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NASA freezes Starliner missions

(gizmodo.com)
269 points rntn | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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tootie ◴[19 Oct 24 14:37 UTC] No.41888007[source]▶
Honestly this feels like an indictment of privatizing space travel. SpaceX is a perfect storm of a benefactor with unbelievable wealth being able to hoard the best engineers money can buy. And now the advancements they've made are proprietary. Ideally Boeing and SpaceX could just collaborate and not have fight each other and waste a load of time and money. If the point is an open, competitive field driving space exploration forward, it seems we don't have that.
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lupusreal ◴[19 Oct 24 21:17 UTC] No.41890843[source]▶
Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin before SpaceX started, and he was certainly a hell lot richer than Elon Musk at that time and many years longer. The narrative of SpaceX owing their success to Elon Musk being rich doesn't align with the facts.
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senderista ◴[20 Oct 24 00:47 UTC] No.41892001[source]▶
He also deliberately kept their budget small and headcount low, on the theory that "constraints breed innovation". Read The Everything Store for details.
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1. mkl ◴[20 Oct 24 08:39 UTC] No.41893933[source]▶
I haven't read that book, but that contradicts what I've read elsewhere, and it's from 2013. Wikipedia says: "By July 2014, Jeff Bezos had invested over $500 million into the company, and the vast majority of further funding into 2016 was to support technology development and operations where a majority of funding came from Jeff Bezos' private investment fund. In April 2017, an annual amount was published showing that Jeff Bezos was selling approximately $1 billion in Amazon stock per year to invest in the company. Jeff Bezos has been criticized for spending excessive amounts of his fortune on spaceflight." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin