I am sorry but some of the stuff she has said is quite nuts. Point to point travel with Starship is never going to happen the way she describes it. A rocket that big makes so much noise you can not launch it at half to ports they listed. If you would launch a Starship on Zürich lake you will blow out every window in the city.
possibly, granted i haven't gone over everything she's said. Her job description of running SpaceX day-to-day balanced with SpaceX's achievements is what makes her pretty amazing in my eyes. Maybe things have changed, maybe she's delegated the day to day ops to someone else. I can't be 100% sure.
The people who make it happen are the ones i most admire. It takes a village, i mean you're not getting anywhere without the vision and foresight of people like Musk. You're also not getting anywhere without a leader assembling the right team (which i think is Musk's real talent) but, to me, i most admire the people on the ground making plans, managing/coordinating, and turning wrenches.
Doesn't matter. That would be a good incentive to have their windows blast proofed. Which is good for the special glasses industry. And all the workers! And makes turning houses into bunkers so much more easy. The swiss like their bunkers.
I mean, Elon made the same claims about Starship Earth to Earth, Mars colonization, plus other outrageous claims about the hyperloop and the boring company and Tesla autopilot (in 2014 he said that in 5 years you'll be able to go to sleep behind the wheel). At what point does the genious marketing end and defrauding investors with false promises begin?
IMO you have to maintain or exert some control over a nation in order to be an oligarch. So Jeff and Elon are out, but David Koch and Robert Mercer meet the definition for me. These guys have exerted huge control over the US over the last 30-40 years.
According to Google his net worth is $150 million, so that is 0.1% of Bezos, and he owns 0 powerful companies to Bezos' 3. Not remotely in the same league.
Given that Russia has mostly an oil based economy roughly the size of Italy, the levers they are moving are quite a bit smaller than their American counterparts.
Bezos or Koch or Hamm or DeVoss can't move their American levers as far, but the overall output is quite substantial compared to what Abramovich can achieve with his.
Oligarchs were basically given large existing monopolies and then just sit on them and make money with no reason to innovate.
While it’s a fun jibe to throw at them it’s a completely different thing to just being insanely wealthy through actually doing something effectively (if sometimes immorally)
As you said, oligarch implies power, and with power one typically controls resources in a way that wealth can be generated for selfish purposes. The strict definition is something like "ruling by few", but I've always thought of it as rule by the extremely wealthy since that's how it typically seems to play out.
Sure, they are pretty closely related in pratice. The Senatorial oligarchy of Rome were pretty much also the wealthy of Rome, and often those with military power.
Still, the term implies politics... not just money. I would also hazard that it implies hereditary power. You could argue that dynastic politicians are oligarch. I'm not really disputing, just pondering.
Ultimately, for both Russians and Americans, oligarch is a (usually derogatory) analogy. It's not a formal oligarchy. We could also say aristocrats, which is more appealing to me.
Also, there's an idea that all governments, or systems of power are oligarchies. No matter what the formal system of government, some group of powerful people wield a lot of power. Rich people, religious leaders, senators, backscene power brokers, generals...
Redundancy for NASA funded projects makes sense, and it's how we regained the ability to launch human crewed rockets from US soil: Boeing wanted to be the sole contract, and has bungled their launch projects, and it was due to NASA also contracting SpaceX that we've had any successful launches. When SpaceX was recently awarded a sole contract, plenty of people — including here on HN — howled that NASA was letting SpaceX turn into a monopolist like Boeing tried to become. NASA has historically chosen multiple providers for redundancy, and the SpaceX sole contract was a unique departure due to NASA lacking sufficient funding. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lu...
The Intercept isn't exactly known for... neutral... reporting.
"Agency managers originally hoped to award follow-on HLS contracts to two of the companies to encourage competition and protect against the possibility of major problems or delays that might affect one company but not the other.
But Congress only allocated $850 million in NASA's fiscal 2021 budget for lander development, about one quarter of the amount the agency said it needed to have a new vehicle ready by 2024.
Given the available money and projected future spending, NASA "down selected" to a single contractor — SpaceX — deciding the California rocket builder offered the most attractive combination of cost, technology and management expertise."
