Biting The Hand That Feeds You In Space (Update)
Chamber of Commerce after Trump’s Amazon attacks: ‘Inappropriate’ for officials to attack an American company, The Hill
“Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says it is “inappropriate” for government officials to use their offices to criticize American companies. “It’s inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company,” Bradley told The New York Times in an article published Tuesday. Bradley’s comments came after President Trump launched a series of tweets over several days in which he accused tech giant Amazon of scamming the U.S. Postal Service and failing to collect taxes on some sales.”
The Pentagon is close to awarding a $10 billion deal to Amazon despite Trump’s tweets attacking the company, business Insider
“But behind the scenes, some Department of Defense agencies are so sure that Amazon will be awarded the contract that they are preparing for a transition to GovCloud, which is Amazon’s cloud infrastructure designed specifically for government use, according to this source. And Safra Catz, the CEO of another Amazon cloud competitor, Oracle, dined Tuesday with Trump. Oracle is competing against Amazon for the JEDI contract. Catz complained to Trump during the dinner that the Pentagon’s intent to award the contract to a single company made it difficult for anyone but Amazon to win the bidding process, according to Bloomberg.”
Keith’s note: We’ve already seen this sort of behavior from the White House intrude upon procurement for several large aerospace projects – Air Force One and F-35. It is inevitable that a space project will find itself similarly perturbed. This is not the sort of environment that should be created to encourage and support a growing space industry.
While @realDonaldTrump continues to attack @Amazon and @JeffBezos his own administration is also hoping that @BlueOrigin (fueled by Amazon profits) will be one of the companies that will commercialize many @NASA activities. You can't have it both ways. Just sayin' pic.twitter.com/NTMQYNi9JL
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 3, 2018
Trump probably hasn’t made the connection of Blue Origin to Bezo’s yet.
If so, then Trump is a [deleted]….but we already knew that….Trump is a [deleted] who was elected by [deleted] …….we are seriously screwed all around….
Who is biting whom? 😉
Self-inflicted.
Is Bezo’s really in that race though ! I mean it doesn’t seem that he is in Commercial Crew or Cargo , he might supply an engine to ULA but is that really Trumps business ?
Bezos/Blue is competing directly with SpaceX. Blue is building a huge factory right outside of NASA Kennedy Space Center..
To do what ? Launch rockets that can’t make it to Orbit ?
BO has existed for as long as SpaceX (it was actually founded a couple years before SpaceX.) Over the same time, SpaceX has developed two different orbital launchers, five versions of the second launcher, plus a triple-core variant of the second launcher. (And that’s ignoring the two suborbital test launchers which alone were an order of magnitude larger than anything BO has ever launched.)
BO has built five suborbital launchers. Not five versions. Five actual units.
SpaceX has developed more types of orbital launchers than BO has built actual suborbital test launchers. SpaceX will perform more launches this year than BO has in its entire 18 years history.
I just do not get the comparison.
Because Musk HAD to innovate or die and was always chasing money. Bezos said he wants manufacturing off world. He could literally give away 100 launches a year for new start ups to get them established in LEO. His wealth is increasing faster than Musk’s so he literally has 10 of billions he can throw in to the ring overnight ..
I keep hearing this excuse for Bezos. But at some point you have to face reality.
To me it appears that Blue Origin is being run more like a traditional aerospace company where development of a couple of liquid fueled rocket engines and a large orbital launch vehicle takes a couple of decades at “only” $1 billion per year. Their development is quite slow compared to SpaceX.
But, compared to SLS (which started with existing engines and mostly a developed five segment SRB design) it’s not doing too badly because it’s burning far less money each year. And their plans don’t look too dis-similar. SLS will only have one test flight before flying crewed and that crewed flight will have a brand new, not flight tested, upper stage. New Glenn would appear to be following a similar philosophy that the vehicle will be absolutely “perfect” on its second flight. That philosophy is a great way to drive up costs and stretch out schedules.
Makes no sense.
Sure, Bezos’ efforts are quite slow; but assigning ‘old space’ attributes as a reason just doesn’t ring true. Bezos’ Amazon example shows the guy knows how to think outside the box.
