Yes, I always get annoyed at the comparisons between Musk and Bezos, let alone by either of them with Branson, who has wasted vast amounts of other peoples’ money with not much to show for it or any hope of getting much of it back.
[Tuesday-morning update]
I’m finally getting around to reading the whole thing. I found this amusing: “In the future, Virgin Galactic aims to use its advanced technologies to manufacture aircraft capable of high-speed point-to-point travel. High-speed aircraft are capable of traveling faster than the speed of sound. A significant market opportunity exists for vehicles with this capability, as they could drastically reduce international travel times.”
What “advanced technologies”?
All three are doing sub-orbital.
To do sub-orbital you need a reusable rocket and part of reusable could be using mothership- or something
else, which none them are doing.
But if and when SpaceX does it’s test launch [with some success] it should be in lead in regards to sub-orbital.
SpaceX is not doing suborbital.
They do a LOT of sub-orbital. They just happen to release an orbital upper stage near apogee almost every time…
But seriously, yes, you are right, they don’t do suborbital business.
Not yet anyway….
Not for Military?
What “advanced technologies”?
Partnering with Stratolaunch? Oh wait. No, maybe, maybe…
Maybe they’ve reached a secret deal with Reaction Engines?
Why do suborbital if you can reach orbit cheaply and routinely?
Branson’s outfits are going nowhere.
Bezos has a cute reusable sounding rocket and lots of hot air.
Only Musk has what it takes.
I’ve just finished reading “First to Fly”by James Tobin (the unlikely triumph of the Wright Brothers). Seems Musk wasn’t the first with the “think about things, build hardware, test it, if it breaks fix and fly again” approach.
Bezos reminds of the Wrights in the 1905 -1911 period when instead of building and flying better aircraft, they litigated against rivals.
They also wasted a lot of effort and time trying to develop their own engines. Glenn Curtis first approached them because he had been racing motorcycles and had experience with small powerful engines. There’s a reason it’s ended up as Curtis Wright, not Wright Curtis.
Notice that when Musk needs a way to move his launchers around, he buys or leases cranes and movers from people that have been building them for decades, NASA spends decades and billions building their own.
Bezos “gets” the top-level requirement for economical delivery of any kind, far better than anyone else in the space industry except for Elon. However, his approach seems to rely heavily on the people who dd development on the NASA model. Similarly, his drone delivery aspirations have been proceeding in slavish obedience to FAA bureaucracy. Why, I don’t know. Is it that he’s a statist at heart, and thinks that his lavish support of Democrat deep state will buy him favors? It seems so. He has never fought FAA, but been obsequious to all of it – including AST, where I was Chief Engineer for ten years. Elon always challenged AST, and he was right to do so. He’s gotten further than anyone else, and there’s a reason.
Meanwhile, Amazon is getting close to drone delivery in the US, after many, many years of kowtowing to FAA edicts that I think are simply illegal. There are people who are
doing drone delivery, very effectively and innovatively (both technically and business-wise).
They are doing it in Rwanda. Rwanda has a drone delivery infrastructure, and the United States of America does not, despite the world’s second richest man trying to establish one. It isn’t Bezos’ fault, other than his agreeing to fetch every rock the FAA orders him to. His approach to space is no different. In a talk he gave I attended, he gave me some insight. He said that Amazon’s success came from his availing himself of existing delivery infrastructure (e.g. FedEx, UPS, USPS), and not trying to replicate it. But he has built his own surface delivery system now, and thinks that he can do the same in the aerospace realm. He’s wrong.
You commented that “ However, his [Bezos] approach seems to rely heavily on the people who dd development on the NASA model.”
Mike, around the time that Blue was starting I heard that a certain person was one of their primary advisers. I spoke to someone in the nascent organization I think and possibly also to this person. Because my impression was that he was exactly what you describe: someone who used the NASA model.
I am amazed that apparently they continued to follow the format this guy came from, apparently slavishly. I thought that it was going to be trouble and I guess it really was.
VG’s “advanced” technology has hybrid motors (with the drawbacks of both liquids and solids and the benefits of neither) and “carefree reentry” which gives them zero experience with lifting reentry required for boost-glide.
So they actually have *regressed* technology.
I feel compelled to mention the British Skylon with the air-breathing SABRE engine, since you probably haven’t been getting updates in a while. They’re still testing coolant loop performance.
They’ve been testing various parts of the coolant loop -and other things – for 25+ years.
They were doing so around – oh, 2009?- when I visited them.
Their system embodies the polar opposite of Elon’s maxim that “the best part is the one that isn’t there.”
Rand, certain writers feel compelled to breeze their way through their articles by setting up “straw men.” (straw persons?). Anyway, as long as they don’t understand (or do understand and blithely choose to ignore) the actual evidence and history, they can fit their story into a well-oiled standard plot.
For those who get the references, Bezos’s space projects are related to space progress as his ROP show is to the LOTR film trilogy, let alone the books (hobby time?).
The real space race is not between these billionaires, but between well-funded startups that have found other space market niches to complement their reusable launchers they’re developing. Rocket Lab is developing Neutron but also low cost, mass produced satellite buses; Relativity is developing Terran R but is really a large scale 3D printing company that also builds rockets; Firefly is developing Beta and the Antares 300 but is also developing a Space Utility Vehicle and low cost lunar landers.
If even one of these turns out to be successful, we’ll all be the better for it. Even better if they all do!
Richard I have a slightly different take on this. I think the real space race is between the innovators and start-ups vs the regulators that want to put them out of business before they can “hurt” anyone on the ground, including the “environment”.
I do not disagree, David, but I would characterize that as a second, distinct space race that is going on at the same time!
MCS, Charles Manly’s engine for the Langley “aerodrome” was also vastly superior to the Wright engine. 200 pounds for 50 hp. The Wrights IIRC had 200 pounds for 12 hp.
However the Wrights did solve the 3 axis aerodynamic control problem and were first to do so.
What seems a little amazing is that aerodynamics is a classical physics problem and the lift and drag equation should have been well known before the Wrights. They and Lilienthal before them were groping in the dark. The whole thing should have been amenable to analysis including the control and stability problem, the latter of which the Wrights decidedly did NOT solve.
It didn’t help that hydrodynamics seemed to be an entirely empirical science, i.e. no good theory of propellers which had been used on boats for quite a while.
My point was that the Wrights did solve, up to a point, the problem of flight. They essentially invented the wind tunnel and were the first to systematically measure lift and drag as well as air screws. They were the first to realize that they had to use the wings to generate the force necessary to turn rather than just turning a vertical rudder. Their first plane achieved controlled flight at around 15 miles and hour.
What they weren’t were engine developers. Nearly no one else was either and most of the engines available were very heavy, slow and low power stationary engines. That they managed to build the engine in their first flyer was little short of a miracle. The five years of obscurity after their initial flight didn’t help the commercialization of their invention. They desperately needed a better engine than they could build while they worked on the rest of the plane, instead they tried to do both and wasted five years while the world moved on. This was where Curtis might have made a difference
Wilbur’s wing warping was probably the only way to control roll at the speeds and with the power they had available in 1903. Ailerons would have created too much drag. But wing warping didn’t scale to larger, faster and more powerful planes that needed stronger, hence, much more rigid wings but had the power to afford more drag. It was a dead end but it was the Wright’s great invention and the basis of the great Wright-Curtis feud.
In the end, an example of an inventor fixating on the wrong part of an idea. It wasn’t the warping that was important, it was the roll and Curtis saw that ailerons were a much better and simpler way to do that.