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You're correct, but that doesn't really change the point I was trying to make Since you've edited your post, I'll respond to the rest. > But they're also just

You're correct, but that doesn't really change the point I was trying to make Since you've edited your post, I'll respond to the rest. > But they're also just carnival rides for Billionaires, and that's what gets on peoples nerves. If Bezos or Branson had sent someone else up in their place, does that really change anything? Sure, it's expensive and only the super wealthy can afford to go into space right now, but there are plenty of technologies in our past that only the wealthy could afford at first, but as time went on, they became more affordable.

geocrasher 5y ago
Sorry about that, I realized I had more to say after I had posted the reply. Your point about expensive technology becoming more affordable in the long run- that makes a lot of sense, and I totally get it. At first, basic air travel was such a thing, as was travel by rail. Or fancy carriage. So yes. That much is true. And I think if they'd sent up other billionaires instead, it would have made no difference. The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider.
- superfrank 5y ago
  > The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider. I hear you there, but I don't understand why Musk gets a free pass then? He's just as rich as Bezos and just as out of touch with what the needs of average American.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    Because in a lot of people's eyes all Branson and Bezos have done is show up late to the game with inferior technology and thrown themselves a party for it.
    - ozzythecat 5y ago
      You seem to believe space flight and cost efficient rocketry are as simple as flipping hamburgers. Bezos grilled a cheeseburger and invited friends for beer after McDonalds already produced a billion Big Macs, and so obviously Bezos was just show boating. If you despise Bezos and Branson because of their wealth, you can just leave it at that. But trivializing the hard work and accomplishment that went into what happened two now this month is near sighted, short term thinking. IMO it actually explains why America’s Congress is basically at a stand still. People are better feeling outraged about something rather than celebrating something right in front of them.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    SpaceX's ventures have generally served more utilitarian purposes. There are significant economic, scientific and military advantages to reducing the cost of getting things into orbit. I don't think any of the three are bad, but I do think there is a gradient in terms of ambitions/successes that puts Musk well ahead of Bezos (at least until New Glen launches) and Bezo ahead of Branson. While Bezos/Branson's priorities seems slightly backwards to me, it isn't wholey unreasonable to take that stance that making spaceflight available to more people will increase the level of interest in spaceflight (even if the timing seems a bit tone deaf for that goal.)
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    SpaceX actually brings things up to orbital speeds, which is the minimum bar for useful space activity.
    - cwkoss 5y ago
      For reference, orbital flight requires 17,400 mph (28,000 km/h) Suborbital flight only requires 3,700 mph (6,000 km/h) Highly recommend playing kerbal space program if you'd like to get a better intuitive understanding of the difference: suborbital flights are your second or third attempt - pretty easy, orbital flight will probably take you a dozen flights or so to figure out.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Because what Musk is doing is pushing a technological frontier that can create new technologies to serve humankind while Bezos and Branson are not. It’s like inventing a new kind of ship vs. buying a super yacht.
    - superfrank 5y ago
      I don't know all the ins-and-outs of everything these three companies are working on, but I'm having a very hard time believing that not a single innovative technological has come out Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. Especially since many Blue Origin employees are former SpaceX employees.
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        Sure, just like building a superyacht today has some innovation as they customize it to each customer. But ultimately Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are retrodding old ground.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    The main thing is that what Bezos and especially Branson have built is a technological dead end. In order to make something that can actually reach orbit, Virgin Galactic is basically going to have to scrap everything they've done, and start from square one (Blue origin might be in a bit better place, but really hasn't accomplished anything yet after decades). The only thing it may make cheaper is suborbital flights, which are essentially useless. You can't even launch satellites that low. So there's essentially no practical purpose for their tech, and their companies, besides bragging rights for rich guys. A lousy metaphor we could use here is that in a world of automobiles, Bezos and especially Branson decided to research horses. It's not a very good metaphor - maybe a better one is someone trying a new entrant in the floppy disk category in 2021. Much like "Zip Drives" were able to make contemporarily larger floppy drives in their day (100mb instead of 1.3mb), you likely could make very good "modern" floppies in 2021, measuring in hundreds of gb, but they would still possess the fundamental flaws of the medium (being so easy to damage), and you simply couldn't get away from that. We abandoned it as a technological dead end for a reason. They achieved something we already have the tech to do; the only thing that's special is that they paid for it all by themselves. -- Musk, on the other hand, has two feathers in his cap - the first is that they're working on tech that's already fundamentally useful and "has room to grow" in incremental improvement. Getting to orbit is fundamentally useful (it's the tipping point where you can start to do satellites, and even extra-terrestrial trips); and pouring R&D into making that cheaper is very helpful for humanity. The other feather he's got in his cap is that the company he founded didn't just do some piddly "incremental improvements" that shaved a little bit off the cost of launch. We'd all be cheering if they'd shaved, oh, 10% of the cost away. That would be really good for humanity. -- But no. They went so far above and beyond that it's absolutely daffy duck. They won the lottery. They didn't roll a natural 20; they rolled a d20 and the dice face on top said "50 million". They invented reusable rockets - which everyone, including all the government space agencies, had written off as permanently impractical. The cost comparisons are just nuts — The cost of a space shuttle launch is something like 0.5-1.5 billion dollars. A similar launch from space x is something like, pessimistically, a few hundred thousand. It's like FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. This is my first "allcaps" on HN, but it needs the emphasis. The thing that Musk's company (really; folks like Gwynne Shotwell deserve core credit here) did was a quantum leap that honestly - nobody else might have had the political capital to do. We might have gotten this a century earlier than an alternate timeline without him precisely because of the stupidity of "allocation of funding" - there's no practical reason why a government agency couldn't have done this; it's all social dynamics and groupthink. It singlehandedly makes a lot of crazy, impractical things (like solar panels in space to solve terrestrial power problems) tip from pure fantasy into "gosh, maybe we could actually do this?" He's already rolling out Starlink, but there are an awful lot of really helpful things for real, contemporary problems on earth that "cheap space launches" could solve. "One of these is not like the others."
- marconey 5y ago
  Their ‘normal’ lifestyle is as comparatively extravagant anyway, regardless of space travel, just less reported on. It being on cable news doesn’t change that.
- ozzythecat 5y ago
  > The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. “A lot of people are hurting badly” is a subjective statement. If you listen to economists or look at the data, the world overall is doing better today than in the past. Help me understand why space exploration has to stop because some people are suffering, just as people suffered in the past when governments or other companies invested billions in X. Was the Apollo program a mistake? Was the ISS, the most expensive project in history, also a mistake? Is India wrong to send a satellite to Mars? What about China? Do you have a problem with America’s extreme, bloated military budget? Where’s the emotional rage about all these other things? What makes Bezos or Branson so special? There’s a more inaccurate but emotionally appealing argument that I think you’re trying to make - that we can simply use money to make every problem go away.
maccam94 5y ago
I think it's viewed as wasteful because it doesn't actually get people into orbit, AND it is expensive. Thus, it's only really appealing to rich people with cash to burn. These vehicles aren't even stepping stones to orbital rockets, and orbital launch prices are dropping. It's much more likely that SpaceX will offer tickets to orbit for $25k in the next 5-10 years than it will be for Virgin Galactic to do so. Blue Origin at least has an orbital rocket in development, but who knows if/when it'll even start being fabricated.
- xorfish 5y ago
  Safety won't be high enough for orbital flights for tourists. Sending rockets to space is still very prone to failures. Failure rates for unmanned rockets where lower 40 years ago than they are now if you look at the trailing 10 year failure rates. Around 1 in 20 unmanned mission fails. Failures for manned missions are less frequent, however noone can guarantee you, that the rate is lower than 1%. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-success-failure-ratio-of-space-bound-rockets https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s...
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Blue Origin is building and firing the BE-4 engines that will be used by New Glen and I rather doubt that there isn't work being done to fabricate other systems given the work that has been completed on their Florida manufacturing facility. Do you have sources that indicate fabrication has not started?
  - maccam94 5y ago
    Aha I have found footage showing a New Glenn first stage in the factory earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXOXKfarFhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXOXKfarFhg I believe I was recalling another video tour, probably from last year, where they said "And this is where the assembled rockets will be stored" and the factory floor was empty. It's pretty cool that they've made so much progress since then!
cwkoss 5y ago
Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space. It really is just a carnival ride - it's not about who's in it, its that they didn't actually achieve anything: what they built has no utility except as a dick-measuring contest. Orbit is a little bit of upwards velocity and a whole lot of sideways velocity. They only did the much simpler former. These sub orbital flights are just barely over the line into what can be called space travel, and do nothing useful except letting them brag that 'they went to space'
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  > Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space. Well, ICBMs are very useful, and only require sub-orbital velocities, though I don't necessarily want Bezos or Branson to get those.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Do ICBMs have any practical uses besides delivering explosives?
    - ckozlowski 5y ago
      If you can deliver a warhead, chances are you can deliver a satellite. Some of the space launchers today either started life as an ICBM turned dedicated launch vehicle (Proton) or are decommissioned ICBMs turned launch vehicles (Minotaur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_(rocket_family)
      - cwkoss 5y ago
        Makes sense that former-ICBMs that can reach orbital velocity have utility. (Are they still ICBMs if the goal isn't to reach another continent?) I think the deltaV's needed to place a warhead on the surface are significantly less than those needed to put a satellite into low-earth orbit.

