Bezos Offers To Cover $2 Billion In NASA Costs In Exchange For Astronaut Lunar Lander Contract (cnbc.com) 195
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on Monday offered to cover billions of dollars of NASA costs in exchange for a contract to build a lunar lander to land astronauts on the moon. CNBC reports: Bezos said Blue Origin would waive all payments up to $2 billion from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the current and next two government fiscal years. Blue Origin would also fund its own pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit, according to Bezos. In return, the company requested a fixed-priced contract from the government agency. "This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up," Bezos said in an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
NASA in April awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with a sole $2.89 billion contract to build the next crewed lunar lander under its Human Landing Systems program. Before selecting the winner of the contest, NASA gave 10-month study contracts to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers. "Instead of this single source approach, NASA should embrace its original strategy of competition," Bezos said. "Without competition, a short time into the contract, NASA will find itself with limited options as it attempts to negotiate missed deadlines, design changes, and cost overruns."
NASA in April awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with a sole $2.89 billion contract to build the next crewed lunar lander under its Human Landing Systems program. Before selecting the winner of the contest, NASA gave 10-month study contracts to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers. "Instead of this single source approach, NASA should embrace its original strategy of competition," Bezos said. "Without competition, a short time into the contract, NASA will find itself with limited options as it attempts to negotiate missed deadlines, design changes, and cost overruns."
Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem with trying to bribe NASA with a scheme like this is that it reeks of desperation after SpaceX won the bid with better technology. SpaceX will make a profit with a cheaper solution - this is a better deal than a one time discount. Moon tested is a big deal. Maybe if Bezos put his $2B discount deal first, he might have had a shot.
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Funny)
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Elon Musk isn't an engineer.
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His father may have been well off but Elon certainly didn't grow up rich.
Makes no sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahm, he is seeing success because he started out rich and is a fantastic hype man
How many other "hype men" have multiple rockets going into real space, and landing back on earth upright over the course of years now?
How many other "hype men" have viable and thriving electric car companies?
It's a testament to your all-consuming hated of Musk that you claim someone who has delivered so much real stuff, against very long odds, is nothing more than a "hype man"... plainly he is something much more, whatever you want to call it.
You are exactly the kind of person who would claim the moon landing was faked because you din't want to believe someone you didn't like could have accomplished it.
Re: Makes no sense (Score:3)
I think his argument is something to the effect of Musk just being a salesman, and that really it was the employees who did all of the work. Spending billions of his own money and 120+ hours a week for years (and counting) on keeping the companies both relevant and solvent and convincing many others to do the same counts for nothing at all, and really this all would have happened anyways workout Musk, because engineers have a tendency of spontaneously forming their own companies and securing enough capital
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Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Informative)
Nada went single vendor as congress underfunded the whole shebang and nasa went with a single complete possible solution from company with space experience and rocket experience vs blue origin which has neither.
Despite his recent space trip blue origin hadn't put anything into orbit let alone beyond and is at least 5-10 years away from doing so. Blue origin is rife with internal conflicts and blame game personal. And that is all bezos fault.
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:2)
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:3)
Don't Like Bezos But He Has Degreee in Engineering (Score:2)
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Elon musk is not the engineer you think Elon Musk is either.
Seriously, these guys aren't in the lab in white coats mixing beakers and inventing future rockets. They are lurching around in HQ interacting with excel spreadsheets and freaking out about stock price fluctuations.
Neither Musk nor Bezos invent anything. They hire engineers. And the engineers invent things. Thats kind of the central skill of the business class, they know how to delegate *everything*. But all the a
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:2)
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Does that make him an engineer?
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What is the qualification to be an engineer then?
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather like a medical doctor, calling yourself an engineer in a professional setting is illegal without an engineering license in good standing. And for similar reason - it's a profession where lives routinely depend on your competence in an extremely complex field.
Getting such a license in the USA requires a minimum of a 4-year engineering degree, working under a professional engineer for four years, passing two intensive competency exams, and earning a license from your state's licensure board.