Something else.
[I’ve always thought that the first company to do what SX is doing was going to own the market, period; and that anyone else would just get the scraps. But clearly this is an incorrect assessment. Obviously Mr. Bezos sees something else on the horizon.]
Blue Origin hasn’t flown to orbit once. SpaceX flew to orbit using Falcon 1 to prove out the tech. Instead of an iterative approach, Blue Origin is pretty much expecting New Glenn’s first stage recovery to work right the very first time. The philosophy of “it’s got to work right the first time” drives up costs and stretches out schedules.
SpaceX tried parachute recovery before settling on propulsive landing. Very iterative. SpaceX also was flying in expendable mode while doing the R&D for recovery. Build a little, test a little, fly a little.
Also, Blue Origin is reportedly funded by Bezos selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year. They have burned through a lot more money than SpaceX.
Perhaps Blue Origin isn’t quite as bad as “old space”, but they’re certainly not as agile and aggressive as SpaceX.
Well, that is my point, more or less. Mr. Bezos is a very smart guy. Any inefficiency that we think we see are as illusionary as seeing mega bucks in my personal account.
The inefficiency is the amount of cash that Blue Origin has blown through without a single paying customer and without a single orbital flight. Yes they’ve proven out their small LOX/LH2 engine and proven they can do suborbital VTVL, but that’s a far cry from anything “useful”.
Even if they start flying New Glenn successfully and recover the first stage on every single flight, they’ve still blown through how many billions of dollars to get to that point? My guess is that it’s still many billions more than SpaceX did to get to that same point with Falcon 9. That’s inefficiency to me.
Not an excuse .. a fact .. Musk it was full time full bore colonize mars in his lifetime .. Bezos approaches it as part time for now ..
The pace of innovation by SpaceX has been staggering really. But even though Musk and SpaceX get recognized for the truly genius innovation that we have seen, as well as the drive and passion to move forward, I think what is often missed is the sheer amount of competence required to pull off what SpaceX has accomplished in such a short period of time.
I don’t think I know what reality looks like with $10e10 in the bank.
Vlad — yep. The one thing that excites me about BO is that very thing- realizing that we must learn to use off-site resources, and to use them off-planet.
In the long run, build space ships from asteroid materials. Only very high value items are lifted from Earth, like chips.
Bezos is much more richer and could afford to take his sweet time. Elon couldn’t.
In other words if Musk had more money he would still be at Falcon 1? Of course since it’s speculation we each have our opinions, but in my opinion if Musk had more money he would be even farther along than he is now.
I know people who work for both companies, and I watched the factory go up. They have different strategies but both appear likely to succeed. Blue hires people with a little more experience, and they don’t push them quite as hard. They don’t change design as often. But they are not wasting time, and their design, launch processing and business model are solid. As an example, they looked carefully at hydrogen, then settled on methane. They wrung out propul;sive landing thoroughly with the Shepard and built it into the Glenn from the start. The LV can carry the bigger DOD payloads while recovering the booster, without requiring a triple hull (Falcon) or strapon SRBs (Vulcan), so for the bigger DOD payloads it will beat the cost of its competitors. Once it is flying and costs are established they expect at least part of the civilian comsat market will take advantage of the extra capacity and add to their customer base, while doubling up the smaller ones as Ariane does now.
The BE-4 is a solid design also, not quite the ISP of the Russian engines but higher than the Merlin and the first US design to use oxydizer-rich staged combustion. The additonal cost of the engine is less of an issue as the booster will be recovered from the start. Methane is a good compromise, and an LH2 upper stage can be added if needed.
Blue is methodical, but they aren’t slow.
[Long post, sorry.]
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I strongly disagree. New Glenn is supposed to be flying some time after 2020. Even with no delays on New Glenn, and allowing for “Musk-time” delays for SpaceX, BFShip will be deep in SSTO testing by then, with the BFBooster under development.
How long will BO have to market a semi-reusable launcher before SpaceX can eat their lunch?