Neutrality may always have some element of manufacture, but that doesn't mean it's equivalent to intentionally trying to generate partisan outrage. This isn't a "bailout fund for Jeff Bezos" — word-for-word quote from the headline of the Intercept article! — it's just NASA continuing to try to get budget for the projects it wanted all along, so it can have redundant contractors like it did with the commercial crew program and avoid getting stuck with monopolist pricing (and monopolist poor performance) like it nearly did with Boeing.
One creates businesses that have scale in a quasi open market while the other privatized formerly state run businesses and keeps their position by further supporting the head of the nation in all matters.
If we could get every billionaire to reinvest their money in world changing technology like Elon we’d live in a much better world. Honestly this is capitalism at its best, how do we do more like this?
"net win for humanity" can be taken two ways. Elon / Jeff not making it back could also be considered a "win" even if dark. For the good they have done they have done a lot of damage to humanity on their way to become billionaires.
Could you be more specific? "A lot of damage to humanity" is a quite strong claim with deep ethical implications. I would prefer a concrete example of such an act.
Speculative bubble getting bigger and bigger by attracting greater and greater fools. No matter what Elon does or says, it's just a zero-sum game. What would the humanity lose if Bitcoin disappeared right now? Absolutely nothing (except people who hold it would lose their "investments").
To the second point, you should look into the definition of monopoly. Amazon is a behemoth, not a monopoly. And they have created immense value.
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but surely taxpayers subsidizing billionaires’ rocket testing and allowing the gains to be privatized is a net loss for society, no?
> In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor.
It's important to note that SpaceX is different from most space-related government contractor in that they mostly sell a packaged service, whereas other contractors before it had development contracts. Boeing / ULA etc were paid to develop launchers, SpaceX sells launches. (I know that SpaceX benefited from subsidies towards achieving that, but their competitors did not achieve that or even tried.)
The key difference is that they are not (entirely) incentivized on sucking on the subsidies teats. That the US government pays them to provide a public service makes them more akin to any utility than to typical government contractors.
The difference is that Boeing and others are financed the way a public works would be, like a bridge or highway. They thus have no incentive to get cheaper / more efficient once they get the contract, and in fact make more money the less efficient they are -- as long as the government doesn't tire of paying them. SpaceX gets development subsidies, like the others do, but they sell launches, not an ongoing project. As a result, the more efficient they are, the more profit they make.
Are you suggesting $1.8M for expansion of Starlink to deliver broadband to rural America is not a net win? As someone in the midwest US, Starlink is the first realistic opportunity for many people I know to access broadband internet. My mother-in-law has had to teach from home all year using her cellphone as a hotspot because that's the best internet she could get no matter how much she payed.
People are engaged in heated normative[1] discussion with little or no facts. I am not. Even saying Tesla is a great example of a government project does not mean it's good or bad. Just a great example.
I just wanted to add some facts to the discussion. Not enough, but some. I think it would be great to find out the total indirect and direct subsidies these companies receive, but I could not find it.
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1: Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible.
As a counterpoint, $900 million to get rural America actual broadband, where cable companies used similiar handouts to line their own pockets and do nothing...
We're in a "Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" type hypothetical now.
Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
They’re also not very good at spending money on consumer goods when they don’t have any, which Amazon absolutely needs. (Tesla needs a lot of people above average income, given their cheapest offering).
And these two giants aren’t the only places people can work. (Not enough by itself, but still a massive improvement compared to the situation leading to the French Revolution).
Super-rich as a class exists because we let them exist, but there is a reason we let them exist… and a reason we have things like the SEC and FTC to stomp on them if/when they get out of line.
Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
Surely not. Starving people are desperate people, and desperate people are always dangerous.
Fed People with most of their basic needs met and a few luxuries make the least effective revolutionaries since they have little to gain and are terrified of losing the little they have.
If that was true, nobody would’ve revolted in Europe since the potato famine (the former Stasi HQ is a short trip from me), and the potato famine would’ve triggered an immediate war for independence in Ireland rather than set one off a generation later.
Edit: before anyone suggests food shortages in DDR, based on what I saw in the DDR museum the shortages were of fancy food like coffee rather than staples like bread and potatoes.
> Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
This is true, but their visible presence and the risk of joining them often motivates the people in slightly better circumstances to become the most effective ones; the starving masses usually aren't the effective revolutionaries, but their presence often accompanies revolution for that reason.
> Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
This is clearly historically incorrect.
> Super-rich as a class exists because we let them exist, but there is a reason we let them exist…
What reason is that? They exist because they are powerful, thus hard to topple. That the SEC and FTC are so ineffective (and ridiculously small pieces of the puzzle) is evidence of that.
If you actually study history (not YouTube, history books) you’ll find starving people and human rights violations to be a common cause for revolution.
“Pop trash” sounds like you’re dismissing it out of hand because you don’t like the conclusion.
I mean, it might be, but as I’m not even claiming to be a domain expert I have to (argument from authority fallacy notwithstanding) rely on the author biographies as a proxy for how much they know.
Now, would you like to give me a brief summary of how, biologically speaking, you recon being malnourished fails to put a bunch of revolutionaries at a relative disadvantage to a non-malnourished bunch of revolutionaries?
I’m saying you need to read actual history as you seem to think that starving a population won’t lead to a revolution.
> Now, would you like to give me a brief summary of how, biologically speaking, you recon being malnourished fails to put a bunch of revolutionaries at a relative disadvantage to a non-malnourished bunch of revolutionaries?
People revolt because they have nothing left to lose, not because it’s strategically a good idea. “Biologically” speaking when you outnumber your foe 100 to 1, you have at least an advantage in numbers, but again that’s not why people revolt.
Sick, miserable people make terrible revolutionaries. Desperate and hungry people have nothing to lose. Poor people in the US are miserable, but not miserable enough to be desperate.
Based on my visits to the USA, I think that’s mainly because Taco Bell and McD are cheaper than anything even vaguely healthy from any American supermarket.
(Regions visited: Central and North California, I-80 highway between SF and Salt Lake City, New York-Newark conurbation, Boston-Providence area)
It ain't that ridiculous. Poor people can't afford high quality raw ingredients and so more rely on highly processed, high-calorie foods (especially HFCS) that leave them obese.
Food stamp payments might be more than you think. For example, for a household of two people in California, the minimum payment is $430/month [0]. That's not going to be putting fancy food on the table, but its more than beans and rice (or soda and chips).
There's no guarantee that taxpayers money would be used for a better endeavor if it was used otherwise.
And the very definition of better endeavor is pretty shaky in any case.
So one can debate on whether optimal resource allocation is done by the government or private individuals, but it is not 'surely' better to have the government allocate the resources.
Why does the richest individual on the planet need a handout of government cash for a project he wants to pursue anyway?
Will there be any element of cheap subsidised access to space in return for the government's investment?
Or is it exactly what it seems to be - a no-strings handout?
As for better endeavours - perhaps you're underestimating the economic utility of a single payer health care system which wouldn't bankrupt 500,000 individuals a year. (For example.)
I was a bit shocked how Jeff Bezos looked in the video [0] in which he invited his brother to go with him. He does not look healthy, even a bit bloated. Does anyone know if he is having health issues?
You see his outline a bit later in the video, still looking fit. I actually thought the same when watching the video. I saw similar features in the faces of multiple friends who needed regular cortisone intake.
There’s an interesting trend I’ve seen where a lot of folks who were previously super health conscious, put on weight when they are in a relationship they enjoy.
Anyone have a study or article of this phenomenon?
The chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. We are machines that work to attract mates, reproduce, and rear young. Once one has achieved the goal of attracting a mate, there's little need to devote energy to courtship displays - though perhaps more need to reserve energy in case of hardship. I might be being a little reductive though :)
> We are machines that work to attract mates, reproduce, and rear young.
How would this be distinguished from people simply having the desire to orgasm which unintentionally causes reproduction? At least for males, I can see a case for the machine’s goal to spread the seed as far and wide as possible, so there need not be any biological imperative to stop at one mate.
> How would this be distinguished from people simply having the desire to orgasm which unintentionally causes reproduction?
That's reverse causality. Evolutionary fitness is a strong driver of human behavior. There's plenty of incidental behaviour, but in terms of baby making it's clear cut.