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Nope. Just as anyone with a Ph.D. can call themselves a doctor, there are lots of sales engineers, systems engineers, railroad engineers, etc. who are unlicensed. Generically, "Professional Engineers" need to be licensed, but exactly what that means and how it applies to specific practices is defined by the individual states. You can't call yourself an "MD" or
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Informative)
Rather like a medical doctor, calling yourself an engineer in a professional setting is illegal without an engineering license in good standing. And for similar reason - it's a profession where lives routinely depend on your competence in an extremely complex field.
Getting such a license in the USA requires a minimum of a 4-year engineering degree, working under a professional engineer for four years, passing two intensive competency exams, and earning a license from your state's licensure board.
Those are the requirements to call yourself a Professional Engineer, but not to call yourself an engineer. The PE accreditation allows you to do things that engineers (lower-case 'e') can't do (like filing construction plans), and it also gives people who don't know you the knowledge that you have a certain level of knowledge and ethics. The PE exam requirements are somewhat different from state to state, and only licensed PEs are allowed to call themselves PEs.
It's explained pretty well here [nspe.org].
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Insightful)
A highly autistic answer.
I hope some day you stop using that as an insult.
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Where I live "engineer" is a professional designation and if you call yourself an engineer without being a PEng you might go to jail.
Some words mean things even more than others.
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Apparently it's a BA.
I have no idea what a BA in Physics is.
Re:Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX has also gotten better at playing the "game" of government bids. As much as NASA wanted two contractors they just did not receive the budget from Congress. Seems like SX knew this and made their bid very cheap in comparison knowing how much NASA loves their old school contractors. If cost was equal I imagine SpaceX would have lost the bid.
It's an easy play for them though since they building Starship regardless so they win with getting the partnership even if HLS costs them more than their bid price.
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"SpaceX has also gotten better at playing the "game" of government bids."
Being a couple of hundred million cheaper is usually enough.
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:2)
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Not only were they several billions cheaper, but one of the other bids had negative mass margin (aka it was too heavy to fly even with zero cargo), and the other ignored important requirements such as "you will not get paid first" and "you will not exclusively own the IP you create". Oh, and they were going to wait to figure out if their design would work after building it.
That SpaceX were well underway in building the main-line version of the rocket they were bidding with, and it could also carry 100 tons
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It's an easy play for them though since they building Starship regardless so they win with getting the partnership even if HLS costs them more than their bid price.
The real win is that they help Starship move along for the day when even Congress can no longer justify SLS.
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Bidding a few billion dollars cheaper than your competition because you have superior technology isn't a "game."
Having to bid cheaper because your competitors have longstanding bribes in place is.
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Coming in way cheaper, and much bigger is a huge factor in them winning. the size comparison's between the landers is pretty stunning.
https://everydayastronaut.com/... [everydayastronaut.com]
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Yeah, SpaceX's proposal wasn't remotely comparable to the others. If they weren't already launching the thing you could criticize their bid as being fantasy. But they are launching the thing, and in a situation that's a lot harder than the moon.
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The justification is basically that Blue Origin and other alternatives are simply too far behind SpaceX
I thought the justification was that they couldn't afford either of the two non-SpaceX options, even if either of them were to be the sole winner?
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To be fair NASA did want to have two contracts running but didn't have the budget. They requested about $3.5bn and for $800m.
If it were not for the budget issue then Blue Origin would quite likely have got a contract. They are partnered with some other big industry players.
Yes, that's true. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the project is badly underfunded by the government and doing things cheaply usually means doing things badly.
If you want the lander done right, you can't cut corners. This is not to say Musk would (although he has a track record of it), only that you simply can't risk the lives of astronauts by gambling on one solution
This whole ethos of awarding contracts by price and not quality is WHY so many complex government projects are a disaster. That's exactly how not to do it.
