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What happened to New Shepard? I thought the intent was to operate a space tourism business which could be scaled up to run at a profit.
by tjpnz 2y ago
What happened to New Shepard? I thought the intent was to operate a space tourism business which could be scaled up to run at a profit.
- ramraj07 2y agoI also intend to get the nobel prize. Guess I and Bezos are in the same boat now.
- ReptileMan 2y agoYou can try the peace prize. They give it to everybody regardless of merit.
- leosanchez 2y agoKissinger was the last one awarded for merit. /s
- riffraff 2y agoThere was an old joke from a comedian about a far right politician, "he saved me from some fascist thugs once, they almost killed me but he said 'that's enough'". That's basically Kissinger's merit.
- asadotzler 2y agoI suspect with New Glenn finally up and running the tourism photo-ops-buying-time farce can come to an end, and I'll bet that's where many of these layoffs happened. Also, with New Glenn nearly ready for customers, it's time to shitcan the people who make that happen and replace them with people who can sell and deliver on launches. Why keep paying engineers when you can lay them off and hire some new ones in a few years when you're ready to consider a new rocket design.
- wongarsu 2y agoBezos competing with Branson for just-barely-space tourism was fun for a while. But the impending decommissioning of the ISS is fueling a boom in space station development. The future of space tourism is in private space stations like the one Axiom is building. Which means in the future Bezos needs something comparable to Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule, not a small suborbital pleasure craft like New Shepard.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoThe tech and infrastructure aren't anywhere near being where it needs to be yet, but it's interesting to note that Bezos is focused on O'Neill Cylinders while Musk is focused on Mars settlement. Both can benefit from there being space stations, but the dream of an O'Neill type space station seems more in line with space station development. Perhaps the two companies can have some overlap, especially when it comes to getting out of Earth's gravity well, but once in space, specialize in different frontiers.
- wongarsu 2y agoI would cheer then on if they made a competition out of this: Can Bezos make an O'Neill Cylinder first, or will Musk be faster building a sustainable Mars colony. Both seem like far-off goals that will take decades to accomplish, but for very different reasons. Kind of reminiscent of the Cold War space efforts, when the USA was focusing on Mars and the USSR on Venus, both making great accomplishments.