A recent online discussion critiquing the oversimplification, polarisation and moralisation associated with the label clean code repeated a common misconception around the term, namely that it was coined by Robert Martin. He popularised it and associated it with a specific approach in his Clean Code book, but he is not the originator of the term. Although absent from his writings before that book, it was certainly in use by many others long before Clean Code was published in 2008.
Prior to becoming considered a brand or a dogma, cleanliness and cleaning of code was a suggestive and general metaphor rather than a specific checklist of practices and judgements. Talking about ‘clean code’ was more along the lines of ‘clean clothes’ or ‘spring clean’ than ‘clean eating’ or ‘clean desk policy’, with their justifiably negative associations. The term clean code was no more concretely defined or rule-based than, say, tidy code.
For example, we find it in the opening sentences of Kent Beck’s 2003 Test-Driven Development book:
Clean code that works, in Ron Jeffries’ pithy phrase, is the goal of Test-Driven Development (TDD). Clean code that works is a worthwhile goal for a whole bunch of reasons.
We also find it in Martin Fowler’s 1999 Refactoring book:
I’ve not succeeded in pinning down the real birth of the term refactoring. Good programmers certainly have spent at least some time cleaning up their code. They do this because they have learned that clean code is easier to change than complex and messy code, and good programmers know that they rarely write clean code the first time around.
With the metaphor being used extensively throughout, for example:
The compiler doesn’t care whether the code is ugly or clean. But when we change the system, there is a human involved, and humans do care.
Colleagues who worked with Mr. Ritchie were struck by his code — meticulous, clean and concise.
But predating any of the uses I’ve already mentioned is what I believe was my first encounter with cleanliness in code:
The best documentation for a computer program is a clean structure.
And clean code:
We will say it once more — clean code is easier to maintain.
These quotes are from Brian W Kernighan and P J Plauger’s 1978 book, The Elements of Programming Style (2nd edition). Although already dated when I first read it — examples are in FORTRAN 66 and PL/I — this book had a profound influence on how I thought about code — formatting, meaningful names, comments, boundary and error conditions, logic and control flow, regularity, refactoring and more. I borrowed it during my first job after university and bought my own copy a few years later.
You can also find these quotes in the first edition, which was published in 1974. The idea of clean code has been around in one form or another for at least half a century.
About 20 new Colorado laws take effect Jan. 1, doing everything from protecting wild bison to streamlining marijuana regulations.
We’ve rounded up a few of the most notable new laws here.
Right-to-repair electronics
This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Coloradans will have more options for repairing broken cellphones, computers and other electronic devices starting Jan 1.
A new law requires manufacturers, such as Samsung and Apple, to provide “documentation, software, data and other tools” to device owners and independent repair shops to help people fix their electronic equipment.
The goal is to help consumers save money and get repairs done faster.
The law includes some exemptions, including for video game consoles due to piracy and security concerns.
Democratic state Rep. Brianna Titone of Arvada was the bill’s main sponsor and says it also applies to sales between businesses and with the government.
“This will save companies a ton of money because companies will be able to hire their own in-house people if they want, or a third-party service provider to do the work of fixing their equipment,” she said. “And they don’t have to go have the expensive contract that the manufacturer requires them to really have.”
Colorado’s so-called right-to-repair law will be one of the most expansive in the country. The state already has a right-to-repair wheelchair law, and a right-to-repair agricultural equipment.
Additional paid family leave for parents of kids needing neonatal care
Colorado’s paid family leave program, FAMLI, allows workers to receive a significant portion of their pay if they need to take up to 12 weeks off work in a given year for a serious family health or personal issue. It’s a popular program that voters approved by a wide margin at the ballot.
Lawmakers have now expanded it for families with a baby in neonatal intensive care. Those families, under a law taking effect in 2026, can apply for an additional 12 weeks of leave.
Democratic state Sen. Jeff Bridges was one of the main sponsors, and it was inspired by his own personal experience. His son was in intensive care, which he said was “terrifying and consuming.”
