deal that actually existed but fell through.
So 0/10 of these were actually lies.
Edit: missed the sub, which actually existed. Not a lie, although the whole episode was in very horrid taste.
This is so stupid. Yes, he was a aggressive on AI, wow what a insight, that most of your list, now everything he ever says is equally wrong even when on a whole lot of other things he was right.
Even when it is proven that on tons of issues he has delivered. Sometimes with some delay but for the most part he has delivered.
People were laughing at electric cars, people were laughing at rocket with 27 engines, people were laughing at reusability, people were laughing at private developed rockets and so on. But nobody remembers those things because now everybody knows these things and they are not controversial anymore.
Amazing how people only remember what Musk got wrong. Lets ignore that he built the most successful space flight company ever, lets ignore that he build a car company that builds more BEV then VW and Toyota combined.
We do actually know how Starship is progressing, and even if its not late 2021, even if its late 2022 its still insane. Just shitting on him because it might not happen in late 2021 is just petty.
The fatality rate stats are interesting. Has anyone down an independent analysis?
If all the risky tesla owners use Autopilot, then you’d expect the remaining human piloted miles would be safer.
Tesla accidents are already better than the average, presumably more to do with the price of the car rather than the tech... but I’m curious to see a real analysis rather than my speculation.
So 50% of your points are that Musk was wrong about self-driving. Fair enough, but why stop copy-pasting there?
As far as I remember, Tesla built a public battery swap station in a former car wash at Harris Ranch and real customers did use it. I also recall that the swapping hardware was demonstrated on video to do two pack swaps in the same time it took to re-fill a gas Audi. So I'm not sure what your point is with that.
The mini-sub was actually built, but not used. Not sure if I'd count that as "never came true".
As for the Roadster and Semi delays... the Semi is on the road (there are at least two of them), and it's not like Tesla is the only car manufacturer to miss shipping targets. Are the CEOs of those companies "liars" too?
You say half is about self driving, like that is only one lie. He makes this repeated lie, updated for the year, multiple times a year every year since 2016.
He claimed the battery swap was going to be at Super Charger locations. Not that they tested it at an old car wash.
A couple of prototype Semis on the road in secret in 2021 is a far cry from commercial delivery in 2019.
And yes, no other car company CEO could consistently overpromise and underdeliver like he does and keep their job. Most automaker stocks don't have the religious fervor of Tesla.
Most automakers are quite careful about the dates they say, and the certainty the communicate around it. Nobody wants to get sued for making misleading statements to investors. Look at what is happening to Nikola for instance. They had one misleading video and it might put the company under. It already killed off their Badger pickup truck.
On SpaceX, he has been more careful about what he says because he does care about ruffling feathers at the NASA and Space Force. He doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him. Also, that industry is filled with grifting rife with liars (see ULA and SLS) who make claims they could never deliver on.
By definition, someone who makes repeatedly makes factual claims that are false that are factually disprovable is a liar. No matter the industry.
> no other car company CEO could consistently overpromise and underdeliver like he does and keep their job.
Musk doesn't overpromise for investors or the public. His M.O. is to overpromise as motivation to drive productivity. Every day he manages to convince his workforce that they're at the cusp of crossing the finish line of w'ever insane goal he has set, and so they keep pushing hard that day (or they quit). At this point it should be obvious: Musk never hits his timelines, and yet he usually still delivers faster than any other CEO or company could ever dream of delivering.
His M.O. works because of his personality and his personal investment in operations. Few managers could ever hope to replicate that, and those who do end up failing horribly, or were merely trying to paper over some other deficiencies. But judging Musk by applying the same standards one would apply to Fortune 500 companies, expecting him to adhere to normative business culture (formal and informal), seems a little obtuse given the past 10+ years of history making abundantly clear exactly how and why he operates. 15+ years ago, sure, it was easy to write Musk off as a conman. But he's delivered in ways that nobody ever thought possible. At this point the only credible interpretation (not simply charitable one) is that he's perfectly sincere and earnest--that his methodology, including his "stories", serve a legitimate and crucial function. Musk is one of those few characters that come along every generation or so, breaks all the rules, and succeeds where pretty much everyone else would have failed. It's not always pretty, but it works. It is what it is.
> He claimed the battery swap was going to be at Super Charger locations. Not that they tested it at an old car wash.
Well, Harris Ranch is a Super Charger location, so... I guess that wasn't a lie? And, again, real customers did use it on real road trips (you can read user experiences on TMC).
Turns out people would rather take a discount for charging instead of swapping, so the swapping model wasn't financially viable. Sometimes plans change. Is almost every startup founder a liar because they pivoted after testing market fit?
> Most automakers are quite careful about the dates they say, and the certainty the communicate around it.
Oh, come. on. I'm going to pick on VWAG for a minute:
* The e-Tron was months late due to software issues.
* The Taycan has been out for almost a year and a half, yet features promised to be available at launch are still unavailable. OTA does not exist. Owners report that paid software features randomly disappear then come back a few days later. 12V battery problems bricking the car are rife.
* Porsche repeatedly and loudly claimed the Taycan was a track-capable car, and wouldn't overheat, unlike those silly children over at Tesla. Owner reports on taycanforum.com indicate otherwise.
* VW said the ID.3 would be available in 2020Q2, but didn't start shipping until 2020Q4.
