[caiobegotti]

"If Kuiper succeeds [...]"

That's the biggest if clause you will ever see about this because in order for it to succeed at all BO needs to actually launch something to orbit at least once before we talk about success of a commercial product on top of their rockets.

I follow up SpaceX quite closely, I admit, but any news about products that absolutely depend on the launch capability of BO is vaporware at most and most probably a PR stunt so they look relevant. They need to deliver something, anything, it's that simple.

[shantara]

> ...BO needs to actually launch something to orbit...

And they need start launching soon. FCC rules give Amazon until 2026 to launch and start operating at least 50% of the licensed number of satellites - 1618 satellites - or risk their satellite constellation license annulled.

To put this timeframe in context, Blue Origin was founded in 2000 and has yet to achieve a single orbital flight.

[zie]

If we assume:

* BO rocket 2x the cargo size * Satellites same size/weight as starlink

120 sats per launch(vs F9's 60). If they have to launch 1618 by 2026, that means they need 14 launches in 6 years.

If they only need 1/2 the 1618, they need 7 launches in 6 years.

So I think 7 launches(840 sats) it's still in the realm of possibility, but they have to execute everything pretty much flawlessly to make it happen. They can't afford to have many things go wrong.

Getting 14 launches done in 6 years would be very ambitious. Unless they are way way further along than they have told the public, this is probably just wishful thinking.

[someperson]

Amazon's obligation to "launch at least half of the total by 2026 to retain the operating license the FCC has granted the company" is designed to stop squatting on the license without delivering service, and it's with the US government NOT the International Telecommunication Union.

If Amazon has shown at least some launches done in good faith, expect the FCC to be VERY lenient if Amazon don't meet their goal of launching 1618 out of 3236 satellites.

Though if in the year 2026 Amazon has missed their target by a significant amount, expect SpaceX to sue to try to get the spectrum partially re-allocated so they can leverage it for their (likely already fully operational) Starlink service.

[zie]

I agree with what you say here. If they are pretty close, I don't think anyone will care much, though perhaps a lawsuit or two by competitors to give their lawyers something to do wouldn't be unfounded :)

But if they are way off, if they only launch 120 sats, instead of the 1,618 they need to launch, I expect even the FCC would rake them over the coals some. If SpaceX is the only provider that met their timeline with the FCC(which seems more and more likely as time goes by that they will be the only one), they will still probably be lenient, but I imagine they will get a stern talking to, about hurrying up!

[dragonwriter]

> If Amazon has shown at least some launches done in good faith, expect the FCC to be VERY lenient if Amazon don't meet their goal of launching 1618 out of 3236 satellites.

That...depends. The FCC has been rather politicized recently, and shifts approximately with US Presidential Administrations; if when the time came the Administration was as anti-Bezos as the current one, I wouldn't be surprised to see it hold Amazon to the letter of the terms whether or not the intent of the rules was different and usual practice involved fairly easy modification as long as good-faith effort was shown.

[shantara]

My wording was ambiguous, so to clarify: their full constellation is 3236 satellites, 1618 is the half amount they need to launch until 2026.

[zie]

thanks! I was to lazy to look up the FCC app to know for sure, so I hedged :)

[_lbaq]

BO has existed longer than SpaceX without launching anything to orbit. I'm not saying that it cannot be done, but 2026 is 5 years away....

[cma]

SpaceX has claimed we will definitely have point to point rocket travel in 7-8 years, in production, for between the cost of a coach and business class ticket [1]. Long haul airlines will begin getting phased out according to them.

Since reliability is going to fundamentally change by that much in order to have massive passenger rockets replacing jet travel, Blue Origin has nothing to worry about. There is a magic invention that is going to completely change the game, and it won't be patented since those aren't worth doing according to Musk.

Musk also said a robo taxi network is coming online this year. He said it will need a bit of winter training but would have that integrated by the end of the year as well. Full level 5, all conditions and scenarios a human can drive in[2]. Steering wheel can be taken off afterwards. Recent news says it is going to be several weeks before they have any sort of object permanence implemented/temporal picture of the scene, but apparently that is all part of the plan.

