>>13439111Bezos is OBSESSED to the point of fanaticism with the idea, not fact, but notion, that NASA paid SpaceX to practice landing their Falcon 9 cores on land and at sea, which is WHY SpaceX has such a significant advantage in the aerospace market.
He wants, therefore, to be paid the equivalent amount that NASA has paid SpaceX to date, all lumped together into HLS, TO practice landing his own boosters at land or out to sea. The cost of developing Starship and SuperHeavy is rated at around $10Bn. New Glenn and its HLS counterparts, together will likely require anywhere from $8-10Bn in capital. Bezos believes that he's owed that money to do similarly to what SpaceX has done under NASA and DoD in effect.
Even though, EVEN THOUGH, SpaceX has stated on every single one of their livestreams that their primary mission is the delivery of their contracted payload and their secondary mission is purely experimental with an intent to land and recover the booster. Couple to that, the fact that SpaceX programmed into their booster the margin to deliver the mass rated payload AND then attempt the booster landing, and then the downstream facts that they managed to 2.25x the performance out of Merlin from original F9 all the way to F9 Full Thrust Block 5 and Merlin-1D.
If there was anyone in the history of aerospace who could be called an entitled brat, it would be Jeff Bezos. It's pathetic. He's a grown man getting into childish fights. The sad reality is that he's the richest man on Earth. He could easily sacrifice $10Bn in Amazon stock and do it in the name of aerospace, putting money where his mouth is, and there would be a tiny dip with Amazon share value, which would quickly recover (because buy the dip/fomo), and Blue Origin would have the funding necessary to do New Glenn and HLS lander all in one.
He doesn't want to build an aerospace empire, he wants to inherit it, and I suspect the $8-10Bn is to get NatTeam lock-in, so that eventually they're absorbed into BO.