geocrasher 5y ago

Sorry about that, I realized I had more to say after I had posted the reply. Your point about expensive technology becoming more affordable in the long run- that makes a lot of sense, and I totally get it. At first, basic air travel was such a thing, as was travel by rail. Or fancy carriage. So yes. That much is true. And I think if they'd sent up other billionaires instead, it would have made no difference. The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider.

superfrank 5y ago
> The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. For many people, it's visible proof of the gaps getting wider and wider. I hear you there, but I don't understand why Musk gets a free pass then? He's just as rich as Bezos and just as out of touch with what the needs of average American.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Because in a lot of people's eyes all Branson and Bezos have done is show up late to the game with inferior technology and thrown themselves a party for it.
  - ozzythecat 5y ago
    You seem to believe space flight and cost efficient rocketry are as simple as flipping hamburgers. Bezos grilled a cheeseburger and invited friends for beer after McDonalds already produced a billion Big Macs, and so obviously Bezos was just show boating. If you despise Bezos and Branson because of their wealth, you can just leave it at that. But trivializing the hard work and accomplishment that went into what happened two now this month is near sighted, short term thinking. IMO it actually explains why America’s Congress is basically at a stand still. People are better feeling outraged about something rather than celebrating something right in front of them.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  SpaceX's ventures have generally served more utilitarian purposes. There are significant economic, scientific and military advantages to reducing the cost of getting things into orbit. I don't think any of the three are bad, but I do think there is a gradient in terms of ambitions/successes that puts Musk well ahead of Bezos (at least until New Glen launches) and Bezo ahead of Branson. While Bezos/Branson's priorities seems slightly backwards to me, it isn't wholey unreasonable to take that stance that making spaceflight available to more people will increase the level of interest in spaceflight (even if the timing seems a bit tone deaf for that goal.)
- cwkoss 5y ago
  SpaceX actually brings things up to orbital speeds, which is the minimum bar for useful space activity.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    For reference, orbital flight requires 17,400 mph (28,000 km/h) Suborbital flight only requires 3,700 mph (6,000 km/h) Highly recommend playing kerbal space program if you'd like to get a better intuitive understanding of the difference: suborbital flights are your second or third attempt - pretty easy, orbital flight will probably take you a dozen flights or so to figure out.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Because what Musk is doing is pushing a technological frontier that can create new technologies to serve humankind while Bezos and Branson are not. It’s like inventing a new kind of ship vs. buying a super yacht.
  - superfrank 5y ago
    I don't know all the ins-and-outs of everything these three companies are working on, but I'm having a very hard time believing that not a single innovative technological has come out Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. Especially since many Blue Origin employees are former SpaceX employees.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      Sure, just like building a superyacht today has some innovation as they customize it to each customer. But ultimately Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are retrodding old ground.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  The main thing is that what Bezos and especially Branson have built is a technological dead end. In order to make something that can actually reach orbit, Virgin Galactic is basically going to have to scrap everything they've done, and start from square one (Blue origin might be in a bit better place, but really hasn't accomplished anything yet after decades). The only thing it may make cheaper is suborbital flights, which are essentially useless. You can't even launch satellites that low. So there's essentially no practical purpose for their tech, and their companies, besides bragging rights for rich guys. A lousy metaphor we could use here is that in a world of automobiles, Bezos and especially Branson decided to research horses. It's not a very good metaphor - maybe a better one is someone trying a new entrant in the floppy disk category in 2021. Much like "Zip Drives" were able to make contemporarily larger floppy drives in their day (100mb instead of 1.3mb), you likely could make very good "modern" floppies in 2021, measuring in hundreds of gb, but they would still possess the fundamental flaws of the medium (being so easy to damage), and you simply couldn't get away from that. We abandoned it as a technological dead end for a reason. They achieved something we already have the tech to do; the only thing that's special is that they paid for it all by themselves. -- Musk, on the other hand, has two feathers in his cap - the first is that they're working on tech that's already fundamentally useful and "has room to grow" in incremental improvement. Getting to orbit is fundamentally useful (it's the tipping point where you can start to do satellites, and even extra-terrestrial trips); and pouring R&D into making that cheaper is very helpful for humanity. The other feather he's got in his cap is that the company he founded didn't just do some piddly "incremental improvements" that shaved a little bit off the cost of launch. We'd all be cheering if they'd shaved, oh, 10% of the cost away. That would be really good for humanity. -- But no. They went so far above and beyond that it's absolutely daffy duck. They won the lottery. They didn't roll a natural 20; they rolled a d20 and the dice face on top said "50 million". They invented reusable rockets - which everyone, including all the government space agencies, had written off as permanently impractical. The cost comparisons are just nuts — The cost of a space shuttle launch is something like 0.5-1.5 billion dollars. A similar launch from space x is something like, pessimistically, a few hundred thousand. It's like FIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. This is my first "allcaps" on HN, but it needs the emphasis. The thing that Musk's company (really; folks like Gwynne Shotwell deserve core credit here) did was a quantum leap that honestly - nobody else might have had the political capital to do. We might have gotten this a century earlier than an alternate timeline without him precisely because of the stupidity of "allocation of funding" - there's no practical reason why a government agency couldn't have done this; it's all social dynamics and groupthink. It singlehandedly makes a lot of crazy, impractical things (like solar panels in space to solve terrestrial power problems) tip from pure fantasy into "gosh, maybe we could actually do this?" He's already rolling out Starlink, but there are an awful lot of really helpful things for real, contemporary problems on earth that "cheap space launches" could solve. "One of these is not like the others."
marconey 5y ago
Their ‘normal’ lifestyle is as comparatively extravagant anyway, regardless of space travel, just less reported on. It being on cable news doesn’t change that.
ozzythecat 5y ago
> The truth is that a lot of people are hurting badly, and to watch others do extravagant things that don't make a difference for the bettering of humanity now just pours salt on the 'wound' of poverty. “A lot of people are hurting badly” is a subjective statement. If you listen to economists or look at the data, the world overall is doing better today than in the past. Help me understand why space exploration has to stop because some people are suffering, just as people suffered in the past when governments or other companies invested billions in X. Was the Apollo program a mistake? Was the ISS, the most expensive project in history, also a mistake? Is India wrong to send a satellite to Mars? What about China? Do you have a problem with America’s extreme, bloated military budget? Where’s the emotional rage about all these other things? What makes Bezos or Branson so special? There’s a more inaccurate but emotionally appealing argument that I think you’re trying to make - that we can simply use money to make every problem go away.