Unless Tesla and SpaceX have completely alien tech, I'm confident Bezos could do the 6 launches by 6 years.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE

[valuearb]

Musk has laid out some pretty big visions he hasn’t yet achieved (see Mars, colonization) and doesn’t always meet his aggressive deadlines, but he’s actually accomplishing a great deal. An rocket with 80 commercial launches, landing and reusing hypersonic first stages (and now fairings), the worlds first full flow staged combustion engine, the most powerful rocket in the world (Falcon Heavy), StarLink with already 655 satellites, and that’s just SpaceX accomplishments.

What has BO done other than land a suborbital rocket that doesn’t achieve more than tiny fraction of orbital velocity? They haven’t even had a person ride it yet, let alone a paying customer on board.

[cma]

If we can start replacing long-haul passenger planes with rockets that soon, I feel that BO can launch the sats or Amazon can pay someone else to launch them. Unless there is something going on edging into magical that is going to put SpaceX that far ahead that there would be people taking rockets for regularly commercial flight, not thrill seeking space tourism, price-competitive with commercial flight and reliable.

[valuearb]

There are a lot of steps remaining for SpaceX to start a long haul point to point passenger service on Earth. First, Starship has to meet its safety and performance aspirations, that’s at least a decades worth of work. The first passengers won’t be for a couple years, and they will only be astronauts and explorers for at least a decade, until Raptor has a long history of trustworthy flights. Then there is the government approvals, offshore launch and landing sites with high volume transport to/from them, etc. Point to Point might be twenty years away.

So yes, its reasonable BO will be launching payloads within the same time frame, 10-20 years.

[darksaints]

FCC rules seem fairly hardline, and they absolutely can be, but in general they are not. Buildout rules generally are given on all licenses (I work with licenses for 2.5ghz spectrum) and if you fail to build out on the timeline you asked for initially, you can usually get the FCC to reissue a license. The only time when it is actually a threat is if there are other interests actively looking and applying to use the same spectrum jurisdiction who are capable of successfully building out before you.

[skapadia]

We live in amazing times. Private companies sending rockets and humans into space. "Satellite constellation licenses" - it really does sound so sci-fi and futuristic.

[jtrip]

I've got another one. Our smartphones now have sensor-cluster nodes; they used have singular cameras but now there are multiple sensors facing the same direction. Like some spaceship or drone out of sci-fi.

[rurounijones]

> And they need start launching soon. FCC rules give Amazon until 2026 to launch and start operating at least 50% of the licensed number of satellites - 1618 satellites - or risk their satellite constellation license annulled.

I am curious what would happen here. Lets say they get 45% of their satellites up and miss the mark.

Do we just end up with a hundres of useless satellites drifting in space doing nothing or are they forced to sell (Who would buy) or?

This seems like onf of those PR disasters in the making for the FCC in terms of space pollution with no benefit.

[shantara]

Their license may be reduced to the number of satellites they've already launched.

> Failure to meet the milestone requirements of 47 CFR § 25.164(b) may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date

[1] FCC authorization: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-kuiper-satellite...

[2] FCC "Milestones" regulation for satellite communications: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=2b427aaecc8c5bcb88...

[rurounijones]

Thank you for the info.

[c54]

I’d assume they’d appeal the FCC and get an extension to their license

[akreal]

They don't have to launch on BO, they can use any launch provider.

[martythemaniak]

These massive constellations don't make financial sense if you have to throw away your rockets every time. That is, they could launch on another rocket, but they'd easily get beaten by SpaceX/Starlink.

[adventured]

Amazon is making enough money now that they don't have to make a lot of sense immediately. They may choose to speculate on a future economic opportunity with concern to missing out on that if they fail to put up the network. Their market dominance also means they can only spend so much of their profit on traditional acquisitions realistically, they're going to be increasingly restricted there.

