Racecars are my personal toys - only needed a few thousand from BMW for public production and a few hundred for the aftermarket support.
On a competitive landscape, these companies are too late to the party with too little to show for it, and they are likely to be eclipsed by startups if they remain so slow in their progress.
It would be great if Bezo has a real rivalry with Elon, but sadly that is not the case.
And it turned out that as long as there are consistent incremental improvements "slow" is very hard to judge. In hindsight, Apple was moving very fast.
Not saying any particular venture will succeed, but the qualifications for success aren't speed nor earliness. Success comes from clear communication, solving a problem and correctly identifying opportunity.
If anything, Blue Origin had a head start. They squandered it.
1000s of engineers and blue collar workers
Which isn't to say they didn't advance engineering as a whole or weren't otherwise beneficial.
I'm actually a fan of his rocket company.
I did find it a bit sad we are so behind in terms of what I pictured the future to be when I watched Apollo land on the moon.
It is 100% a calculated "I'm a space cowboy" image maker.
Why does it reduce the value of a human being? What's the difference between a billionaire employing 1000 people for his frivolous needs compared to a million people employing 0.001 people each for their frivolous needs?
>These billionaires are blowing money on their personal midlife crises when they could be raising worker wages and helping to end poverty with billions to spare.
And what about all the people living in 3bd room houses, driving luxury cars, buying electronics, when they can be saving a life for as little as $3000[1]? Are they bad people for spending $3000 on creature comforts when they can be literally saving lives with that money?
> People were able to go into space before billionaires wanted to do it on a whim, you know.
Ever since the cold war ended, "going into space" has moving ahead at a glacial pace. I for one welcome the increased funding.
This funding chart[2] that gets passed along captures this dynamic perfectly. Would people want fusion power regardless of billionaires? Yes. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want billionaires funding fusion research to speed things up.
[1] https://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-...
[2] https://external-preview.redd.it/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2...
They made a lot of money and, as far as I’m concerned, they can spend it on whatever the hell they want. I have a ton of ideas on how people who aren’t me should spend their money, but I think it’s none of my business what they choose to do with their wealth, just as it’s none of my business what you do with yours.
The companies they owned created a lot of value. Some of it went to the employees, and some of it went to the owners.
If I say that more of that value should have gone to the employees, and less to owners, that's a different thing from butting in and telling people how to spend the money they earned.
They aren't directly in charge of policies that cause so much misery to so many people.
Yes, albeit at extremely high cost, which has always limited its utility.
Maybe you haven't been keeping a close eye on progress in space tech, but SpaceX is working towards reducing cost per kilogram by two orders of magnitude. 1/100th! Compared to the already relatively reasonably priced Falcon 9! And they're just about to do an orbital test of the system (Starship+Super Heavy Booster). This is after decades of government contractor launch providers like ULA happily milking the government with cost-plus contracts, where the costs only ever seemed to go the wrong way.
Blue Origin is aiming to be competitive with them with New Glenn, also a massive cargo-carrying rocket. Certainly not there yet, but they don't seem to be aiming for the space tourism flights for the superrich as an endpoint.
Virgin Galactic, shrug, but the sister company Virgin Orbit wing is doing interesting things with smallsat launches from a 747.
These are not all useless vanity projects.
Most immediately, there’s always the “internet for literally everyone” aspect, where even remote villages will be able to get access to the world’s information.
Much longer term, if we don’t develop a comfort with working in and building in with space, and we don’t wipe ourselves out some other way, we will certainly be wiped out at some point by an asteroid impact, massive volcanic eruption, or some other major catastrophe. All of our eggs are in the Earth’s basket.
Offworld mining wouldn’t pollute/despoil Earth, and elements that are rare here can be found in very high concentrations in asteroids. (A single asteroid could contain the same amount of platinum as has been mined in all of history).
It potentially opens up the ability to do things like deploying massive, thin solar shades as a way to try to slow global warming.
Large technical challenges spin off lots of new tech that get used elsewhere.
The last one that comes to mind, though I’m sure there are many others, is that it’s a big achievement that humans can be proud of together. It makes it clear that we can do more than just squabble over little pieces of this planet, and help us look outward. I think that that kind of inspiration shouldn’t be discounted.
And the point is that if SpaceX succeeds, it will no longer take exorbitant amounts of money and resources. It’ll become extremely routine and affordable even to regular people. I’d try not to view everything in terms of a power struggle with billionaires and corporations sucking up all the resources, that’s going to cast a dim pall on literally everything.
Rich people usually amass wealth to give them the power to do what they want to do, but if you’re directly building a business to do what you want to do, and you already have enough money, then maximizing profit isn’t the goal, having it do what you want it to do is. Money is necessary for that, but it’s just the means to the end.
But if you do that really well, then usually it’s worth a good amount.
People had transportation before Karl Benz and Henry Ford. I don’t think they did anything that couldn’t have been done elsewhere provided the resources were dedicated.
… been throwing money at SpaceX since (at least) 2006:
* https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html
The thing about R&D is that you do not know ahead of time what will work and what will fail. Some of NASA's programs failed and some have succeeded. But there was no way to know if SpaceX would be the winner, or SLS, or anything else.
SpaceX itself nearly failed:
* https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex...
> … and certainly nothing reusable.
Reusable was never done before (AFAICT). It turns out that it is actually technically possible and useful. But there was no way to know that ahead of time. It was a risk that SpaceX, and NASA by funding them, that just happened to work out.
Bezos and Branson, less so. They just have money.