BEWARE FLORIDA!!!

I know there are a few of you out there that are thinking “Hey, aren’t you being a bit rough? After all Bezos is trying to do his part to get us all into outer space too!” Well to all you folks that think that is the case, I wanted to write this for you. Frankly the guy does want to build rockets, but his history, motivations and methods often seem more like Mike Myer’s evil Doctor.

Bezos was born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico as Jeffrey Jorgensen. His mother was a teenager when his was born, the daughter of a wealthy Texas family. His Father divorced her a year after he was born and she married a hard working Cuban immigrant named Miguel Bezos (an engineer for Exxon) who adopted him.

Bezos went to Princeton where he obtained a BS (with honors) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He worked a few years for IT departments at Wall Street banks and investment firms before moving to Seattle and forming Amazon in 1994. As of March 2015, Bezos's personal wealth is estimated to be US$ 50 billion, due in part to a recent spike in Amazon's stock price, ranking him 15th on the Forbes list of billionaires.

Portfolio.com, has described him as a notorious micromanager: "an executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases."

On August 15, 2015 the New York Times wrote a scathing article "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" about Amazon's business practices. It described working for Bezos and Amazon in the offices as a grueling and inhumane experience with many employees regularly being terminated or quitting. Bezos responded by claiming it doesn't represent the company he leads and challenged its depiction as "a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard"

He was named World's Worst Boss by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), at their World Congress, in May 2014. In making the award Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the ITUC, said "Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the American corporate model..."

A series of articles in the Morning Call newspaper described working for Bezos and Amazon in the warehouses as grueling and inhumane. 

 
Bezos formed his Blue Origin Spaceship Company in 2000, always keeping whatever they do under a deep cloud of secrecy. After 15 years their biggest known success was the launching of their New Shepard suborbital space vehicle one time. 

This April, New Shepard went to 93,500 meters (307,000 feet) and fell back to earth. While the test itself was deemed a success and the capsule was correctly recovered via parachute landing, the booster stage crashed because hydraulic pressure was lost during the descent.

For comparison, SpaceX (which Elon Musk formed in 2002) has had 18 successful ORBITAL flights including six cargo deliveries to the international space station. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 v1.1 generates 1.3 million pounds of thrust at liftoff while New Shepard only generated about 110,000 pounds of thrust.

The Blue Origin New Shepard is not only severely under powered, it also looks suspiciously like a penis (Sigmund Freud might have had a thought about this if he were still around).

Bezos’ lack of results in the space arena might be forgivable or at least cast in the same light as other under-achievers like Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson or Mars One’s Bas Lansdorp if it weren’t for the fact that he has actually tried to screw another new space entrepreneur, apparently (from the appearance of his rocket) out of penis envy.

The Amazon Billionaire has made it clear that if he can’t be atop the New Space industry by succeeding, then he is willing to get to the top of the heap by dragging down the leader: SpaceX.

 His first attack came when SpaceX decided to lease the old Apollo/Space Shuttle launch pad, LC-39A.  When it became obvious that the award was going to SpaceX, Blue Origin appealed, claiming that they would have a human rated rocket to launch from it within five years.  The GAO ruled against Blue Origin.  Elon Musk injected a bit of memorable humor into the feud stating "If they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.  Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."

He tried a second time when SpaceX announced its intention to land their Falcon 9 first stage booster on a barge.  He produced a patent owned by Blue Origin that claimed a system for doing just that.  The problem was that the patent was much too vague.  While it described landing on a barge it didn’t actually go into any detail on how to do it.  The claim was thrown out of court.

Earlier this year Bezos announced at a press conference with United Launch Alliance (ULA) that he is going to use his new engine, the BE-4, to replace the Russian RD-180 engines that ULA can no longer use.  This seemed like a match made in heaven for Bezos, giving the Lockheed – Boeing partnership the engine they desperately need and giving them a chance to compete against the low price juggernaut that is SpaceX.  But not so fast.  In the last week there have been rumblings of an imminent deal with Aerojet Rocketdyne, an old space manufacturer of rocket engines to buy ULA. 

