Hugo Hacker News

Blue Origin Sues NASA over Lunar Lander Contract Given to Rival SpaceX

irrational 2021-08-18 05:59:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Are 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 2021-08-18 07:47:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Well you can't say Blue Origin isn't acting like a traditional defense contractor here.

tehbeard 2021-08-18 05:54:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I 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 2021-08-18 05:59:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Elon 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 2021-08-18 06:35:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

While 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 2021-08-18 07:12:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Uh what ?

chalst 2021-08-18 10:11:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Taleb 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-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.

orwin 2021-08-18 11:49:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This article is really a long-winded way to say "it's not me, it's you". The first to paragrph hold no purpose, I'm not on twitter but this is exactly the pettiness level i expect.

Still, interesting article, validated my experience in the skeptic community and why i couldn't mesh well with the hard liners.

chalst 2021-08-19 14:53:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I guess that's right. I can't say I thought "interesting article", more that in writing it he condemns himself. "I can prove he's a traitor", followed by an argument that whose fundamental weakness becomes more apparent the longer it is reflected on, is not the noble exercise in patriotic duty he is trying to pass off his score settling as.

It's the curse of the social media age: people whose great virtues might in another time have led themselves to universal admiration, in the hustle of self promotion allow their ugly vices to be seen.

MarkEthan 2021-08-18 06:46:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'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-sc...

[1.2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/

sumedh 2021-08-18 13:03:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Did 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.

NiceWayToDoIT 2021-08-18 06:45:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Honestly 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 2021-08-18 06:57:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Plus 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 2021-08-18 07:11:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Musk has tesla stock too

NiceWayToDoIT 2021-08-18 07:24:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In 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.

aeternum 2021-08-18 05:32:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Bezos apparently felt very different about this just 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/bG0kT78SDn0?t=1801

It would be so great if NASA's defense/reply includes this video clip.

jvzr 2021-08-18 06:17:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The (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

King-Aaron 2021-08-18 02:19:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Bezos wants free money so badly he'll spend millions in legal costs to get it?

Rebelgecko 2021-08-18 05:16:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

He 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 2021-08-18 05:50:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Then 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 2021-08-18 05:57:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Because their solution was an absolute joke by looking at the GAO review..

bell-cot 2021-08-18 06:43:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

SpaceX'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.

TimesOldRoman 2021-08-18 03:48:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The American way.

beeboop 2021-08-19 03:27:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A million dollars to Bezos is like $1 to most of us.

__m 2021-08-18 07:00:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Right out the spacex playbook. Remember when they sued the air force?

Gwypaas 2021-08-18 09:28:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

SpaceX 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 2021-08-18 11:23:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

SpaceX has historically only sued when they weren't allowed to compete. I can't remember them ever suing where they competed but lost.

actinium226 2021-08-18 06:10:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is so ridiculous

s5300 2021-08-18 06:33:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I 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 2021-08-18 06:52:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Bezos 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.

tarey 2021-08-18 04:21:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not 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 2021-08-18 06:46:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

well spacex spent money on solar city bonds after receiving money from nasa.

tarey 2021-08-18 08:46:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Was it wasteful?

orwin 2021-08-18 12:44:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes? 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 2021-08-18 14:34:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Sorry, I meant is it wasteful like taking a rocket for a 10-minute joyride? Or are you saying Solar City is worse than that?