They're also piling up immense amounts of cash, with not much to do with it other than begin kicking it back to shareholders (the same 'problem' Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have had). Needless to say, Amazon clearly isn't eager to return it to shareholders via a dividend or buying back its stock. Five years from now? They'll be drowning in probably $40+ billion per year in operating profit. They can trivially afford whatever it costs to do the launches with someone other than BO, even if it's very expensive. It doesn't have to make financial sense today.

[choeger]

They won't launch on spacex, for sure. And there literally is no one else offering the capabilities to do it. The article mentions 10 billion dollars. That is only about 50 launches with the "competition" of SpaceX. Ok, you might get a discount, but still you would have to place 20+ satellites into a launch vehicle and have pretty much one launch per month to meet the requirements. "vaporware" sounds about right to me, tbh.

[dogma1138]

India and Russia can also provide a much cheaper alternative to ULA.

You assume that Amazon has to use a US launch provider which isn’t the case.

[choeger]

I do not know that India has the capacity. Russia could, potentially, reduce the cost of Angara to about what an expendable Falcon 9 costs. Call it $50M per launch. But then you have to ship the satellites to Russia. Amazon still need to acquire 6 launches a year (assuming they can launch 60 satellites at once, which is totally unclear atm). That would be more than the currently planned launches and might require substantial investment into the production facilities.

So far there are at least five "maybes" in the equation:

1. amazon launching from Russia in large numbers 2. Khrunichev lowering the price of a single Angara significantly 3. Khrunichev being able to produce enough rockets in the first place 4. amazon being able to stack their satellites into the Angara 5. amazon being able to produce enough working satellites in the remaining time frame.

For me that still counts as vaporware.

[xwdv]

Why not? The money is green and if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor with Starlink might as well make some extra dough?

If Starlink can't beat Kupier they're dead anyway those satellites will go up eventually.

[haggy]

> if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor

That's not really the point though. Amazon is a fierce (and many times dirty) competitor to be up against.

If you're competing directly with AWS then you need to take every advantage you can get. If you're trying to build a global satellite network to provide internet access and not having launch capabilities will delay AWS long enough to get a foothold in the market then you take it.

[ethbro]

T-minus X: "Starlink: offering free transit to Azure & GCP."

[lozaning]

Eventually someone's going to launch an orbital data center to cut down on round trip latency. You think AWS bandwidth is expensive now lol.

[intotheabyss]

The only launch provider that reuses rockets is SpaceX, so every other launch provider is at a total disadvantage.

[caiobegotti]

You're right, but the article suggests otherwise. Their deadline to put half of the satellites in orbit is 2026 so it's plenty of time for BO to have launch capability but until they put ONE object in orbit it's all vaporware, unless Amazon says right now Kuiper is open to other launch providers, which I have not seen in any news source yet.

[wtallis]

Half the satellites is still a lot of satellites. BO would need to ramp up to at least monthly launches sometime in the next two years. SpaceX is only doing a little better than that, and they started sending the Falcon 9 to orbit in 2010.

[bryanlarsen]

New Glenn is a lot bigger than Falcon, though. It has twice the capacity to LEO by weight and more than twice by volume. So if a Kuiper satellite is the same size as a Starlink one, they should be able to launch 120 per flight. 14 flights to get above 1618. That could be done within a single year, although that's a big ask for a company that hasn't hit orbit yet...

[valuearb]

New Glenn is a paper rocket built around unproven engines.

[NikolaeVarius]

New Glenn competes with the Falcon Heavy

[bryanlarsen]

Starlink satellites don't use Falcon Heavy.

[polytely]

I can't imagine SpaceX helping Amazon to create a competing satellite constellation while they are setting up starlink

[bryanlarsen]

Musk has stated that he has no objections to launching OneWeb's constellation. That may or may not also apply to Kuiper.

[neetdeth]

Cooperating with Bezos is a different thing though. It would be like nursing an injured rattlesnake back to health.