And how reliable is BO’s schedule? It’s taken them 18 years to develop a 5t suborbital hopper to the point where they are comfortable talking about starting possible human flights later this year or next year. If no disaster occurs, SpaceX will be flying people into orbit next year.
Both companies have existed for roughly the same length of time. Supposedly Bezos has poured more money into BO per year than Musk ever had. Yet SpaceX is the highest volume commercial launcher in the world, owner of the largest launcher in the world, and currently developing the largest launcher in history; while BO is occasionally flying suborbital hoppers and currently developing something to try to compete with SpaceX’s last HLV.
We simply don’t know how well BO can commercialise their technology. So any talk about price is premature.
However… there’s nothing especially expensive about FH. The boosters are stock F9 first stages, mass-produced and reusable. The core is modded, but uses stock Merlins, and is (theoretically) recoverable. And the expendable upper-stage is just a mass-produced F9 US.
NG expends it’s upperstage. It will be almost certainly be more expensive than F9, therefore won’t compete for F9-class payloads. That limits it to extra large payloads, which limits it to a small percentage of DoD and some NASA payloads. Even if they won all those payloads, there’s no economies of scale in production and operations. You have to keep your workforce employed at full cost for 1-3 launches per year. So I don’t see how it could be cheaper than FH, unless they sell it for less than its actual cost, subsidised by Bezos.
[For comparison’s sake, Musk sheepishly, seemingly embarrassed, priced the developed of FH at half a billion dollars. And he wanted to cancel it. Bezos has put the expected cost of NG development at $2.5b. I’d be stunned if NG in reusable mode can match the price of FH in fully-expendable.]
Except that SpaceX has made the same assessments and produced similarly record-setting engines. All while operated a commercial launch company.
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Look, I might be wrong about BO. They might suddenly burst into action — low cost, nimble, reliable — and eat everyone else in the market, including SpaceX. But nothing they’ve done over the last 18 years shows any signs of that.
And so, IMO, until something changes, it’s time to just stop referring to them as any kind of competitor to SpaceX.
They have some potential to one day become a competitor to ULA/Vulcan and ESA/Ariane VI. But that’s it.
We wouldnt be having this comparison were not Mr. Musk in the mix; compared to the Other Guys, Blue is a bunny rabbit for sure.
Still, it sure looks slow…
And I’d point out this: the difference between hopping around on one engine and taking tons to orbit is…well, there’s no comparison. And now SX has taken used LV AND a used capsule to ISS. This is damn impresive.
We often hear SpaceX and Blue Origin used as the subject of a sentence, as if there’s a modicum of equality. There isn’t.
How quickly we forget.
And SpaceX is in negotiations to build a second BFR factory, possibly in the same Exploration Park development as Blue. The first factory is to be on Terminal Island, Port of LA.
….
Criticism in the Washington Post “trumps” anything else related to Jeff Bezos, it seems.
I would laugh if Bezos bought twitter for 20 billion and canceled the trumpster ..
won’t that also count as “biting the hand that feeds you” ?
No that is saying “shut up” something trump routinely tells people .. and if Bezos isn’t taking government subsidies .. they are not feeding him
i meant how much twitter traffic does trump generate ? so would twitter make more advertising (I assume there’s advertising involved … I don’t use it) dollars with or without trump ? so would cancelling trump’s account improve twitter’s bottom line ?
and how much does trumps twitter rants COST america? https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Not everyone in America really cares what the world thinks… Many would be happy to return to the isolation that existed before WW II, except if we do some tin horn dictators would probably try to take it over again…
Right.
Those are the ones who never learned Modern European History.
Ever see a kid in a swimming pool standing on his head, coming up for air with “did you *see* that, Mommy”? Or the little girl in the park doing hand stands all the while shouting “but *watch* me, Dad!”
It’s the image I get when watching some of the WH pronouncements. Watch the body language, and facial expressions, as a bill is being signed (the guy admittedly has a very cool signature).
There’s an ego boost, being able to do something that nobody else in the world can do. And made all the more powerful as folks try to find the thinking behind the latest move. But there’s none to be found because there’s actually a child inside.
