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Blue Origin Sues NASA over Lunar Lander Contract Given to Rival SpaceX
- King-Aaron 5y agoBezos wants free money so badly he'll spend millions in legal costs to get it?
- TimesOldRoman 5y agoThe American way.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoHe was also offered to front $2b of the development costs himself after NASA went from saying there'd potentially be multiple winners to saying there'd only be one. I honestly don't think return on investment is his main concern with Blue Origin
- Taniwha 5y agoThen why is he wasting money on lawyers - why doesn't he just go to the moon and prove his solution is the best rather than chasing a NASA boondoggle
- tigershark 5y agoBecause their solution was an absolute joke by looking at the GAO review..
- bell-cot 5y agoSpaceX's contract is for $2.89B, right? NASA should offer Bezos a $3.0B contract to get astronauts to the moon - $2B up front of his own money, then $1B of NASA's money after he brings the astronauts back safely. Hmm - with how fast Blue Origin accomplishes things, maybe add a 20-year time limit to the contract.
- beeboop 5y agoA million dollars to Bezos is like $1 to most of us.
- tarey 5y agoNot even Musk has spent money on a 10 minutes of wasteful trip to space, why should NASA give any money to Bezos? If he wants to set up Amazon Prime on the moon, use his own money to do it.
- __m 5y agowell spacex spent money on solar city bonds after receiving money from nasa.
- tarey 5y agoWas it wasteful?
- orwin 5y agoYes? The company should have crashed, it would've been better for the market to reimburse early buyers and let small start-ups develop a better-quality product and have Tesla (or Amazon, or google, idc) buy the new startups. Dyaqua could've really use the money and a Tesla-Imerys conglomerate could already have given us affordable rooftops with Tesla's scale economy and powerwall and Imerys knowledge.
- tarey 5y agoSorry, I meant is it wasteful like taking a rocket for a 10-minute joyride? Or are you saying Solar City is worse than that?
- chalst 5y agoI'm also interested in seeing orwin's argument expanded. I'm a tad skeptical of crowding-out arguments, which often rest on a faith in the wisdom of markets that goes beyond that which can be justified.
- aeternum 5y agoBezos apparently felt very different about this just 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/bG0kT78SDn0?t=1801 https://youtu.be/bG0kT78SDn0?t=1801 It would be so great if NASA's defense/reply includes this video clip.
- jvzr 5y agoThe (tl;dw) money quote of that video: > Today there would be, you know, three protests, and the losers would sue the federal government because they didn’t win… --Bezos
- tehbeard 5y agoI am all for competition in the space industry to ensure access to space even if a fault occurs with one vehicle by having alternatives, but.... One of these companies is fabricating the largest space vehicle stack since the Saturn V, while also sending payloads into space on the regular. The other made essentially a copy of the former's grasshopper test vehicle and stuck a couple of seats on it... This is another "Elon sulking about the minisub" incident, but with a different billionaire.
- colechristensen 5y agoElon sulking about the minisub seemed like… a mildly unstable burned out billionaire. This seems like competition via lawyers instead of results, and nothing but a waste of everyone’s time.
- chalst 5y agoWhile we are on rich guys who overreact, I note Twitter is still alive with the aftermath of the multimillionaire flaneur reacting to Snowden's call-out tweet with an exercise in scorched-earth character assassination. But I digress.
- mam3 5y agoUh what ?
- chalst 5y agoTaleb deploys Bayes theorem and the base rate "fallacy" [fn] to show that Snowden is more likely to be a traitor than, uh, what he thought before he started studying Snowden. https://medium.com/incerto/snowden-phony-hence-traitor-86ee41197578?source=social.tw https://medium.com/incerto/snowden-phony-hence-traitor-86ee4... It's really as bad as the literal URL suggests. [fn]: To be fair, the idea that base rate bias is a fallacy is asserted in Wikipedia, so that's not originally his mistake. What base rate bias is, is a misconception that leads us to make poor estimates. It's not a fallacy, since fallacies are classes of inferences and, while there's a lot of debate as to what biases really are, I know of no logician who thinks they are a kind of inference.
