Jeff Bezos is worth $160bn - yet Congress might bail out his space company Bernie Sanders

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

In just eight short years the US, led by our extraordinary scientists, engineers and astronauts at Nasa, had opened up a new world for humanity. And while the entire world rejoiced, there was a special joy and pride in our country because this was an American project. It was our financing, our political will, our scientific ingenuity, our courage that had accomplished this milestone in human history. We had not only “won” the international space race, but more importantly, we had created unthinkable opportunities for all of humankind.

Fifty-three years later, as a result of a huge effort to privatize space exploration, I am concerned that Nasa has become little more than an ATM machine to fuel a space race not between the US and other countries, but between the two wealthiest men in America – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are worth more than $450bn combined.

After many billions of dollars of taxpayer funding the American people are going to have to make a very fundamental decision. If we are going to send more human beings to the moon and eventually to Mars, who will control the enterprise and what will be the purpose of that exploration? Will the goal be to benefit the people of the United States and the entire world, or will it be a vast boondoggle to make billionaires even richer and open up outer space to corporate greed and exploitation?

At this moment, if you can believe it, Congress is considering legislation to provide a $10bn bailout to Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company for a contract to build a lunar lander. This legislation is taking place after Blue Origin lost a competitive bid to SpaceX, Musk’s company.

(snip)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/22/jeff-bezos-space-elon-musk-billionaires-bernie-sanders

[AZSkiffyGeek]

1. Paying for a contract is a bailout?

Is Bezos expected to give NASA the lunar lander for free because he's rich?
Does Bernie not understand how government contracts work? Or is he just taking another shot at Bezos?
Nevermind, I know the answer.

[JohnSJ]

3. I guess for a Democratic Socialist it is. For everyone else in the real world it is business

[Hoyt]

2. Wonder if Sanders realizes contractors were used in Apollo 13 missions too? And Obama approved the

contracting for current space missions.

"Begin with the fact that over the course of NASA’s entire 61-year history, it has never not been part of a public-private partnership. The only branding on the side of the space agency’s rockets and spacecraft may have been an American flag and the words “United States of America,” but if all of the companies that actually built the machines had been able to slap their decals on the ships too, there would have been no room for windows. The Apollo program alone had up to a dozen prime contractors, including North American Aviation, Grumman Corp., Rocketdyne, General Motors, IBM, Douglas Aircraft and even General Motors.

"Those contractors portioned out the work to so many sub-contractors in so many states around the country that, in the end, an estimated 400,000 people—more than the modern-day population of Cleveland—could say they had a hand in putting Americans on the moon.

"The only thing that distinguishes the way the business was conducted then from the way it’s done now is that back in the Apollo era, it was essentially work for hire. NASA would tell the companies exactly what it wanted and the companies would deliver—a little like sketching your own house and then hiring an architect and construction company to build it to your plans.

"Now, the work is more free-range: NASA encourages companies to build their own rockets and spacecraft, provides them a portion of their R&D financing, and then operates more as a customer, buying back the services of the resulting hardware. The most promising example of that business model may be the crew vehicles being built by both SpaceX and Boeing, which will soon begin carrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA awarded the companies the contracts in 2014, and backed the work with more than $6 billion in development funding. Boeing and SpaceX, meantime, will get paid for the rides they eventually provide and come away with their own fleet of spacecraft they can continue building and marketing to other customers."

https://time.com/5639998/nasa-moon-commercial/#:~:text=The%20Apollo%20program%20alone%20had,Aircraft%20and%20even%20General%20Motors.

[happy feet]

4. Unclear

Jeff Bezos lost out on the competitive bid to Musk, yet Congress will pay him too or ???? Read last paragraph above...perhaps we need to read the entire article to discern Bernie's point. I'll bookmark for later.

[twodogsbarking]

5. Bernie may not be entirely correct but I don't trust Bezos.

Capitalism may not be the friend that we have been told for many decades.

[Uncle Joe]

6. My own belief is

the primary tug of war in the 21st century will between the power of oligarchs and nation states.

Today democracy and the idea of nation states is under threat by the power of the ultra wealthy autocrats.

As Bernie states in the article, there is a lot of money to be made in space, ie; asteroid mining etc. but our current space polices seem to be geared toward giving away what is to be made to private interests at the expense of the public.

This doesn't seem wise to me.

[twodogsbarking]

7. Like they did with cell phone territories?