I wonder if trump sold amazon short .. bought puts and then tweeted
You, sir, are twisted 🙂
Zug correctly pointed out a day ago that Blue Origin isn’t at issue here. (Other than as potential collateral damage.) The stated issue is Amazon’s USPS deal, the obvious unstated one the WaPo’s ongoing strong partisan stance against this White House.
Buying the highly partisan Post was a clever lobbying move back in ’13 when it looked like Democrats would run DC indefinitely. Now, it’s a bit of an embarrassment.
Bezos could likely hang tough, but at considerable ongoing expense. Possibly including significant damage to Blue Origin’s prospects, yes.
Or he could renegotiate Amazon’s USPS deal for a nominal increase, sell the Post “to pay for this”, get out of the spotlight, and get on with ruling retail and expanding to space.
The people egging him on to continue public head-butting with this President do not have his or Amazon’s – or Blue’s – best interests at heart.
The simple fact is that the USPS is not losing money shipping for Amazon since the law requires revenue for competitive products (products like package delivery) to cover the costs for said services.
The only embarrassment happening here is to the American people, what with the inability of the President to get facts straight, let alone identify facts. Worse, the President seems to willfully meddle in the market to hurt the people he dislikes or perceives as threats. That’s a real problem.
The fact of the matter is that a mail carrier has to visit each and every mailbox just to check to see if the flag is up, indicating that there is a letter or package to be mailed. So, it’s really not much of a burden on the USPS to drop off a package at that same address since they’re going to be there anyway. Using the USPS for “the last mile” of package delivery makes a lot of sense at the macro economic level.
I don’t see that explanation working. Overhead and productivity are not one to one. You may have 100 employees in a shop doing a particular job and if you would bring in additional duties your expenses will increase. I don’t know if anyone noticed but USPS is delivering packages on Sundays now…heck they delivered a package to my house last Easter Sunday. I was shocked! Doing something just that alone is going to increase your expenses. What’s missing from the comments is someone from the gov signed that agreement. If it’s true as the Prez says, “it’s a bad deal”…well if I was in amazon’s position I would do the same thing. You can’t blame Amazon for someone in the gov agreeing to terms.
“it’s a bad deal”
Just consider the source.
Consider the time-and-motion involved. Roughly one extra back-and-forth to the truck to load any sizable package in the first place then again to deliver it to an address. Unlike normal mail packets the carrier can’t stuff dozens of packages in their satchel. It adds up over the course of a carrier’s day.
Not that it may not indeed make economic sense – but there is a substantial additional cost involved in either more carrier hours or reduced carrier routes.
Ah. The law requires it, therefore it is so? That strikes me more as impressive optimism than simple fact, but your mileage may vary.
FWIW, USPS has managed to lose multiple billions every year for over a decade now. Must be going somewhere. (I’ll save you the trouble – much of that is paying for pensions underfunded in the past. IOW, a cost of doing business.)
And as GHall points out, separating out the costs of any one facet of a complex operation like USPS is non-trivial.
But then I don’t recall expressing an opinion on the USPS’s Amazon deal in the first place. (Checks – didn’t.) I just stated a clear fact: That it’s at issue here.
So, you seem to be arguing with the President, not me. Have fun!
BTW, FYI, Presidents have been publicly jawboning private entities for a variety of reasons since shortly after there were Presidents. The current iteration arguably doesn’t even set any new lows for style – check out some of FDR’s less subtle exhortations.
No. They were required by Congress to fund pensions to a degree no other agency is required and no commercial entity does. That put them under unnecessary financial pressure, and it wasn’t an accident.
At the time this issue blew up, USPS was actually overfunding their pension funds, according to Generally Accepted Accounting Practice.
GAAP and industry standard practice is 80% of future liabilities. According to the IOG, government agencies are typically around 40%, DoD is less than 30%.
At the time, USPS was at 91%. Putting it $42 billion ahead of where it needed to be to cover future costs, and was heading towards a $140 billion surplus if they didn’t reduce funding.