- irrational 5y agoAre they really rivals? In my mind Blue Origin and SpaceX are in entirely different leagues. Blue Origin is in the kiddy league while SpaceX is in the professional league. Maybe once Blue Origin gets into the adult league they can complain about not being selected.
- Gibbon1 5y agoWell you can't say Blue Origin isn't acting like a traditional defense contractor here.
- actinium226 5y agoThis is so ridiculous
- s5300 5y agoI don't understand Bezos thought process in continuing to make himself look worse with this stance. Like, I get the whole of billionaire phallus swinging contests, but he has many other ways of attempting to do that with Musk if he so feels the need that isn't space. Is he really this worked up about things? Or is it a sort of calculated long-term plan despite the obvious short term failure in an attempt to keep slight relevancy in the politics of it all while they slowly chug along for a few more years with an end goal of capturing a much smaller and perhaps niche market of space related things? Hard to tell, and though I dislike Bezos, I really hope it's not as petty of a situation as it currently looks.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoBezos could pivot to something else space related, making his own niche while letting SpaceX continue on with what they do well. Musk is focused on getting to Mars and setting up some sort of base there. Bezos has already shown his interest lies in space habitats. BO even released their own renderings of potential O'Neill Cylinder designs. While those are a long way off, space stations already exist but have lots of room for improvement. Jeff could refocus Blue Origin on space habitats, using SpaceX as a collaborator on putting mass in space rather than as a competitor. I don't know the current status of Bigelow Aerospace but COVID19 seems to have hit them hard. Perhaps there's a role for Bezos and BO to come in and boost Bigelow's technology to the next level and beyond. There are so many possibilities, it's a shame that he's focused on treading ground that others are already covering well.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoHonestly I do not understand Jeff, if I remember how Elon started, and how he had limited amount of his own money, and that he had only money for one more launch, and that there were issues with Tesla at the same time, so everything was about to collapse.... Jeff is nowhere near that situation, in comparison Jeff has "infinitely" more resources. He is richest man on the planet, he has almost 200 bn of wealth at his disposal, he can hire any team and build anything, he can innovate, and yet he behave like "patent" trolls do, so can someone explain me what is his problem?
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoPlus Bezos has better access to his wealth. Musk was for a brief moment the world's wealthiest man too but that's mostly paper wealth that he doesn't have the ability to liquidate easily. Bezos can sell off Amazon stock quite easily and I'd assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Bezos is far better diversified than Musk.
- mam3 5y agoMusk has tesla stock too
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoIn the beginning Elon's stocks especially SpaceX were worthless, if Elon was at the brink of collapse hardly that he could extract any additional value.
- MarkEthan 5y agoI'm not surprised - Amazon successfully managed to get the Pentagon to drop a $10 Billion USD contract with Microsoft by "applying lawyers" to the matter [1]! Why not do the same here. When you are at the scale of ambition that Bezos et al. play in then why shouldn't you push your legal execs to deliver the same way you push your engineering execs to deliver... That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure. [1.1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-scraps-microsofts-10-billion-cloud-computing-deal-after-lawsuit-from-amazon/?sh=2d73c21f243b https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc... [1.2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/
- sumedh 5y agoDid DOD give a reason why they went with MS when AWS is being used by most of the world. The only reason was because Trump hates Bezos so Amazon was right to fight back.
- __m 5y agoRight out the spacex playbook. Remember when they sued the air force?
- Gwypaas 5y agoSpaceX sued for the right to compete on a sole source contact, same against Kistler which lead to COTS. Blue Origin was given about 500m to compete, then lost and is now suing even after the GAO came to the conclusion that they lost fairly.
- mlindner 5y agoSpaceX has historically only sued when they weren't allowed to compete. I can't remember them ever suing where they competed but lost.