everyone makes bold promises

delivering is harder

It also has to deal with the electoral fallout, nationwide, from the very recent discovery of the massive conspiracy – which includes most senior political figures in Minnesota – to attempt derailment of the Trump administration’s ICE efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere to round up and deport illegals in addition to being neck-deep in all of the government program fraud, along with recent immigrants, about which we were already aware.

There is already ample basis for bringing RICO cases against the Democrat Party in several states and probably nationally as well.

“We’re all crooks! Vote for us!” doesn’t strike me as a battle cry likely to resonate with very much of the country.

Gavin—the DNC Mitt Romney—destroyed dams…infrastructure mind you.

The Minnesotans are acting worse than Portlandians these days.

Nate P: Sadly, based on the behavior of too many Democratic Party politicians and their supporters, it seems very clear to me that they are “totalitarians who don’t pay even the slightest lip service to republicanism or our Constitution anymore.”

Trump was legally elected, is president, and has the right to legally carry out his policies, as he so clearly outlined during the campaign. This seems unacceptable to the Democrats, and they are literally in revolt against the U.S. government in numerous Democratic Party strongholds.

This is who they are. If they win back power, they are going to move aggressively now to eliminate their opponents. And I doubt they will try to use the legal system, as they attempted against Trump from 2020 to 2024. They are quite open now about their willingness to use non-legal means.

Thus, this might be one time I actually agree with Jeff Wright, though I find his analysis to be simplistic and poorly thought out.

1.) Contribute to the DNC on the down low (while contributing to Romney types in the GOP).

2.) Tell Bloomy to shut up bashing space, or he will sue him too.

3.) If the DNC candidate gets, in—an investigation over Elon results in Starlink de-orbited.

4.) Take the next 20 years to launch something half as fast as Starlink—but folks will be starved for it, so…

“This adulation of Bezos however goes back more than a decade, long before Musk earned the hate of the left for supporting Trump.”

All I can think of is that Bezos tossed a lot of money at more progressive causes, and wasn’t shy about it. Perhaps that played a role.

To the extent TeraWave provides in-space cloud services, it actually stands to compete more with Amazon Web Services than with Starlink – though a decade hence, who can say for sure what Starlink might transmogrify into? Much of the same basic hardware needed to provide AI data center capability atop Starlink would also allow cloud services to be offered.

And it also needs to be remembered that Blue has a fundamentally higher fixed and variable cost structure than does SpaceX. Blue’s rocket is still only partly reusable and is built using traditional, slow and expensive OldSpace fabrication technology. Achieving complete reusability for the New Glenn stack – if that is ever accomplished – will be neither easy nor quick as witness the apparently still moribund state of the Jarvis project.

Blue, in my view, will also need to significantly increase its launch infrastructure in order to support TeraWave deployment on any kind of reasonable schedule as well as do all of the other things it already wants to do. It has exactly one New Glenn pad. By the time TeraWave is supposed to start deployment in the late 2020s, SpaceX will have at least five Starship pads in service and perhaps as many as eight to ten. Blue needs to build at least one more pad and acquire at least one more booster recovery vessel – preferably more.

Where that notional second pad could go is far from obvious. Perhaps Blue can outbid SpaceX for SLC-41 once ULA expires, though I doubt that. The most likely pad site availability to materialize at Canaveral on the rough timeline needed is, in my view, the one now allocated for joint use by Phantom Space and Vaya Space. Or, perhaps Blue could do at the SLC-36 complex what SpaceX is already doing at Starbase and intends to do at SLC-37 and build a second pad near its first. We shall see.

Anent the mainstream press treatment of this announcement, it’s a combination of the ignorance and credulity of the legacy scribblers combined with their formidable politically-motivated distaste for Elon. Blue makes an announcement about a project years from initiation, and even more years from initial operation, and the legacy press treats it like a harbinger of imminent doom for Starlink. Utter bunk, of course. Even at its current customer growth rate, Starlink will have – by the time of the notional first TeraWave satellite launch – a worldwide customer base larger than the populations of all but the largest European countries.

It isn’t just Blue that gets this press treatment, by the way, so does the PRC. Every partially reusable rocket PowerPointed by some PRC “commercial” space company gets treated as the imminent bane of SpaceX’s Falcons.

So it goes.

Richard M: This adulation of Bezos however goes back more than a decade, long before Musk earned the hate of the left for supporting Trump. I saw it in 2015, at the time both companies were doing the first vertical landings, and watched it continue for the next five-plus years. To the press, the companies were neck-and-neck, never once noticing that while SpaceX was setting amazing launch records, Blue Origin was doing nothing.

And I think that’s mainly what explains the positive slant on coverage of anything that promises competition with SpaceX: it’s loathing of Elon and his politics.