If this deal goes through there is no way their rockets will be using Blue Origin rocket engines.  Apparently someone at ULA was not very impressed with Bezos’ ability to deliver.  This appears to be a desperation move on the part of ULA to keep their rockets flying.

This week Bezos’ announced big plans to build rockets in Titusville, Florida next to the Kennedy Space Center and to lease the pad next to SpaceX out on the cape.  His claim is that they would be building rockets there to launch at KSC “within ten years”.

Given the apparent experience of Amazon employees, I wouldn’t want to work there.  Given the track record of Blue Origin, they have already had 15 years and done almost nothing.  I don’t have much faith that we will see anything significant launch there in the next ten years.  But who knows?  Perhaps Dr. Evil will surprise us.

Waste in Space

The blog below was originally written in 2012.  The graphic above reflects more recent numbers, showing that the math on the SLS is just getting worse.  This behemoth is a white elephant and a drag on our ability to explore deep space.

NASA spent ten billion dollars on the Constellation program during the five years of its existence, from 2005 until president Obama cancelled it in 2010.  They had little to show for the money except an expensive and almost catastrophic suborbital test flight of a dummy first stage and an incomplete space capsule. The Orion/MPCV capsule is the only piece they carried over to the current SLS program.  Developing the Orion capsule consumed about half of the money; $5 billion of that $10 billion.  Recent estimates for Orion reaching first flight say that it will require $6 to 7 billion more. NASA also spent around a billion dollars just to modify one of the shuttle launch pads so that it could be used to launch the Ares vehicle.

Meanwhile SpaceX developed and launched two complete launch vehicles, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, and a space capsule that will eventually carry humans in orbit, the Dragon. They designed and flew two different versions of their Merlin rocket engines plus their Draco thruster, they built a huge factory in California, a test facility in Texas, and launch facilities on a pacific atoll and at Cape Canaveral, Florida.  They are building another launch pad at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California.  They have done all of this for about $1 billion, and almost all of that was exclusively privately raised funds. The SpaceX Falcon 9 can put an 11.5 ton payload into low earth orbit (LEO) for approximately $54 million or $2400 a pound. The Falcon 9 / Dragon spacecraft will launch a 7 person crew to LEO for approximately $120 million or a fraction over $17 million per seat.  That's about one third of what Russia is now charging NASA for seats on Soyuz and an order of magnitude cheaper than Constellation would have been. Even the Chinese have flatly stated that they cannot match SpaceX on price.

Also, SpaceX plans to test fly its Falcon Heavy in late 2015.  The Falcon Heavy that will have a payload capacity of around 53 tons to LEO at a cost of less than $150 million per launch.  That is $1400 per pound, which is getting very close to the “holy grail” price of $1000 per pound. Again that was with ZERO developmental cost to the American taxpayer.

The future of manned space exploration is with commercial development, not bloated government programs like SLS.  The Space Launch System, or SLS, is the government funded project NASA came up with to please members of the House and Senate that opposed President Obama's efforts to lower costs by introducing commercial competition.  It followed the cancellation of the Constellation Program as the vehicle to replace the retired Space Shuttle.  An unofficial NASA document recently estimated the cost of the program through 2025 to total at least $41B for four 70 metric ton launches.  Some estimates place the SLS cost per pound to LEO at $8,500, more than six times that of the Falcon Heavy.

The Competitive Space Task Force, in September 2011, said that the new government launcher directly violates NASA’s charter, the Space Act, and the 1998 Commercial Space Act requirements for NASA to pursue the "fullest possible engagement of commercial providers" and to "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space".  So why are we throwing scarce taxpayer money at the monstrosity called SLS, and not fully funding COTS and Commercial Crew programs?  Ask your Senator or Congressman.  Something is VERY wrong with this picture.