On Monday, Feb. 9, Jeff Bezos did a really unusual thing for him. He posted to his own, personal account on X an unusual picture of a turtle. More specifically, a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows. As you can verify by clicking on that link, it wasn't a "poster" or meme with messages written on the picture, or the name of who it was addressed to. There's no text at all this evening as I look at it.
Step by step, ferociously? Credit: Jeff Bezos/X
I'm sure that a lot of people were confused by this; I mean what does a turtle have to do with anything? Why? For whom?
I found out about this doing my daily scrolls of Ars Technica and a handful or others. Ars' senior space correspondent apparently quickly interpreted this as being a message to Elon Musk. Why a turtle?
The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos’ privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.
Bezos’ foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space community by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk’s thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars.
Now I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a corporate page that had turtles on it, but that seems as if it was years ago and a short search of Blue Origin.com doesn't turn up anything like a coat of arms, or a corporate seal, or anything with a couple of turtles on it. It took an open web search to find examples of the art at Inverse.com. Then I went to a couple of online Latin to English translators and neither said anything quite like the "step by step, ferociously" it shows in the caption for that picture. The better translation was one word: "gradually."
Ignoring that etymology, I'll just follow with Eric's take on this, the most important aspect being that it's because Musk pivoted from talking constantly about going to Mars ASAP, and over to a permanent colony on the moon. A few days after the first successful landing of a Falcon 9, on the KSC in December of 2015, Jeff Bezos Tweeted (it wasn't X back then) "welcome to the club" -
...[S]econdly, Bezos was telling Musk that slow and steady wins the race. In other words, Bezos believes Blue Origin will beat SpaceX back to the Moon.
In a bit more detail, Blue has launched around 20 of their "New Shepard" suborbital flights and two New Glenn flights. Bezos concludes his team will beat the team that has launched 600 orbital Falcon 9 flights. So far.
The reason may be a combination of their belief that SpaceX's Human Landing System (HLS) mission plan is too complex and Simpler is Always better - along with Blue Origin's contribution to delaying the Human Landing System by suing SpaceX over the HLS. This large graphic is Blue Origin's comparison between what they think SpaceX proposes to do versus what they think they can do.
Blue Origin infographic about the differences between the lunar Starship (HLS)
and the National Team lander. Reduced file size, more detail in the version at the Reddit link above. File is dated "Five years ago" or 2021 - image
from Reddit.com
This is the place where what Eric thinks they can talk about (from "inside sources") diverges from things I think we can have higher confidence in. Add to that complication, a more important consideration - that the same sorts of inside sources are saying China may well have a simpler lander that could put taikonauts on the Moon before 2030.
It's hard to come to a nice, clean conclusion to this story. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have big complex tasks in front of them. Both are going to be doing things they've never done before. Refueling in space is great example because it has been known since the Apollo days that refueling in space will be needed at some point, but nobody has ever done it. Which means whoever gets experience doing it is going to have a lot of power.
The logistics of doing the "10+" flights to fill a tanker in orbit which will fuel the SpaceX ship are mind-boggling - some models talk about launching ten Starships in ten days, or even less time. That's never been done before. There are also rumors and reports all over about new designs for the Human Landing System and how it's going to be much easier to get to the moon with this new one.
As Eric Berger says, "the 21st century space race back to the Moon now includes three participants: China’s state-run program, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. Game on."
I don't want really want to take a side in an argument which is detail-heavy, yet I don't know the details. Living on the Moon may be no harder than living on Mars, however it's much closer? Until small fission powerplants get cheaper, the additional real estate on Mars isn't an advantage to colonists? A big telescope on the far side of the Moon sounds like fun? Our human presence on the Moon will chase off ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H disprove Martian Bevis and Butthead in a UFO making crop circles?
ReplyDeleteWay to go, Bezos. (he said sarcastically.)
ReplyDeleteLet's see. BO sued over the HLS, twice, causing all work on Starship to stop for, what, a year? BO sues over the increased launch tempo (at the same time BO isn't launching anything.)
And, yeah, what about the huge number of New Glenn launches? We've been swamped with twice as many NG launches as SLS. That means... 2 New Glenn launches. Wow, what a rushed flight schedule for a super-duper rocket.