“We need to make it easier for parents with kids in the NICU,” he said.
The measure largely passed along party lines, with opponents worried about increased costs to businesses and workers who pay into the FAMLI program.
Gun show requirements
Operators of gun shows in Colorado will be required starting in 2026 to submit a security plan to local law enforcement and to hold liability insurance under a new law.
The plans will have to include a list of vendors, a floor plan, information on which areas are under video surveillance, and the estimated number of attendees.
Gun show operators must also enforce age limits for attendees. Gun shows must also ensure that all purchases follow the state’s background check requirements and the state’s three-day waiting period law.
Screening for renters and fee transparency for consumers
Landlords will not be allowed to ask prospective tenants using a housing subsidy to submit a credit history or credit score as part of the screening process under a new law that takes effect in 2026.
A separate housing bill aims to make prices for products and services more transparent for consumers. The goal is to standardize prices up front so people aren’t hit by hidden fees later on. The law also restricts the kind of fees landlords can charge tenants.
The law, which takes effect in 2026, make it mostly illegal to hunt or poach wild bison, also known as buffalo.
The bill was brought to the state legislature at the request of some tribal communities. The law does not apply to privately owned bison that are in captivity, or bison owned by an American Indian tribe.
According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife ,the state does not have any confirmed wild bison herds, although sometimes bison from Utah’s Book Cliffs herd cross into the state.
This story was produced by the Capitol News Alliance, a collaboration between KUNC News, Colorado Public Radio, Rocky Mountain PBS and The Colorado Sun, and shared with Rocky Mountain Community Radio and other news organizations across the state. Funding for the Alliance is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Methane emissions from Colorado’s oil and gas production fell sharply from 2010 to 2017, according to the Environmental Defense Fund study. Researchers used data from the Japanese Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite, and the findings were backed by results from aircraft-based analysis in flights over the high oil production Denver-Julesburg Basin.
EDF advocates credit hard-fought collaborations among regulators, oil and gas trade groups and environmentalists beginning with 2014 legislation under then-Gov. John Hickenlooper. Another important methane law passed in 2017, and six more legislative compromises moved forward during Gov. Jared Polis’ administration, EDF officials said.
“The timing and magnitude of the decline closely align with Colorado’s methane regulations, suggesting they played a central role in driving reductions,” EDF said. The nonprofit advocacy group noted that Colorado’s oil and gas production actually increased during the time that methane emissions dropped, further evidence of the laws’ efficacy.
“We are not getting the regulatory protection around methane, greenhouse gasses or climate from the EPA and the federal government at this time, and I think it’s more than ever incumbent on state regulators to take up that that responsibility to protect their residents,” said Nini Gu, regulatory and legislative manager of the EDF’s West region. “And Colorado has always been really great when it comes to oil and gas emissions regulations.”
Colorado officials and environmental groups say the state’s extensive rules and regulations on cutting greenhouse gas pollution, cleaning up ozone, and promoting clean power will stay in place despite federal rollbacks. Where the federal reversals have threatened Colorado policies, the Polis government and Attorney General Phil Weiser have launched a flurry of lawsuits to keep the status quo.
The new laws in the 2010s emphasized detection of leaks through regular infrared monitoring and other methods, and new leak control equipment.
Colorado’s industry trade groups welcomed the results of the study, for the same reasons the EDF underlined.
“Colorado is the nation’s fourth-largest producer of oil and natural gas. This new data confirms that emissions can be reduced while continuing to produce the abundant, reliable and affordable energy that Coloradans rely on,” said Lynn Granger, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.
“That progress reflects years of work by operators investing in new technologies, improving practices, and adapting to evolving requirements,” said Carly West, executive director of the trade group API Colorado.
Recognizing the success of the recent collaborative negotiations is important when Colorado lawmakers and regulators consider yet more rules, Granger added. They should “avoid adding costs or complexity that could hinder innovation, harm Colorado’s economy, or deliver little additional environmental benefit,” she said.
