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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that by beginning his company with a focus on space tourism and flying on the very first mission himself, Bezos only plays into the hands of critics.

I'd frame it as Bezos demonstrated supreme confidence in the rocket by being personally on the first manned flight.

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Jeff Bezos flying with his brother Mark on the first manned flight of Blue Origin is the ultimate dogfooding event. Surprised people are so against it, it is an iterative step and was massively risky but proves out the technology.

Blue Origin will be a formidable competitor and working with ULA, JPL and NASA will be great for the space industry and new perspectives on sustainability on Earth.

ULA will be launching Amazon Kuiper satellites to start but eventually it will be Blue Origin itself. I wouldn't ever bet against Bezos. The competition is just beginning. I am glad we got a space race, competition is good.

The Blue Origin flight was extremely smooth and clean, I can't wait to see more.

ULA has contracted Blue Origin for their BE-4 engine to power their Vulcan. Future heavy lift launches will fund Blue Origin for a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4

Viable biz model, ability to execute is all I care about wrt Blue Origin.

Competition, good.

Living in space, colonizing Mars, mining asteroids, neurotic billionaires... Whatever. Just infotainment.

> mining asteroids,

I agree about the living in space and colonizing mars which are mostly pipe dreams (that I'm admittedly optimistic about as a spaceflight enthusiast), but I think mining asteroids is a feasible proposition. The material is there, and in-situ resource extraction and return has been demonstrated. It's really just a matter of scale-up and putting in the upfront investment.

And Blue Origin has forced ULA to fall back to using Russian rockets engines because their engine hasn’t been finished yet. ULA probably regrets using BE now.

I get the natsec hesitancy to go with the RD-180 over a domestic model, but at least the RD-180 exists.

Except the Vulcan hasn't had a single launch yet, will have half the payload capacity of the Falcon Heavy and is being built by a company with no experience in rocket landing/re-use.

I don't really see how the Vulcan will be competitive with the existing launch capabilities of SpaceX, even if it does launch successfully before Starship.

I don't see how Blue Origin producing the engines for an also ran rocket is going to fund their operations. Blue Origin will be dependent of Bezos and the USG for quite a while, atleast until the New Glen can be launched re-usable.

It is weird that they went with a brand new company to provide the lift for their NSO launches. Especially when they haven't executed on a heavy lift engine yet. It feels like New Glenn especially is a pipe dream.

Starting off by catering to a tiny, rich elite in order to drum up excitement isn't a bad idea. Look at Tesla: they started with a $100k+ sportster model to create buzz, dispel myths about electric car performance, make it look sexy instead of focusing on environment benefits and cost-per-mile efficiencies. That generated revenue--and, more importantly--free advertising and buzz. Then they started making more affordable, less-sexy vehicles for the broader market. It was very much intentional. Musk could have repeated the pattern with SpaceX, but didn't have to, since he'd already proven himself and had a nice bankroll.

Musk was not the founder of Tesla nor the originator of the Roadster-buzz business model, but point taken.

Musk was closely involved with the design of the Roadster and is officially a co-founder of Tesla. Do you have sources regarding who did develope the Roadster-buzz business model?

Here the founders describe how their Roadster concept was integral to their pitch to Musk to become a Series A investor. https://youtu.be/eblPwXFb7TE

It sounds like Musk was already looking at investing in a different electric sports car company and thus it was more a case of a bunch of people having similar ideas amd working together. They also say that the buzz business model was something they sort of fell into.

Edit: The other side of the story is here. I am sure both sides have bias, but given that a judge dismissed Eberhard's claim that there were only two co-founders, it the five co-founder settlement seems reasonable.

The link was left off my edit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090624221445/http://www.teslam...

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