> so there need not be any biological imperative to stop at one mate.
It's more efficient when you consider humans have a long maturation time. Reproductive success is also greater when grandparents are involved with child rearing, implying that a strong family unit leads to better outcomes. Promiscuity is definitely favorable if the rearing duties can be foisted onto someone else, though paternity tests and prophylactics have changed the landscape somewhat.
There's a lot more to it, and much of what I've learnt is from an old Stanford lecture series by Robert Sapolsky called human behavioural biology. Worth a watch if you're interested
> That's reverse causality. Evolutionary fitness is a strong driver of human behavior. There's plenty of incidental behaviour, but in terms of baby making it's clear cut.
That does not seem to be consistent with declining birthrates in developed countries. By and large, the more freedom and self sufficiency women have, the lower the birth rate (not a scientific conclusion, but what I see so take it with a boulder of salt).
I often wonder if we went back in time and asked all the women who had 3, 4, 5+ children, how many of those were wanted pregnancies versus how many of those were due to “pressure” of some kind from the father or society.
> It's more efficient when you consider humans have a long maturation time. Reproductive success is also greater when grandparents are involved with child rearing, implying that a strong family unit leads to better outcomes.
I would also guess tribes that prioritize monogamous relationships with multiple generations cooperating with each other outlast tribes that do not. But I would also guess that the biological (or “machine” aspect of it) is for males to be promiscuous. The tribes that fight this biological urge by whatever means (even just keeping it hush hush so it allows for peace) would be more successful long term than those that do not?
> There's a lot more to it, and much of what I've learnt is from an old Stanford lecture series by Robert Sapolsky called human behavioural biology. Worth a watch if you're interested
I’ll check it out. Here’s a link for anyone else interested:
> That does not seem to be consistent with declining birthrates in developed countries. By and large, the more freedom and self sufficiency women have, the lower the birth rate
I have read this before and I think it's an accurate phenomenon. There's some amount of 'evolutionary warfare' between sexes. I think the biological mechanism for it is called 'imprinting'. Also women have preference for someone who will help with the cost of pregnancy (which can be fatal) and rearing, as for men, they might not include this in their calculus.
> I would also guess tribes that prioritize monogamous relationships with multiple generations cooperating with each other outlast tribes that do not.
The picture is, of course, complicated. Societies/tribes have varied between polygamy and monogamy, and a number of factors are involved, including culture. All better explained by that lecture series. Though keep in mind is over a decade old
Being fit serves many goals other than attracting a mate. I wouldn’t personally even put it in the top 3, although admittedly most people probably would.
Keeping fit permits a longer lifespan, which can be important for the evolutionary fitness of grand kids. Also, I'm being a bit facetious, I don't believe all our behavior neatly fits into evolutionary motivations, and the science doesn't claim such rigidity. It does, however, have startling explanatory power about a bunch of things we do. I'd suggest watching the lecture series in the sibling thread
his shirt also seem "puffy" under hist shirt compared to how he usually looked.
I do not believe it's possible to decide whether he's swollen from corticosteroids, or because he's bulking up in a gym, he's just just eating more because he's happy or because he's sad.
I’m wondering if Amazon wouldn’t let him do this while he was at the helm. It sounds quite dangerous. Your first manned flight and it has the world’s richest man and owner in it?
I don’t keep up with Blue Origin, have they demonstrated the ability to do this safely?
Not sure where everyone is getting their numbers but the failure rate for manned launches over the last 20 years is 0.8%. The percentage chance of death while climbing Everest is around 1%. SpaceX’s Falcon has ~2% failure rate. Unmanned flight failure rates are considerably higher. So risks of manned flight look comparable to climbing Everest.
Can you extrapolate all manned flight numbers (which are done by people with much more experience at it) to Blue Origin which has apparently only done 14 flights of New Shepard ever?
I thought that the failure rate for manned missions was accepted to be around 1 crew loss in several hundred flights. That seems much worse than typical mountain climbing, with Everest and K2 being somewhat riskier than space flight on a per-attempt basis.