[liability]

Hey now, that's not a very fair comparison; rattlesnakes leave you alone of you leave them alone.

[sailfast]

In general, Musk's approach seems to be: force an industry to be leaps and bounds better by succeeding in that industry in a new way thought very difficult before.

Worked for Tesla as well as SpaceX. Same goal for Boring / Hyperloop.

Seems like ubiquitous satellite internet would also be a good thing, and SpaceX would make money on the launch to fund Starship. Win-win? Silly logic from an armchair quarterback, but I don;'t think it's as weird as you think.

[jncraton]

I don't fully understand the negativity around BO. They haven't gone to orbit yet, and they don't run everything they do as a PR campaign the way that SpaceX does, but getting a rocket to orbit isn't that big of a deal these days.

We first achieved orbital flight over 50 years ago, and many different groups have achieved the same since then. Given Bezos' deep pockets, why would BO fail where so many other have succeeded in launching payloads to orbit?

They appear to be making steady progress, both on reusability and on their BE-4 engine. There doesn't appear to be any real insurmountable obstacles between where they are today and orbital flight.

I'm not saying they will absolutely succeed, but their success feels more like a when than an if unless Bezos decides to pull the plug for some reason. Whether they can do this by 2026 is of course a different matter.

[nscalf]

The default state of space is failure. It's incredibly expensive, extremely error prone, and failure can have catastrophic results. There's a reason SpaceX was laughed out of room for years. Hell, the most basic problem is described as tyranny.

Regardless of how rich Bezos is, can he bring the right type of talent together and get that talent to make no errors? How many hundreds of millions to billions of dollars is he willing to throw away with nothing to show for it? It's not just can it be done, it's can it be done in this competitive environment before SpaceX pulls so far ahead that there isn't any reason to compete? Add onto it that most of the top talent wants to be, and is, at SpaceX.

[DennisP]

Also I think BO is doing things the hard way. SpaceX started with small expendable rockets carrying cargo. That kept the stakes reasonably low, and let them rapidly iterate and learn from experience. BO's first orbital rocket is supposed to be a heavy-lift reusable.

[mbell]

> getting a rocket to orbit isn't that big of a deal these days.

There are have only been maybe a dozen LEO+ launch families developed ever, and less than a handful by private companies. There exist only 3 active systems in the same category as New Glenn (Long March 5, Delta IV, Falcon Heavy).

Getting anything more than a toy to orbit is _extremely_ difficult, and many have lost untold millions trying to get just a toy to orbit. It is a _really big deal_.

[jncraton]

I shouldn't have said that it isn't a big deal these days, as that devalues the scope of the achievement of getting a payload to orbit. I simply mean that orbital flight is something that we are able to do with the proper funding and resources.

I still think that Bezos can do it if he wants to. If SpaceX were for sale, Bezos could buy them 5 times over (as of their valuation based on their February funding). I have to believe that level of capital could build a company with similar capabilities.

SpaceX has done, and continues to do, incredible work, but their success isn't magical, and it should be repeatable for another company.

[HeadsUpHigh]

>but their success isn't magical, and it should be repeatable for another company.

Not 100% true, SpaceX went against a market that was not only disposable but also extremely inefficiently built. Today's market is significantly more competitive both from SpaceX's side but the other launchers have also decreased prices and are in the process of building cheaper rockets as well.

[JumpCrisscross]

> why would BO fail where so many other have succeeded in launching payloads to orbit?

Guess: Blue Origin employees don’t get equity.

Obviously more motivates an aerospace engineer than cashing out. But my understanding is Bezos owns 100% of Blue Origin. It’s solely his project. That probably changes the type of person they attract and their personal dedication to the effort.

Also, “so many others” haven’t succeeded on orbital insertion. Most efforts (start counting at successful motor test) failed.

[Lazare]

> getting a rocket to orbit isn't that big of a deal these days.

