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> In this proposal, Bezos made a critical error. NASA wanted to see companies self-invest in their hardware. The space agency wanted to be a customer for these

> In this proposal, Bezos made a critical error. NASA wanted to see companies self-invest in their hardware. The space agency wanted to be a customer for these landers, but not the only customer. "I think they realized it's why they lost," one politically connected source told Ars. "Meaning they did not invest properly." So Bezos' letter offers a mea culpa. Offering to personally bankroll the lander is better than not offering to personally bankroll the lander, but this still doesn't meet the bar. There's a business plan for Starship that has nothing to do with convincing the government to use it to land on the moon. If the government doesn't use it to land on the moon, they're going to build Starship anyway, launch more satellites than anyone ever thought they would require, and go to Mars. Blue Moon was always intended to have one customer. That's why Bezos presented it in DC instead of Kent or Texas. If you read the rest of the letter it becomes even more clear: > We built the National Team – with four major partners and more than 200 small and medium suppliers in 47 states – to focus on designing, building, and operating a flight system the nation could count on. Why would you go out of your way to build something this way? The best reason I can think of is to give 94 out of 100 Senators the chance to brag about creating jobs in their home state. > It also eliminated the benefits of utilizing the broad and capable supply base of the National Team (as opposed to funding the vertically-integrated SpaceX approach) and locks every trip to the Moon into 10+ Super Heavy/Starship launches just to get a single lander to the surface. It's hilarious to see Jeff talk about vertical integration as a bad thing, especially at the same time that he's trying to sell the government a cloud services provider that designs its own chips, generates its own power, and is actually part of a larger company that uses that cloud to run a retail website, for which it has its own package delivery service.

HWR_14 5y ago
> Why would you go out of your way to build something this way? In fairness, if you want to use traditional aerospace supply chains, they are probably optimized to work through 47 out of 50 states - because their biggest customers were DoD contractors who wanted to help Senators make those claims.
- philwelch 5y ago
  This is true. But rockets are a tiny bit more specialized. For instance, SpaceX and Blue Origin both build their own engines. That’s not the norm in aerospace. ULA buys their engines from other companies (including, in theory, Blue Origin) while jet engines are almost never built by the companies that build the rest of the jet. Also, in this case, Blue Origin is only building half of the moon lander. The other half is Lockheed Martin and friends. It might have made more sense, in theory, for Blue to design the whole lunar lander instead of just the bottom half. The NASA reports specifically called out the integration risks from this approach as a problem. I don’t know if it’s actually faster to outsource the upper stage of the lander to LockMart or if they just wanted to take advantage of LockMart’s proven ability to win massive government contracts, but you don’t go out of your way to talk about how many states you’re doing business in unless you’re making an appeal to Congress.

HWR_14 5y ago

> Why would you go out of your way to build something this way? In fairness, if you want to use traditional aerospace supply chains, they are probably optimized to work through 47 out of 50 states - because their biggest customers were DoD contractors who wanted to help Senators make those claims.

philwelch 5y ago
This is true. But rockets are a tiny bit more specialized. For instance, SpaceX and Blue Origin both build their own engines. That’s not the norm in aerospace. ULA buys their engines from other companies (including, in theory, Blue Origin) while jet engines are almost never built by the companies that build the rest of the jet. Also, in this case, Blue Origin is only building half of the moon lander. The other half is Lockheed Martin and friends. It might have made more sense, in theory, for Blue to design the whole lunar lander instead of just the bottom half. The NASA reports specifically called out the integration risks from this approach as a problem. I don’t know if it’s actually faster to outsource the upper stage of the lander to LockMart or if they just wanted to take advantage of LockMart’s proven ability to win massive government contracts, but you don’t go out of your way to talk about how many states you’re doing business in unless you’re making an appeal to Congress.