It's 1/270, but this won't be an orbital flight. The rocket climbs up to the Karman line then releases the capsule. There is no reentering which is one of the most dangerous phases of orbit flights.
14 trials is nothing - especially when even a 5% risk would be considered too high. For reference, the 95 % confidence interval on a distribution with a 1 in 5 accident risk would include this result:
https://epitools.ausvet.com.au/ciproportion
A 0.1% risk is probably considered too high for tourist flights that have no other useful purpose. They can't do enough flights to verify that experimentally, they'll calculate the risk via simulation and then validate the simulations with the test flights.
Indeed a 0.1% risk is far too high for tourist flights. The FAA doesn't accept the less than 0.0006% incident rate[1] of general aviation as safe enough for paying passengers.
i don't think anyone could have told him anything; at amazon employees are supposed to learn the word of the dear leader by heart, there used to be a bit of a personality cult around him, when i worked there.
Suborbital flights. Which require about 3% of energy needed to reach an orbit, and are of very limited practical use other than serving as an extended rollercoaster ride for tourists.
Blue Origin are very far away from achieving anything comparable to even SpaceX first Falcon-1 flight from 2008.
BO has completed 15 test flights over 6 years of a platform that bears little comparison with SpaceX's achievements.
Each BO test I've watched has been very well presented and seemingly marketed - it's just that at this point, frankly, what they're doing is of less interest than that what SpaceX has accomplished.
I agree with this thought. They've done a whole lot less boundary pushing than SpaceX.
The rationale for getting into the game seemed more like, "Well, this space thing seems like an emerging market, and we can't be a true monopoly unless we have a tentacle in it, too."
This article was light on details of what this flight entails. Here is a better source [1]:
> Zero-G will begin from the third minute into flight, and then at some point between and the flight’s highest point, or apogee, at four minutes, Bezos and the others onboard will officially pass into space. Gravity will return at approximately six minutes post-launch, with the parachutes deploying at nine minutes, and finally a landing at around 10 minutes after takeoff.
So this is a 10 minute flight with 2 minutes of zero G.
It came as a surprise to me to learn that Blue Origin was founded in 2000 and SpaceX was founded in _2002_. SpaceX recently celebrated 100 successful Falcon 9 launches _in a row_. It's fair to say that Blue Origin at this point has... under-delivered.
I can't find a definitive list of commercial launches (which, presumably, would be for New Shepherd) but it seems to be a handful at best. And just how many billions has Bezos poured into this?
I do wonder if Bezos's retirement as Amazon CEO will lead him to taking a more active role in Blue Origin going forward. This flight is probably meant to bring attention to the company and maybe put the pressure on. It seems like quite a risk though for something still so relatively unproven. I mean Musk hasn't gone up on a SpaceX launch yet. To be fair, his contract with Tesla probably forbids it (as, I suspect, Bezos's with Amazon does as well).
Oh and to anyone commenting on billionaires flexing at each other and otherwise competing this is nothing new. I suggest you look back at the history of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan (to name a few). This is nothing new.
It’s an expensive roller coaster but it’s still promising. They’re perfecting technologies and gaining the experience they’ll need to build real orbital vehicles. They seem to be trying to do something between Virgin Galactic and SpaceX to get this company off the ground, so to speak. Probably not a bad idea since Bezos obviously doesn’t want to go all in like Musk did but also doesn’t want to bleed cash into a money pit.
I am somewhat uneducated on the topic but is space tourism a good idea? It is a flight to nowhere which surely has a hefty carbon cost. Doesn't it also add pollutants high up in the atmosphere?
As exciting as it is to experience space I could imagine the environment cost is far from ideal.
A SpaceX launch outputs 336,552KG of CO2. I imagine Blue Origin's first passenger flight will be a bit less because it's not going as high.
The environmental cost of doing anything is far from ideal, but in the case of space tourism the impact is minimal. A 777-300 flight from New York to London outputs about 1,261KG of CO2 per passenger.[1] In British Airways configuration there are 299 seats on a plane like that, which is 377,039KG in total. There are 28 direct NY-LDN flights daily.
If the goal is to reduce the amount of high atmosphere CO2 then persuading 300 fewer people to fly across the Atlantic would have a larger impact.