Hickenlooper, now a Democratic U.S. senator, pointed to the Colorado rules under his governorship as a national model adopted by then-President Obama’s administration (and now being reversed by the Trump administration.)
“Colorado was the first state to enact smart methane rules,” Hickenlooper said. “The data proves they work, delivering cleaner air for our communities and making real progress in confronting the climate crisis.”
The Geo Tracker was a severely underrated runabout. I’ve driven a few of these before and have always adored their underdog spirit, their surprising off-road capability, and their oh-so-cute looks. Is it time for the Geo Tracker to come back? Oh yeah it is.
Thomas wrote about a new graphics package for the Toyota RAV4. TheDrunkenWrench got me really excited:
It is time. All the pieces are there: -The people crave small, cheap, proper 4x4s -The CAMI plant needs a model to save it’s production -Vinyl graphics are back
THE GEO TRACKER MUST RISE FROM THE ASHES.
GM
Matt wrote a Morning Dump that contains an interview with the legendary Bob Lutz, who held back no punches about modern BMW design. Ranwhenparked:
The headline could easily read “Ex-BMW Exec Bob Lutz Has Functioning Eyes, Brain”
Sid Bridge:
BMW Exec: Sir, I thought you should hear what Bob Lutz said. BMW President: I hope this is worth interrupting my lunch. BMW Exec: He said our cars are ugly. BMW President: What does he know?! Now go fetch me some more onion rings to put on top of my Kimchi & Durian sandwich and don’t get any on the shag carpet. Oh, and check and see if my new “Best of Slim Whitman” CD came in. Say, why don’t you drop by this weekend and we’ll catch up on the the absolute best James Bond movies with George Lazenby. And go ahead and put a few bucks on the Dallas Cowboys for me. I think this is gonna be their year.
Peel
Jason wrote a Cold Start about the Peel P50, and I love how the advertisement shows what appears to be a woman meeting a guy for a coffee date by driving her car into the shop. UnseenCat:
Taking a P50 into the cafe for a date does make some sense. After all, if the datye starts to go badly, or he turns out to be a creep, she can just slam the door and peel right out …
You could argue that an “electric car company” is not something that needs to exist, and that car companies should simply be Car Companies, not tied to any particular powertrain. But electric car companies do exist in the U.S. in the form of Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Slate, and the reason why is pretty obvious: “Electric” was the hottest new term of the last two decades, and a necessary one to raise enough capital to get a new company off the ground. Pitching a hybrid car company to a group of investors would have been as fruitful as the messages I used to send on dating apps. But now it’s 2025, and that hot “electric” term is now lukewarm at best.
A few months ago, I was at a Rivian event in which I asked a representative if the company would ever offer a gasoline range extender. The answer was an emphatic “no.” I asked the same question at a Lucid event and received the same answer. “The future is electric,” is the refrain I typically get from folks when I ask this question. To which I respond: “What’s your point?”
Telling me what the future is doesn’t seem particularly relevant. We could all be driving flying cars in the future, but if you started selling only flying cars today, you’d be a fool. This reminds me of 2022, when GM announced it would skip hybrids because the future is electric. More specifically, per the Detroit Free Press, Mary Barra said:
“GM has more than 25 years of electrification experience including with the plug-in vehicles like the Chevy Volt …From that experience, our vision is for an all-electric future. Our strategy is focused on battery electric vehicles as they represent the best solution and advance our vision for an all-electric future.”
I remember thinking upon reading that: “Sure, the future may be electric, but you’re selling cars now, in the future’s past. Right now, people want hybrids.” As expected, GM backtracked on its plan to offer only EVs and to skip hybrids, and is now going heavy into the hybrid game (while still offering a solid array of EVs).
Too Many Companies Are Splitting Too Small A Slice
The future is electric, but today is not electric. Toyota understood this because they understand consumers, though they got dragged by journalists for not going all-in on the new hotness. But sales numbers bear out that hybrids are the answer, and what’s more, automakers like Rivian and Lucid losing absolute metric crap-tons of money on electric vehicles — and other car companies like Ford deciding it’s worth losing $20 billion to cut many of its electric vehicle programs altogether — goes to show that the market just isn’t there for fully electric cars.
