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Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

"In winning the $2.9 billion contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which had formed what it called a “national team” by partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. SpaceX also won over Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Ala. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)"

That's good PR, mentioning that Bezos owns WP when it is completely irrelevant, in order to foster a feeling of openness and honesty, while the real bomb in that sentence is that spaceX beat the team of the dinosaurs (Northrop, Lockheed)

I don't know how I feel about any of this

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> That's good PR, mentioning that Bezos owns WP when it is completely irrelevant, in order to foster a feeling of openness and honesty

It is standard practice, when a newspaper reports on its owner, for it to point out the fact of ownership. It is considered good journalistic ethics. It is reminding the readers of the possibility that their reporting on their owner might be prone to bias, even if there is no sign of bias in any particular case.

Here in Australia, every time The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney's broadsheet) or The Age (Melbourne's broadsheet) mentions Nine Entertainment (the Australian TV network, and more recently owner of those newspapers), they add a parenthetical aside ("the owner of this masthead"). Different publications, different country, same principle.

I wish a newspaper reporter, writing about the union to which he or she belongs, had to disclose that relationship.

Many years ago when the SF Chronicle had an ombudsman, I asked about this, and was told "it's just not done."

For what it’s worth, the hosts of NPR’s Planet Money regularly disclose their union memberships when talking about the topic.

The Post includes that disclaimer every time they mention Bezos, or Amazon for that matter. It's policy, not a judgment call about relevance. They don't want to be accused of hiding the relationship.

It is a statement about the dire state of so much of the news media that standard disclosure of potential conflicts of interest is seen as some kind of weird spin.

How serious of an effort did Northrop and Lockheed put in though?

Blue Origin isn't really a serious contender, and has very few actual flights under their belt. I have no idea, but I'd think the other two companies probably were mostly a "consultancy" role to provide clout behind BO.

It's pretty perplexing BO would take point on such a major undertaking given their vast lack of experience.

I kind of think that they put their name in there just to try to make life hard for SpaceX. Basically throwing in their lot with anybody but Elon.

What actual flights? Not the New Shepard? That's a suborbital rocket. They haven't gone to space yet!

From a software perspective, I've experienced being in the small startup company that partnered with the huge established government contracting firm to try to win an award. Complete disaster. The culture clash alone was fatal.

That's called transparency, and it's fine that they do that.

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