* They sold and registered ID.3s to dealerships to inflate their sales numbers for December, despite claiming many months ago that they were sold out for a year. They've sold almost none in January. That's called channel stuffing, and regulators don't like it.
> And yes, no other car company CEO could consistently overpromise and underdeliver like he does and keep their job.
Really? I don't see anyone calling for Herbert Diess's head. Yet, every new EV from VWAG has been late. By your standards it sounds like he repeatedly lied about timelines. And it sure looks like VWAG lied to investors and regulators about the number of cars sold to actual customers in 2020.
> A couple of prototype Semis on the road in secret in 2021 is a far cry from commercial delivery in 2019.
You originally claimed that "Semis on the road by 2019" was an example of a Musk lie. Here is an article, with pictures, from March 2018 showing a Tesla Semi charging at a public supercharger. https://electrek.co/2018/03/08/tesla-semi-trucks-spotted-sup...
> By definition, someone who makes repeatedly makes factual claims that are false that are factually disprovable is a liar. No matter the industry.
All of that is about Tesla, which is a publicly traded company whose CEO is Musk. Making outlandish claims about your new product and therefore how outlandishly profitable your company is going to be in 2-8 quarters is the status quo for CEOs.
Musk claims about SpaceX tend to be significantly less outlandish. (less, not none, he still throws some doozies out there) He doesn't need to sell a dream to shareholders. The customers of the product aren't dreamy eyed brand loyalists, the customers are mostly corporations and governments whose decision making processes are going to be driven mostly by accountants and lawyers.
My attitude about Musk's Tesla claims mostly fall in the category of "I'll believe it when I see it," but with SpaceX it's cautious optimism.
Well, if you're counting suborbital vehicles, Blue also had the Goddard research prototype.
That said, while Blue will probably have something called New Armstrong if they last long enough, even they may have no clear idea what would bear that name right now. "New Armstrong" is a name that Bezos dropped for a successor at the New Glenn announcement; even if there was some concrete plan attached to it, it may still not be much more substantial than the "Falcon X/Falcon XX" plan that SpaceX presented at a conference in 2010, and ditched fairly soon after.
Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.
Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.
It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.
Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.
I guess the optimistic take is that Bezos believes the addressable launch market will be huge enough to amortize multi-billion upfront costs. It's definitely a hail mary.
There are enough companies that won't launch on SpaceX because SpaceX is a competitor and enough companies that spread their launch contracts as a kind of insurance that a second vendor could stay viable. But with Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane and Roscosmos fighting for that second spot thats a small number of launches spread over quite a few vendors...
As a pretty big SpaceX fan, the additional delay is quite disappointing. I was greatly looking forward to seeing New Glenn go up...and back down...late this year.
This updated maiden flight target follows the recent Space Force decision to not select New Glenn for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Or, we don't really have a customer.
Both Telesat's Lightspeed and Amazon's Kuiper are planning on launching very large constellations on New Glenn, so those two alone represent a lot of launches.
It looks like the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Launch Services Procurement (LSP) contract that Blue Origin refer to was awarded in August 2020 (six months ago).
The bad news mentioned here are that New Glenn's maiden flight is delayed by approximately a year compared to earlier estimates.
Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
> It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons.
To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
Considering how US space program funding is subject to the whims of presidential administrations and congressional funding, New Origin may actually come out on top of this comparison.
How so? SpaceX is a proven launch system at this point, ULA has plenty of business, and SLS isn't going anywhere soon, so there aren't many options for new entrants.
I won't be that sure about SLS anymore with many recent events concerning it:
- it failed to do full mission length firing during during the Green Run testing
- its main supporter in the Senate Shelby announced he is going to retire
- Europa clipper will launch on Falcon Heavy instead of SLS
- early Gateway parts have been recently announced as also launching on Falcon Heavy
Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
While I certainly agree that aggressive timelines often get modified, especially with new launch systems, initial estimates in 2016 were for first flight in 2020.[0] Then they pushed to 2021.[1] Additionally, the fact that they called out Q4 2022 (late in the year) doesn't give me a lot of confidence they'll even get it done in 2022 either.
Right; I have no doubt that Blue/people inside of Blue are having serious thoughts about 2nd stage re-use, at least to a level roughly equivalent to what you pointed out SpaceX has revealed.
However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy.
Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
The second stage of New Glenn runs on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, not on liquid oxygen and RP-1 as Falcon. It makes it much harder to reuse simply due to much bigger fuel tanks and significantly less tolerance to overheating . I doubt Blue Origin really considers that seriously.
I guess it depends on what you call a redesign. They likely need to modify the fins to counter act any new control authority on the upper stage, but other than that I see no reason why the first stage would change.
New Glenn is a case of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you".
The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant.
Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan!
We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.
I hate to say it, but this slow pace feels like Blue Origin is being run by the folks next door to it from Boeing.... If people didn't already notice, you can spell Boeing from the letters in BluE OrIGiN (a bit out of order)...
I feel like they have to use a third party at this point. The friction between Musk/SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the FCC makes me think that Kuiper needs to get on orbit ASAP to begin testing. Starlink is rolling out quickly, and if Amazon doesn't get moving now they are really going to be in a tough spot.
bo is a vanity project by someone who made billions selling counterfeits and factory rejects as legitimate products to unsuspecting consumers, to produce a rocket that will be obsolete before it ever flies.
The stage 1 simulator, and integration & test facilities: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=...
"Tank Cleaning and Testing" facility: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=...
Launch Complex 36: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=...
It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.