The Bush administration blocked their request to reduce program funding to correct levels, and instead Congress introduced legislation written by the notorious ALEC lobby group requiring that USPS fund 100% of liabilities calculated 75 years ahead, but which were required to be funded within ten years.
Then Congress added a new requirement (again written by ALEC) that the USPS create a new health fund, then (over)-estimated the projected costs of that fund over 75yrs, then required USPS to again fund the entire 75yr future cost of the program within the same ten years.
That was USPS’ supposed “$100 billion unfunded liabilities”. A complete fiction invented by a business lobby group who were apparently scheming to privatise USPS, and wanted a $200b cash bonus for doing so.
Whether the USPS is overfunding or everyone else is underfunding pension plans matters here, why? We circle right back to, all I said was that Amazon’s USPS deal is at issue here, and some of the collateral damage of the brawl if it isn’t settled quickly may be space-related.
I wonder, is there a uspswatch website out there? Maybe you should consider starting one – you’re obviously both informed and passionate…
Because what you said…
“FWIW, USPS has managed to lose multiple billions every year for over a decade now. Must be going somewhere. (I’ll save you the trouble – much of that is paying for pensions underfunded in the past. IOW, a cost of doing business.)”
…is wrong. But it so precisely matches a lie created by others that it’s obvious that you are merely repeating what you’ve been told. And I would think that you would want to know that someone deliberately misled you. At the very least, to stop trusting that person or group. And maybe even encourage you to take a look at some other things that person or group has told you that probably also aren’t true.
For example, the current claims about the Amazon deal. Maybe it’s not a bad deal for the USPS, maybe it’s a very very good deal, and that’s why there’s a concerted effort to undermine it by the same kind of people who tried to bankrupt the USPS in the 2000’s. So if they lied to you then, wouldn’t you want to know now?
Is that not a reasonable expectation? That someone would want to know that they’ve been lied to?
If not — which now seems to be the case — if it doesn’t bother you that you’ve been lied to, then perhaps you don’t care if you lie to others, you just throw these regurgitated lines out there to try to win arguments regardless of whether anything you say is true, and in that case, I would think that other readers would be interested to know that about you.
“Buying the highly partisan Post was a clever lobbying move back in ’13 when it looked like Democrats would run DC indefinitely. Now, it’s a bit of an embarrassment.”
Then you know absolutely nothing about why Bezos bought it which means you really do not have an informed opinion…
Ah. I can but admire such passionate intensity. Mr. Bezos has shared his full list of true reasons with you? Then enlighten us, do!
Seriously, I don’t see where I said anything about the lobbying aspects being the only, or even the primary reason for the purchase. Highly intelligent people tend to do things for a complex mix of reasons. Are you saying Mr. Bezos did NOT at all factor the DC political influence aspect into his WaPo purchase decision?
As I said .. an uniformed opinion ..
And when the content declines to 100% ad hominem – not even new ad hominem, repeated – the thread’s dead, Jim.
Which is too bad. There are useful points about the political environment for space to be learned from all this.
One lesson to take to heart: On the national stage, space is a minor issue. At best, on a good day, secondary. If you seriously want to do useful space, you should go out of your way not to tie it to the current partisan knife-fighting. Getting either side’s hard core actively opposing your favorite space projects would not turn out well.
Good luck!
Why a billionaire with major govt. contracts, and who is bidding for more, bough a major paper in DC isn’t exactly rocket science. It isn’t even 5th grade level civics. Plain as the nose on Pinocchio’s face.
Who is holding who’s tail here? There is a pending RFP for DoD cloud services worth $billions and until recently it appeared Amazon was going to take it – sole vendor. With Trump clearly upset with Amazon/Bezos/WaPo, in some cases quite justifyably, DoD could decide not to award it to a sole vendor and Bezos loses more long term than he’ll gain from a decade of launch services. Trump could also move to increase the rate USPS charges Amazon for package delivery.
I don’t understand the Blue Origin hatred here. It is good competition for SpaceX. I am not entirely sure if Musk would be developing BFR so rapidly were it not for New Glenn.
