A purple horse and sparkly dust?
Sounds like a hallucination.
Of course when you’re building a rocket that is too expensive to be competitive and powered by engines supplied by an unreliable supplier that is planning to use the same engines on a competing rocket, a little magic dust may be needed to create a celebratory mood.
Looks like Tony is expecting to ride off into the sunset once Bezos buys the company.
But I can see Vulcan galloping for a while. If the likely merger does happen BO would be wise to keep the (likely) dependable Vulcan keeping customers happy while they work on New Glenn (and if that proceeds at the usual “any day now” BO pace it could be a while before it’s ready).
Will Tony stay on? Can BO make enough BE-4s to supply Vulcan launches and New Glenn’s development?
It’s going to be interesting.

I have been predicting this step for sometime.
Between taxation and carefully written regs, add in subsidized work selectively given, it allows the government to start selecting winners and losers within an industry.

Politicians cannot help themselves. And they never consider the 2nd and 3rd order effects.

I want a comic book about how many times Gary Hudson got told “no” by investors.

Today’s comic books are filled with angst after all.

He says corporate journalists are being laid off by the thousands in an election year because readers have lost trust in them since they are lying woke Marxist activists.

They are being replaced by grassroots news sources who are often more expert and more honest (think Robert).

“Tens of thousands of mainstream journalists laid off in what’s being called an ‘Extinction Event’ for corporate journalism.”
https://twitter.com/profstonge/status/1775867358893973953

https://cutjibnewsletter.com/podcast/cutjibnewsletter-speaks-season-7-episode-4/

Topics will be familiar to site readers, but good discussion nonetheless.

https://cutjibnewsletter.com/podcast/cutjibnewsletter-speaks-season-7-episode-4/

“Whenever SpaceX launches a flight, it requires massive air traffic control resources to clear the airspace for hours around the launch window,” David Grizzle, a former chief operating officer of the Air Traffic Organization, an agency within the FAA that hires the controllers, told The Times.

“And again, it pays zero,” he said.

So, let me see if I’ve got this right. These launch companies launch the spacecraft that make huge profits for their operators, and the launch companies pay taxes on their profits, but the greedy government thinks that the taxes on all these profits isn’t enough? Just how much would be enough?

If the government is so hard up for money, it could save billions every day just by reducing the money it pays to people to not work — plus, once those people start working, they will pay taxes on their earnings rather than sucking on the collective teat of the rest of us. Heck, if the FAA needs more people, use that welfare money to hire some of those welfare recipients, who themselves have become accustomed to a free ride just for loafin’ around.

Better yet, move some of those FAA guys off of regulating innovation and development so that they can facilitate those development flights from private launch pads so that the new launchers can make even more profit launching even more hugely profitable spacecraft into orbit and beyond.

But no. They want to cut open the goose as it lays the golden eggs.

Greedy government. Greedy, greedy government.

The US President last month also called for private and corporate jet owners to increase their contributions, as part of his push for the wealthy and big corporations to pay “their fair share.”

His proposal would increase the tax on fuel to $1.06 per gallon over five years, up from 21.8 cents, per The Times.

Really? And just how much is “fair?” Is is fair that the rest of us pay huge taxes to support layabouts to lay about?

https://www.aol.com/news/biden-wants-space-tax-companies-113738121.html

The FAA, according to Washington officials, “is already struggling to keep up with the pace of space launches,” and it is only fair that private space launch companies pay their “fair share” for the cost of regulating them. (Perhaps this is why it is taking them so long to approve test launches at Boca Chica, lol.)

While this sounds a lot like the story of condemned prisoners being made to buy their own bullets, on a more optimistic side, it does suggest that space travel is well on the road to becoming, like the airlines, just another business — regulation and all. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

The regulatory agencies were set up to protect customers from operators, not to regulate innovation or product development. In the case of rockets, SpaceX and others have demonstrated that they can, do, and will launch their hardware and test units safely. The regulators (e.g. FAA) only need to make sure that traffic is clear in the danger zones. They are not there to make sure that development hardware works perfectly, because the whole point of developing innovative hardware is that it probably won’t work perfectly. It only has to work safely.

The failure of the flight termination system on Flight One was definitely in the FAA’s purview, but virtually nothing else was. The other sixty items that they regulated were not their concern.
whether the test unit works as intended is not the purview of regulators. Whether it blows up is not their purview. Only that it is safe, whether or not it works as intended and whether or not it blows up.

Regulatory interference outside their purview is an example of mission creep.

We do not need to get the regulatory system to move at the pace of innovation, we need to get them out of the way of innovation and development. They were not meant to be there.