Re: Yes, that's true. (Score:5, Insightful)
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My favorite big dig story was the contractor that would have trucks collect truckloads of new steel, then drive it directly to the scrapyard to sell.
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I think the key is to purchase enough legislators that the primary purpose of the contract is to get you paid, with actual results being a distant second.
In a sane world "cost plus" contracts would be very rare - there may need to be some allowances for unexpected difficulties, but it seems to me a project should have frequent cost milestones, and if you begin getting significantly over budget without evidence of major unforeseeable difficulties, you lose the job due to your obvious incompetence and someone
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Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:2)
Re: Bezoa hates losing (Score:2)
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Rather than trying to catch up to SpaceX in general spacefaring, why not try to refine New Shepard into a premium terrestrial delivery option for Amazon? The market of wealthy suborbital space tourists is rather small and intended purely as a corporate steppingstone, but a capsule crammed with fast-expiring pharmaceuticals that must make it across the country or to a plague spot un the developing world in minutes could be delivered for a much more reasonable price per kg.
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A fully operational New Shepard is intended to be used with a larger booster than the well-tested suborbital one used for this flight. The older booster has a smaller diameter than the capsule, hence the phallic appearance of the stack. The larger booster would support orbital or fractional-orbit delivery to anywhere in the world.
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IIRC, even dropping their bid by 2 billion still wouldn't have gotten them down to SpaceX.
Bezos is just asking for trouble. Even if they got a contract they'd still end up with an expensive lander that's very likely to be obsoleted on delivery by SpaceX.
good grief (Score:5, Funny)
whiner (Score:5, Insightful)
You lost, get over it, do it yourself & prove us wrong. Whiner.
Re:whiner (Score:5, Informative)
Just want to point out how bad of a rocket Bezos has.
That manned flight reached 2,233 MPH and an altitude of 66 miles. At that altitude, air drag is so significant that an object can't complete 1 orbit which requires about 93 miles and it's only about 13% of orbital velocity. It's closer to a wingless jet than an orbital vehicle with performance characteristics close to the 1963 test flights of the X-15.
Re: whiner (Score:2)
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That is not the rocket they are bidding. They are bidding the late and unfinished New Glen. Which on paper is a nice rocket but has not flown.
I don't believe Blue Moon requires New Glenn to be operational. It can be launched by several Atlas V or Vulcan rockets and assembled in orbit, or one SLS launch--though a spare SLS is far less likely than NG being operational.
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It still doesn't demonstrate the same level of experience. On the one hand, you've got a company with 123 successful orbital launches, 3 of them crewed flights. On the other hand, you've got a company with 0 successful orbital launches, 0 of them crewed flights. That's quite the disparity in track record.
The experience in building and flying orbital-class crewed vehicles is probably more important in this context, I'd imagine.
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Just want to point out how bad of a rocket Bezos has.
And yet there's many good things to say about it as well, such as the fuel mix used being significantly greener than any of the competition. The reality is every different product / service has upsides and downsides and every point needs to be weighed against the requirements you're intending to fulfill.
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How do you figure that? Both New Glenn and Starship are methane+oxygen. And when you're talking about burning hundreds of tons of fuel and oxidizer, can you really call it green?
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Yeah, but he did make Dr. Evil's rocket - it's got to count for something when all those people get to say "why, that looks like a giant..."
https://www.moviequotedb.com/m... [moviequotedb.com]
But yeah, I've got to agree - the way to "win" here is to actually do stuff - that's how SpaceX seems to be doing it, so IMHO, Bezos needs to do the same. If he can get his giant wang to high orbit, or perhaps to fling a probe into lunar orbit then he's back in with a chance (at which point, I'd imagine NASA would love to receive an offe
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It's not a bad rocket. It's a second stage that they happen to be also testing as a suborbital rocket for tourists. It's basically a smaller version of Starship.
The problem is, they don't have any meaningful progress on building the first stage.
