4 ms·

By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and l

By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides. Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).

oskarkk 1y ago
Yeah, I agree with what you said about Elon's tolerance for risk and continuously betting the company on ever larger projects. I just dislike the common characterization of "billionaire space race", when one of the billionaires is a billionaire because of that "race", while for the other it's just a small side project (relatively to his wealth). But I root for Blue Origin too. Thanks to Bezos' commitment and the real work they have done, they will be flying frequently at some point, and that's good. Everything that keeps up the space boom that SpaceX started is good, from my space nerd perspective. And it wouldn't be good if SpaceX became a monopoly (if we don't consider it a monopoly already).