Senate Preparing $10B Bailout Fund for Jeff Bezos Space Firm
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Even if Blue Origin is behind SpaceX, it's still good to have a couple irons in the fire pushing things. Solar was the same way. There were probably a half dozen failed solar startups that Obama threw money at that the right can pillory as boondoggles, but this is how private research will go if governments aren't doing massive amounts of public research.
Some companies will succeed, others won't.
It is a sort of whataboutism - in this case, just because Blue Origin is a space company funded by a rich person, the actions should be the same.
Yes, Blue Origin is similar to SpaceX. There are, however, both qualitative and quantitative differences, and both of those may justify different results when viewed by a third party.
Does Blue Origin produces good results? Well. Blue Origin was created before SpaceX, but many would say the results of Blue Origin are more modest. So NASA may decide that funding Blue Origin doesn't justify added expenses.
Does Blue Origin need money? It could be funny, but Jeff Bezos can well fund the company - he even promised giving them a billion a year. That kind of funding is significantly different from, for example, NASA's help to SpaceX right after forth Falcon-1 flight. So NASA's money may not go as long in the case of Blue Origin.
There are more modest companies where NASA help would likely achieve more. I'd name Sierra Nevada Company with Dream Chaser and Master Space Systems with their landers. Big aggregations of airspace behemoths, themselves created by merging multiple airspace companies and eliminating competition don't often produce results with reasonable price tags.
When AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud were weighted, there were arguments that the government should buy from at least two different companies to preserve competition.
The biggest buyer in this market invests in maintaining the competition. Otherwise another market would be dominated by a monopoly to detriment of the biggest customer.
Take the premise governments are incompetent and overspend.
You neither win or lose by getting two. The incompetence is built into the second same price.
Except you have the second early.
Building early has a cost, but given the way governments work the incentive for re-election is being under budget and fixing problems only when they become so bad they have too. Building early intuitively sounds better to me.
Is that hard to understand? It's definitely pork. Some gov't official from a particular state drafts legislation to ensure that a company in the same state gets the money that legislation sets aside regardless if they are the best choice. That has to raise flags to everyone, right?
Most gov't contractors know that they can charge multiples of what it would actually cost because it's the govt paying for it. No govt contract has ever said, "hey, we know we initially bid to do task for $x, but we actually were able to do it for $x-20%". Instead it is always, "oops, we grossly misjudged the scope of work and allowed people to continue to make changes to the request, so we're now 5x the original bid". They allow the requests to make these changes because they know that it is guarantee to keep the money flowing and people employeed.
For major infrastructure I would expect the second to cost around the same price as the first. Materials, labour, time, bribes and corruption is all double.
Any saving you might expect around paperwork and opportunity cost I don't mind, compared to waiting a decade then starting the process of getting it through government again.
Even in the movie, (I don't know the book) think about the downtime if they had to fund the project again.
And if you include 'in secret' it's even worse, because if the 3 letter agencies can do anything in secret for the same price as a public department that would me pretty amazing.
Maybe the quote isn't cynical - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTUrdizRZyw
This is about ensuring a healthy and competitive space technology ecosystem in the US. It’s about redundancy. It’s about not losing all the progress an organization like Blue Origin has made, since starting from zero will be more expensive. To me it seems prudent to make a $10B investment here, which is small when compared to other policy packages the Biden administration has proposed.
Would Blue Origin lose all progress? Why is the assumption that Bezos would fold up shop and shred everything?
Yes, the headline is a bit provocative, but it's a valid criticism; as is the fact that the bailout was added by a Senator from the state that Blue Origin is based in, which makes it look like a much less altruistic move to ensure space exploration continues at a rapid pace, and more like a way to make sure her state gets a cut of the budget.