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Just a small - but significant - correction:
SpaceX has been going to LEO for almost 13 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
First successful orbit was on 28th September 2008.
Blue Origin engine dev is interesting, but there are no orbital launch system tests that I am aware of going on. So it does seem like whining about a competitor who is very very far ahead.
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Do you need to orbit to reach the Moon? I think it's actually just a direct upward acceleration.
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Attaining orbit requires less thrust than getting past orbit. You need to go faster to escape the Earth's gravity well than to just run around at the edge.
Yes, orbits are used (were used, Apollo 11) to build up velocity to get to the moon. It isn't a "straight shot", unless you have unlimited thrust. See: https://i.imgur.com/EDifGGX.jpg [imgur.com]
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Depends on the mission profile.
Apollo used an earth orbit to line up for the boost to the moon.
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Astronavigation is a little more complex than "point it that way and hammer the throttle".
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To be fair, it depends on how much throttle you have.
Re:whiner (Score:5, Insightful)
You lost, get over it, do it yourself & prove us wrong. Whiner.
Yeah, I actually feel his desperation around losing the moon project a bit concerning. Why doesn't he just focus on getting New Glenn into orbit using that money? Once New Glenn is flying I have no doubt NASA will be showering him with contracts, if only to ensure they do not become dependent on SpaceX. My guess is that New Glenn is having problems.
It appears that the first launch is now pushed out to 'late 2022' which probably means late 2023 before it is ready for commercial payloads, and even later before it is human rated. Even using Musk time for Starship, it really looks like the welded tin can is going to be in orbit before Bezos is even on the launch pad. The combination of Starship to lob cheap mass into orbit and Falcon to shuttle humans is going to leave New Glenn is an awkward commercial place.
I'm not a fan of Bezos, but it would be really great if there was a decent competitor to SpaceX. Imagine if Bezos was actually chomping at Musk's heals around getting a payload to Mars. We would be seeing even more impressive progress than we are now.
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Yeah, I actually feel his desperation around losing the moon project a bit concerning.
Well he is a comparatively new entry into the space market and waving cash incentives around is not only not unheard of, but actually common for any kind of product / service.
How is this different from Spotify's 1st month free? Spending money to establish yourself in a market is quite normal.
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Yeah, I actually feel his desperation around losing the moon project a bit concerning.
Well he is a comparatively new entry into the space market and waving cash incentives around is not only not unheard of, but actually common for any kind of product / service.
How is this different from Spotify's 1st month free? Spending money to establish yourself in a market is quite normal.
The market is never going to be that big unless the prices are much lower, so what good is establishing oneself? Only one of the three proposals has the possibility of dramatically reducing the overall cost of lunar exploration.
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Yeah, I actually feel his desperation around losing the moon project a bit concerning. Why doesn't he just focus on getting New Glenn into orbit using that money?
This has been my biggest gripe with BO... get your engine working, get your rocket in orbit. What is the holdup? SpaceX's next gen engine, Raptor, isn't even finalized and they just celebrated number 100 [twitter.com] rolling off the line. Eric Berger, the spaceflight editor for Ars, shared that unofficially he's heard that Blue Origin have only made 9 BE-4s. [twitter.com] Suborbital space tourism is cool, and having a small hydrolox engine will be great for an energetic upper stage, but what good is that if you're not putting things
Given it'll probably cost 100x that.. (Score:5, Interesting)
... its hardly the magnanimous financial sacrifice from Bezos that it sounds. This guy didn't become the worlds richest man by making bad business deals.
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No he did by sinking costs into breaking into markets he wouldn't otherwise be able to without such loses. It's proven to in general be a very sound idea. I personally think NASA should consider it if no strings are attached. If the cost is the biggest issue, there is no reason NASA shouldn't see how successful Bezos can be at providing a similar lander -- competition is good.