Arguably true, but to the extent that is is true, it makes BOs failures to do so given how much time and money has been spent on it rather inexplicable, no?

Either they're doing something hard (and might fail), or they're doing something easy so why haven't they succeeded? Either way you cut it, it's a bad look.

> They appear to be making steady progress

It's certainly slow. Whether it's steady or indeed, progress, remains to be seen.

> I'm not saying they will absolutely succeed, but their success feels more like a when than an if unless Bezos decides to pull the plug for some reason.

Let's hope.

[bryanlarsen]

> It's certainly slow.

Slow compared to what? Compared to SpaceX they're slow, but compared to everybody else?

NASA/Boeing's SLS program started in 2005 as Constellation. It's still over a year away from it's first test launch and several years away from fully operational status.

China's Long March 5 started in 2007 and it can be argued that it wasn't fully operational until this year.

ULA's Vulcan, started in 2014 is at least a year out. And it reuses the same Centaur upper stage as Atlas.

[liability]

Slow compared to Rocket Lab; 11 years to orbit, compared to Blue Origin's 20+ and counting.

Slow compared to Orbital Sciences, who took 8 years in the 1980s.

[versteegen]

Rocket Lab took about 7 years for Electron: for the first ~5 years after founding they did some sounding rockets and DARPA/ONR-funded non-orbital-rocket propulsion tech before pivoting. Can't remember or find when Peter Beck said they started on an orbital rocket, but they got NASA funding to do a study of the concept December 2010 [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110723113333/http://www.rocket...

[NikolaeVarius]

BO doesn't have a PR campaign since they haven't done anything to campaign about.

The Falcon 9, started design in 2005, first launched in 2010 and rapidly improved to the state we have now.

Meanwhile, the New Glenn started in 2012 and has yet to produce anything but engine tests videos, which are cool, but its not a vehicle.

[valuearb]

BO hasn’t done anything. They’ve demonstrated zero progress. They haven’t even attempted orbit. Their tiny tourist vehicle has gone what, four years in testing, without a single person on board, let alone a customer?

So why the positivity? Because they made videos and a giant plastic lander mockup?

Why the negativity? They tried to patent landing rockets on a ship ten years ago, and still have never done it.

[newsclues]

Because they haven’t done “the hard thing” yet.

[bhupy]

Sure, but there doesn't appear to be anything intrinsic to BO that lends itself a particular disadvantage to doing "the hard thing".

They appear to have the requisite resources & staff, so predicting that they will never do "the hard thing" seems a bit like spiking the football after the first quarter.

[mlboss]

Space is hard. Even with the best people and resources there is a high probability of failure. The only way forward is to launch -> fail -> learn -> repeat.

[bhupy]

Yes, pith aside, everybody knows that space is hard. The GP commenter is arguing that it's odd to write off BO when they are currently in the process of launch -> fail -> learn -> repeat.

[peakay]

but they aren't in that process, they haven't even started it

[almost_usual]

> They appear to have the requisite resources & staff

What makes you think that?

[bhupy]

Um, they have Jeff Bezos' personal piggy bank to fund it? He periodically liquidates his Amazon holdings to fund BO.

According to LinkedIn, they currently have ~2,800 full time employees. Their executive team comes from leadership roles at various aerospace agencies (both private and public).

They also appear to have no issues winning government space contracts: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/04/30/blue-origin-wins-lions...

That they have the resources is just about the least controversial claim. Whether they can actually execute on it is another question entirely. Despite the uncertainty, no credible person can claim with certainty that they will fail.

[raxxorrax]

> getting a rocket to orbit isn't that big of a deal these days

Sure, you just have to run fast enough. If you meant that from a PR perspective, I agree. Sad, but true.

[numpad0]

There is no negativity or positivity, towards or against, Blue Origin, or ULA, or SpaceX, or Tesla. None. Anywhere.

It’s the script some people are reading aloud, “I don’t understand why there is negativity...” like GPT-3 made out of human flesh.

