The only thing launched for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a lawsuit An Amazon shareholder has filed a lawsuit on the company alleging it didn't do its due diligence when it awarded launch contracts for the company's Project Kuiper satellite constellation to Blue Origin and others. At the heart of the case, unsealed last week after being filed under seal on August 23 in the Court of Chancery in …
Depends on the cost of building blue orgin rockets/buying ULA ones vs the cost of the proven flight design of the falcon 9
In other words... if it costs 15 billion to design/build your own launch vehicles vs 5 billion to buy space x launchers, thats 10 billion that amazone can return to the shareholders....
In any case , I bet the worry for bezosbub is that spacex adopt amazone delivery practices..... IE lob it into an orbit after getting close, then take a picture and claim it was delivered
Bezos is executive chairman of Amazon. He has been selling Amazon stock for years to fund Blue Origin and is down to 12.3%. He also retains voting rights to the large chunk of shares he had to give to his ex wife.
Blue Origin is a private company so ownership is not so easy to quantify. There was some startup capital from NASA and US DoD. Blue's purchase of Honeybee Robotics may have involved swapping stock but those investments are tiny compared billion per year Bezos has put into Blue since 2014. The Blue Moon human landing system only got into congress's price range ($3.4B) because Bezos will subsidize at least as much.
Having Amazon pay Blue a large amount of money means Jeff gets almost all of it instead of 12.3% and he does not give an additional 4% to MacKenzie.
New Glenn is intended to be a big Falcon 9: reusable fist stage, new second stage required for each launch. It may launch years from now. The first stage may get recovered years later (it is expensive and Blue think they will land it first time). About a year later a first stage may get re-used and a few years later experience from re-use may get fed back into the design to make re-use cost effective. Bezos is patient and expects a regular income from Amazon as it replenishes its Kuiper fleet. That far in the future, fully re-usable Starship will be flying at a much lower cost than New Glenn. A re-usable upper stage for New Glenn is more than a rumour but will struggle commercially because New Glenn is a bit small for full re-use to retain a positive payload mass. Blue has mentioned a bigger rocket but I have not found evidence of more than a bullet point on a power point slide.
Fed up of chasing other couriers for my packages,
With Amazon it’s always delivered on the day they say, Royal Mail take it back to some random place and attempt redelivery random days before taking it to a depot 30 miles away.
Evri decide they can’t find it
Dpd are Surly
Ups next day is actually 5 days.
Amazon might deliver on the day that they say but they often ignore changes to the delivery made on their website. That meant an order that was delivered when I was had to go out unexpectedly was stolen from my doorstep. I did change the deliver instructions before the van left the Depot but it was ignored.
Then DX (Deliver Exactly) left my order at 260 when I live at 160. The order weighed 162kg in six packages, I guess the driver just wanted to get it off the van.
Exact delivery my ass.
At least with Royal Mail, I can toddle along to my local delivery office (1.5 miles) and get my parcel. Parcelforce is 2 miles, Yodel are 30 miles away, Amazon are 25 miles away.
Well, when that "favorite supplier" is the world's leading launch provider, and demonstrably cheapest, then the situation is different.
How long do you think it would be before a lawsuit, if a government agency put out a cloud IT bid and left out.. say... Microsoft, or Oracle?
Oh wait, never mind: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/06/jedi_contract_canceled_pentagon/
SpaceX and Starlink are not competitors.
SpaceX and Jeff's BO are barely competitors given BO have never built a rocket that can go to space and SpaceX have launched over 60 of them this year.
Jeff's BO is in the same league as North Korea when it comes to being a successful space launch provider.
Government contracts are regulated differently to private companies. Companies can, and frequently do, award contracts to their friends.
The lawsuit is, however, effectively about an attempt to defraud investors by not including, ahem, Company X, in the list of potential bidders. This sort of thing is what AGMs are for and I wouldn't be surprised to see the court make that point: if you don't agree with what the board is doing, you can vote against it.
SpaceX launches OneWeb just fine. Try setting your brain to 14 year old idiot mode and imagine the inevitable Xcretion when Blue Origin cannot get Amazon satellites up but SpaceX has. Some people just cannot keep their fingers off the keyboard even when everyone else knows the consequences are expensive lawyers at dawn.
Perhaps you were thinking of Tesla?
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