BO is approached differently. While SpaceX is run like a traditional company, needing to make profits to put back into R&D, BO is a side hobby for Bezo. Bezo can well afford to put a billion dollars a year into BO until BO has their orbital launchers developed and working.
I don’t think anyone here is against Blue Origin, just not willing to see them as equal with SpaceX. In some ways they are equal, two outsiders shaking up the launch industry and doing things that many said were impossible, which is why I think everyone here is rooting for BO. It’s just that so far only one company has been doing a lot of shaking.
Taking your time is nice if you can afford it, but it’s a risky way to operate in a fast changing environment. There were several very well designed airliners in the 1940’s and 1950’s that were out of date by the time they went into production, the market had moved on. I’m pretty sure no one here wants to see that happen to Blue Origin.
And that’s the part that annoys me. This idea that BO is a “SpaceX rival”. They aren’t. They are essentially competing with Virgin, and later, if NG flies on time, with ULA/Ariane/etc. They aren’t in the same game as SpaceX.
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The weird thing is, when it comes to long term “vision”, I’m wildly opposed to Musk’s Mars fantasy. Whereas Bezos’ idea of the industrialisation of space is the focus I think everyone needs to have, if we ever want humanity to spread off-Earth.
But the path that Musk is taking to Mars is the correct path to the rest of the solar system. And the steps he takes along that path, fast iterative development, test as you fly, experiment on hardware after its primary mission, is brilliant. (Currently they are burning up Block 3 & 4 F9s, to clear the decks for Block 5, by re-entering them more and more harshly. Testing the limits of reusability by testing to destruction. Who else does that in aerospace? Test articles are usually bespoke, expensively built for purpose.)
IMO, Bezos should have spent his money on developing the hardware for space exploitation, not another launcher. Obviously he couldn’t have know that when he founded Blue Origin (two years before SpaceX was founded), but he had no such excuse when he proposed New Glenn. A much more sensible plan for BO would be to spend that $2.5 billion (according to Bezos) on developing systems to exploit lunar and asteroid resources and hire SpaceX for launch; F9 for orbital testing, FH for BEO tests, aiming the scale to be compatible for BFR for landing production hardware.
I wonder about a private company making the government’s cloud storage system. I wonder … what if they could/would build a back-door into it ? And how hack-able is it ?? … just wondering
Programers love their back doors ..
AIUI, classified material travels on a stand-alone network. This is for the system the DoD uses to interact with civilian service contractors. Many contractors were already using Amazon’s cloud services for much of their paperwork/reporting burden, but the DoD has old legacy systems that they have to deal with that require traditional connections. (We’ve all seen those kinds of systems, built once and maintained forever.) The JEDI contract with Amazon was about migrating those applications to the same system that the civilian contractors have pretty much already standardised on. (Just as they previously did for the CIA.)
You can’t have it both ways.
Regardless of everything else connected to this matter, Keith, I see this statement as inherently false because it presumes a false either/or choice over the ethics involved.
It is perfectly possible for some entity (say, a super-rich person) to own multiple companies or institutions. If one of those companies is doing something unethical (or at least inappropriate against a given scale) in its operations while another company owned by the same person is operating appropriately, why would it not be acceptable to criticize the inappropriate behavior of the former company while praising the appropriate behavior of the latter?
To claim it has to be either/or as you do with this statement suggests that if you need something or strongly desire something from somebody who conducts themselves somewhere in their affairs in a way you disagree with, your only choice is to look the other way regarding the ethics and take the product or to not take the product at all.
Such is not your only choice.
So when Obama regularly ripped Fox News it was okay. When Trump regularly rips Washington Post it is unprecedented and wrong. My side does it good. Other side does it, bad for democracy. At least now I understand it.
This would be an example of what many call “false equivelency”.
Yes, Obama sometimes criticizing Fox News is okay compared to Trump attacking the media as the ‘enemy of the people’. The Washington Post occasionally (even often) reveals it’s pro-establishment, pro-Pentagon bias. Fox News is a flat out propaganda outlet that doesn’t even come close to meeting the low, low bar of journalism set by the rest of the media.