maccam94 5y ago

I think it's viewed as wasteful because it doesn't actually get people into orbit, AND it is expensive. Thus, it's only really appealing to rich people with cash to burn. These vehicles aren't even stepping stones to orbital rockets, and orbital launch prices are dropping. It's much more likely that SpaceX will offer tickets to orbit for $25k in the next 5-10 years than it will be for Virgin Galactic to do so. Blue Origin at least has an orbital rocket in development, but who knows if/when it'll even start being fabricated.

xorfish 5y ago
Safety won't be high enough for orbital flights for tourists. Sending rockets to space is still very prone to failures. Failure rates for unmanned rockets where lower 40 years ago than they are now if you look at the trailing 10 year failure rates. Around 1 in 20 unmanned mission fails. Failures for manned missions are less frequent, however noone can guarantee you, that the rate is lower than 1%. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-success-failure-ratio-of-space-bound-rockets https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s...
shkkmo 5y ago
Blue Origin is building and firing the BE-4 engines that will be used by New Glen and I rather doubt that there isn't work being done to fabricate other systems given the work that has been completed on their Florida manufacturing facility. Do you have sources that indicate fabrication has not started?
- maccam94 5y ago
  Aha I have found footage showing a New Glenn first stage in the factory earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXOXKfarFhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXOXKfarFhg I believe I was recalling another video tour, probably from last year, where they said "And this is where the assembled rockets will be stored" and the factory floor was empty. It's pretty cool that they've made so much progress since then!

cwkoss 5y ago

Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space. It really is just a carnival ride - it's not about who's in it, its that they didn't actually achieve anything: what they built has no utility except as a dick-measuring contest. Orbit is a little bit of upwards velocity and a whole lot of sideways velocity. They only did the much simpler former. These sub orbital flights are just barely over the line into what can be called space travel, and do nothing useful except letting them brag that 'they went to space'

xyzzyz 5y ago
> Neither Bezos or Branson achieved orbital velocities, which is the minimum bar for doing useful things related to space. Well, ICBMs are very useful, and only require sub-orbital velocities, though I don't necessarily want Bezos or Branson to get those.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Do ICBMs have any practical uses besides delivering explosives?
  - ckozlowski 5y ago
    If you can deliver a warhead, chances are you can deliver a satellite. Some of the space launchers today either started life as an ICBM turned dedicated launch vehicle (Proton) or are decommissioned ICBMs turned launch vehicles (Minotaur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_(rocket_family) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_(rocket_family)
    - cwkoss 5y ago
      Makes sense that former-ICBMs that can reach orbital velocity have utility. (Are they still ICBMs if the goal isn't to reach another continent?) I think the deltaV's needed to place a warhead on the surface are significantly less than those needed to put a satellite into low-earth orbit.