[someperson]

Boeing's Space Launch System and to a lesser extent ULA's (Atlas/Delta) are certainly disliked among many space enthusiasts (on /r/spacex and other watering holes) for wasting taxpayer money in huge amounts.

Blue Origin is disliked for being an extremely well-funded project that appears to make almost no progress after 20 years, yet causes SpaceX grief by being a patenting the landing rockets on ocean platforms idea just as they were about to achieve it (and the "join the club" tweet).

The hate may or may not be petty, but it's wrong to say it's not there.

[rst]

Also for trying, back in 2014, to grab the lease on launch pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, which ultimately went to SpaceX, without having an orbital rocket to launch from it -- not then, and not now.

[TrueDuality]

I'm not an expert in the field, but I do work with the space industry and closely follow a lot of the developments from all of the different groups attempting commercial rocket endeavours.

The big thing that keeps coming up around Blue Origin is that still to date they're entirely unproven for any real flights. They're older than SpaceX and most of their lives have been exclusively focused on sub-orbital flights, and most of that was centered around the "space tourism" business.

They switched in 2014 to targeting orbital missions and from the outside it looks like that was only done for a contract with ULA (specifically this is the creation of the BE-4 engine). After that they started taking orbital options seriously, proposing the New Glenn as its own orbital launch vehicle the following year.

It may also now be worth pointing out that the BE-4 wasn't independently designed to work with the New Glenn or for any specific mission characteristics that Blue Origin had planned. It is supposed to be a drop in replacement for the RD-180 engines we were purchasing from Russia for the Atlas V which is a major design constraint.

You're also right that they haven't been performing as much PR as SpaceX but I don't think that's by choice. Every time they've had a success or an attempt at success they've done very large PR campaigns and even taunt Elon publicly but those are few and far between.

They have absolutely had successes but they've also missed all of their target deadlines they've announced publicly and with their contracts. They have yet to have a successful payload to orbit and now they're talking about using a non-existent platform to launch 1,618 satellites to orbit by 2026. If they get the same density of satellites as Starlink (56/mission I believe, didn't look this up) that is about 27 launches.

I hate to toot SpaceX's horn, but they're currently the gold standard on rapid development of rocketry so it's worth comparing their time line to this one proposed by Blue Origin. As a starting point Blue Origin has not launched their BE-4 rocket into orbit yet much less with a payload so they haven't reached the beginning of it yet:

* September 2008: SpaceX successfully gets their rocket into orbit

* July 2009: SpaceX successfully gets first commercial payload into orbit

* June 2010: The Falcon 9 v1.0 platform has its first launch

* 2010-2013: SpaceX launches 7 missions

* 2014: SpaceX launches 6 missions

* 2015: SpaceX launches 7 missions

* July 2016: SpaceX launches its 27th mission

* January 2017: SpaceX launches its 27th successful mission

So at least in my opinion Blue Origin may not entirely be vaporware, but their time line seems unreasonable. To be successful in this endeavour using exclusively Blue Origin rockets, while taking on no additional launches, they would have to be more than twice as fast at development as SpaceX while using hardware that was designed for another purpose, in an market segment that they didn't start in.

[darksaints]

Only tangentially related to your comment, but I find it interesting enough to comment anyway. Jeff Bezos is literally the wealthiest man alive, and by some measures, the wealthiest that has ever lived. He could literally buy anything he could ever want. Most people would have gladly retired and lived whatever life they wanted to, and they would have done it billions of dollars ago. And so, the fact that he hasn't retired and is still actively involved in building things shows that he still wants something more in his life. And by observing what he is building, we can infer what it is that the richest man in the world wants. And all I can infer at this point is that his biggest desire is to be Elon Musk.

And it's obviously not his wealth that he's envious of. I believe it's the adoration, the faith in his abilities, and excitement of a cult following. All he wants is for people to do for him what you are doing for Musk.

[valuearb]

Far from the wealthiest ever, based on percentage of GDP. He might not be top 100.