It's also worth pointing out that Jeff Bezos owns two Gulfstream G650ER private jets, which will be putting a lot more CO2 in to the atmosphere than his day trip to space.
Blue Origin doesn't need hydrogen at industrial scale. They could easily supply themselves with "green" hydrogen created via electrolysis.
Elon Musk has promised to eventually fuel Starship with synthetic "green" methane. Green hydrogen is a much simpler problem, so if Blue Origin hasn't yet made that promise, it's quite likely they will soon.
If you think the future of humanity is in space (I do, but opinions vary) then yes, space tourism is excellent and critical idea.
Generally it drives practical use cases, has a clear revenue model (which is really, really important to keep any complex financial and technical project honest) and drives popular demand for "space" in general. Having rich and famous tweeting orbital and translunar updates would do more for image of space travel than 50 years of science fiction and state advertising combined.
For example, low gravity has lots of well documented side effects. Even though short term microgravity is not too bad, having a constant stream of rich people travel there will create more demand for space medicine, which will probably drive innovation to improve the lot of all space travelers long term.
Launching stuff to orbit will have a carbon cost. And it should be tallied. But it's a cost we have to pay ANYWAY to become an interstellar species.
If the overview effect [1] is real, even just a few world leaders and ultra-wealthy appreciating the fragility of earth could easily outweigh any pollution from space tourism.
In terms of carbon it's not even that bad, a spaceflight is roughly comparable to an airliner crossing the Atlantic. Of course it puts other pollutants in more layers of the atmosphere, something we definitely have to study as spaceflight becomes more common.
In absolute numbers you're right because millions of people are tourists compared to a few wealthy space tourists. But that's a strange metric to use, the space tourists are part of the regular tourist group as well. If we compare energy usage per tourist the numbers will be stacked against space tourism.
Regular tourism is bad, but rocket tourism is a new kind of bad because it puts pollutants in the upper atmosphere and we really don't know what the effects of that will be.
Is life a good idea? Human have a hefty carbon cost, and aren't they also the leading cause of pollutants? I could imagine individuals truly concerned for the environment would stop reproducing.
It will probably help humanity venture into space so I would answer yes it is a good idea. Rich people that can afford space tourism also can afford doing other things with their money which is also carbon intensive but doesn't bring humanity forward technology wise.
Besides personal desire to do it, this could be seen as a traditional symbolic show of confidence in safety -- like an engineer standing under their new bridge, the first time vehicles go over it.
I suspect this may be why he stepped down as CEO of Amazon. The corporate risk is huge for the the CEO of Amazon to fly on something that risky, and the board may have insisted he step down before doing it.
Well you how know even something simple like an app is buggy and has issues the developer didn't anticipate for the first few releases?
Imagine something as serious as a spacecraft.
But this is about as much as a journey into "space" is as a high altitude plane flight.
I still remember the months of watching "go for throttle up" explosion footage in 1986 (it was the 9/11 before 9/11) the few tv stations at the time would not stop playing it. I think we all became numb to it.
That's a different program.
And that $10B (actually $6B, and even that $6B will be split among 4 companies) hasn't actually been awarded.
Jeff has put $9B of his own money to Blue Origin so far.
I disagree. SpaceX doesn't need to play at Space Tourism. Musk is working on species defining technology and capabilities while his 'competitors' play with space Tourism.
It seems more desperate. I think he's jealous of musk, as he should be. Musk is doing so much net good for humanity, while Bezos seems more like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
People generally dont expect Musk to go to the ISS on Crew Dragon - because he's not an astronaut. But if SpaceX start doing 'space tourism' aimed at general (if somewhat rich) consumers then it would be odd for Musk not to take a ride on that - dont you think?
Similarly Branson would be expected to have a go on his space tourism thing once it opens up to the public.
Musk was known to joke that the (pressurised) Cargo Dragon spacecraft had everything needed for a stowaway to visit the ISS. Thank goodness he didn't try it - probably a stunt too far even for him.
That's commendable IMO. Arthur C. Clarke's first published short story "Travel by Wire!" shows the inventor of teleportation travelling by plane. When questioned on this he says, "I don't travel by wire, I invented it!"