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Capitalism bitches. If you don't like the idea of free market capitalism lets become socialists. I mean I am not even joking. What Bezos do is more than fair and as you point to, sound business. The fact that we find it morally questionable when business ethics is a laughable oxymoron, should persuade us that we need to approach corporate business practices differently or simply submit that Bezos is good at the rules of the game we foster as being "superior" in economics.
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To suggest that capitalism can and must work without any sort of regulation and rules is uneducated and thoughtless at best - literally every functioning state has some sort of regulation of business practices. I guess that means we're all living under socialist state - talk about redefining words ;)
You know that there are all sort of laws, for reasons ranging from economic to environmental, that corporate business entities have always fought against (and often with this very same "logic" that they should n
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Free market capitalism requires enough competition that no single buyer or seller can significantly affect prices. It has never existed in the real world outside (arguably) some of the most diversified and interchangeable of commodity goods. Corn and wheat for example - at least before corporate consolidation concentrated the majority of production into the hands of a handful of umbrella corporations.
Capitalism of most any shade is also completely amoral (unless you believe there's an inherent (im)moralit
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It's proven to in general be a very sound idea.
It's proven to be a sound idea for a huge corporate entity wanting to dominate a business niche, sure. For the other businesses in that niche, not to mention the consumers, it's usually not that great.
I love the irony... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of Jeff Bezos arguing the importance of competition.
There's nothing anti-competitive about this. Offering cash incentives to enter into an established product is normal across any market and any industry. Hell ever wonder why Youtube-TV offers you the first 14 day free trial, but Comcast doesn't?
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It's normal, yes, but it's also considered to be illegal price dumping when it's used to establish or maintain a monopoly. If you have two competing businesses, let's just say they sell widgets, and one business offers a coupon for a discount on widgets, that's pretty normal. When a massive conglomerate comes along and decides they're going to take over the widget industry and drive those other widget sellers out of business and starts selling higher quality widgets at way below cost, there's no way the oth
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small change (Score:2)
Offering up his unpaid avoidance taxes - Bravo (Score:5, Funny)
Nice to see Bezos indirectly offering to pay taxes for once. :P
Fermi Paradox explained! (Score:3)
All civilizations advance until ego and money prevent them from reaching the stars.
A lander, sure, but ... (Score:5, Funny)
Notice there's no Prime delivery offered on getting that lander to the Moon ...
Bezos will fire at least 10% of his best engineers (Score:2, Funny)
because his messed up AI bots with their botched algorithms tell him so.
Pretty sure this is illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
How would this not be considered a quid-pro-quo bribe? Last I checked, Trump is no longer POTUS so offering gifts in exchange for government contracts is frowned upon again.
=Smidge=
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They prefer to call it "lobbying".
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How would this not be considered a quid-pro-quo bribe?
There's a difference between a quid-pro-quo bribe and offering a discount for a service being asked.
If NASA didn't competitively bid, then reached out to Bezos and offered that he'd get the contract if he handed over $2bn, then you may be on to something.
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On the other hand, when someone pretty much directly says: "I'll take a loss on this contract just to starve out the competition" it can be a bit problematic. It happens all the time with smaller businesses, of course, and many people are quite happy to take those contracts. When it's the government giving out the contract though, this sort of thing seems like it could be problematic.
Maybe he can self-fund (Score:5, Insightful)
in lieu of paying taxes.
Remember your weapon was made by the lowest bidder (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmmm (Score:2)
First Bezos asked for $10 Billion (Score:5, Informative)
US senator proposes $10BN for NASA to include Bezos’s Blue Origin [geekwire.com]
It's so nice to own a member of Congress, even if sometimes it doesn't pay off. The senator in opposition was Bernie Sanders.
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Grade school math... (Score:2)
Bezos 10 Billion.
If Bezos gives you a 2 Billion discount who still costs more?
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Hey call it by the proper term, lobbying.
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Yeah, the spelling correction is a bitch on my computer, too.
Somehow words with many b's are confusing it.
Bribing -> Lobbying.
Not sure why that goes that direction all the time :( Probably because I'm on a Mac?