Sure. And there's nothing wrong with stitching together a couple of necessarily decoupled pieces of information in order to create a story, but it doesn't take a critical analysis or some deep industry understanding to see the pretty sloppy assembly by Berger. Seriously, as I've said plenty of times before, there's plenty of fodder with Blue. There's no need to Trump it all up into some less than cohesive mega-conclusion.
Since the root of this conversation is the article, if I may go back to that:
--"The Big Shot of a company set a three year goal that was pretty ambitious, the new CEO thought it was 5". Welcome to the history of space. Ambitious goals set by the non-technical leaders that are reality checked by the more technical folks. No news here, and furthermore IMHO its pretty disingenuous to intimate the whole project is a *sugar* show because of what were always going to be inevitable delays.
--"Blue blames DOD for delays", corroborated by a former employee that finds that 'doesn't make sense'. Well, if DOD was providing some the funding and direction (as they were) and DOD changes their mind (as they often do), it actually makes a lot of sense that DOD was responsible for delays. Furthermore, while we don't know the identify of the "former employee" or obviously what level of corporate information they may have been exposed to, its hard to take that kind of source at face value and so there's really no benefit in supplying that quote as supporting evidence. Indeed, reality of the ongoing delays was always going to be a combination of internal Blue and external DOD influences; why not just present the message as such?
--"Jeff wanted a big rocket and that's hard". Sure. And so would have been an F9-like vehicle. In fact, for similar fundamental vehicle concepts--as is the case here with two stage, first stage reusable by vertical landing, etc.--common sense suggests a F9-sized vehicle would be nearly as hard to design/build as a NG sized vehicle, so it is definitely a big pile of misdirection to focus on the physical size of the vehicle when having a conversation about Blue biting off more than they can chew. Related, the logic really doesn't close when one suggests NS to NG is a huge leap while citing F1-to-F9 as an appropriate evolution. One could easily contest the opposite: Going up-down to orbital (NS to NG) is primarily a simple upgrade of Moar Rocket, whereas going single use to recovered (F1 to F9) is a completely different set of technology.
--"Blue is run like an Old Space company". Yeah, that sucks for the employees, many of whom are young and eager and see all the great things their friends and peers are doing at SpaceX. But its a bit of a homeless point here, and one that certainly doesn't serve the "too big to fail" through-line in any useful way. Hell, if anything, Old Space is a series of many successes and very few failures.
--"Blue is distracted by other activities, like lunar *sugar*". Sure its a legitimate observation, but one lacking some follow on context/speculation. Like, maybe its more important at the Blue corporate level to get the visibility and/or funding from lunar activity? Maybe there's stronger motivation to get the launcher going if there's a mission driving it?
Again, Blue's got plenty of warts to pick. Nobody would suggest they're a model of efficiency, Jeff isn't a technical leader, generally their external communications are bland and uninspiring, etc.
Yes, of course. (Hence the apples to apples parenthetical). The point is that there's nothing materially different from what SpaceX has already done in this realm, so its not like NG has to invent things or that its some impossible task. They just need to execute.
Yes, of course. The point is that, as represented by specific example, there are plenty of tasks in front of NG that are far from the intimated never been done before level of difficulty. In fact, MOST of the NG tasks are simply executing on variations of a theme, many of those themes having relevance to NS.
Yes, of course. The point (as is the main point of my post) is that there's plenty of elements from NS that will be in some way applicable to NG, despite the intimated challenge of Nothing to Saturn 5.
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