Of course, there’s Tesla, a company that managed something amazing. Lightning in a bottle, you might call it. It was an American company that came out of nowhere, developed its own charging infrastructure, created electric cars that were generations better than anything up to that point, and offered the cars at a rather competitive price. They also had a larger-than-life CEO who was admired by most of the world at the time, and also, they made loads of money by selling ZEV credits to automakers running afoul of CO2 compliance. That credit system is likely gone in the United States, thanks to the new presidential administration.
I get the impression that many companies saw Tesla’s success as proof that a sustainable EV company can exist. But in my eyes, to try to replicate Tesla’s model is silly. Tesla is one-of-one. An outlier. I tweeted this thought over a year ago, suggesting that EV companies should hybridize ASAP:
My suggestions to EV-only automakers: 1. Be careful looking at Tesla and thinking “I want those sales numbers.” You are not Tesla. Don’t try to be Tesla. Tesla is an anomaly. And 2. Get on the range extender bandwagon as soon as possible. Transition back to BEV-only later. https://t.co/1b7H2jmfN0
You know who replied to that tweet? None other than Ford’s own Jim Farley, CEO:
Now it’s nearly 14 months later, and Ford announced that its departing fully-electric F-150 Lighting is being replaced by a range-extended F-150 Lightning.
This is what happens when you make sh*t products. This has nothing to do with making EV’s; this has everything to do with making bad EV’s. https://t.co/f3kxBlR6Ul
You can see my opinion on the matter in the reply above.
This seems like a smart move on Ford’s part. The truth is that fully-electric pickup trucks make little sense for the mass market, and if you don’t believe me, just listen to what the former CEO of Lucid (an electric car company that refuses to offer gasoline engines) told me when I interviewed him last year:
“But let me tell you the reality is, and it’s me saying this, that it is not possible today with today’s technology to make an affordable pickup truck with anything [other] than internal combustion.”
This is just reality, which is where major corporations have to live.
With Fully Electric Vehicles, America’s Love For Big Cars Gets Expensive
America loves large cars, and large cars typically have what’s called in the industry “a high Vehicle Demand Energy” (VDE). This is the energy needed to move the vehicles down the road, and though it can be affected by powertrain (because, for example, a gas engine requires more cooling, which can lead to more drag; an electric vehicle is heavier, which can lead to more rolling resistance, etc.), this is more about the vehicle in which the powertrain is placed than the powertrain itself.
America’s taste for large vehicles means we tend to drive cars that require lots of energy just to go down the road, and if that vehicle is, for example, a pickup truck (like a Chevy Silverado EV) or SUV (like a Rivian R1S), you’re going to need a massive battery to achieve the range that the average American wants. Both the Silverado EV and the Rivian R1S offer batteries over 140 kWh, with the former offering one over 200 kWh.
Add a big trailer to those vehicles, and even those giant batteries won’t be enough to overcome not only range issues, but recharging issues, as infrastructure still isn’t good enough, and pull-through chargers for trailer-pulling pickups just aren’t very common even in 2025. When it comes to towing, EVs are simply the wrong tool for the job, as I wrote last year.
Image: Lucid
With Lucid and Rivian losing billions of dollars annually as EV demand remains softer than expected (though we do have some early signs that Rivian is turning things around, with a few quarters of positive gross profits, though net profits remain elusive), there’s an obvious question worth asking: Should these companies build cars that appeal to more than just a small electric sliver of the American car market-pie?
Rivian thinks the upcoming R2 and R3x will be enough. I have no doubt that they’ll sell relatively well, but I do have doubt about whether they’ll bring Rivian to sustainable net profitability. After all, the world already has cool, small electric SUVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Chevy Equinox EV. And sure, you could say the world has lots of great hybrids, but the sales figures are on a different level. With hybrids, there’s more than just a sliver of the American market “pie” to share.
EREVS Are A Compromise That Can Minimize The Most Important Compromise
Image: Ram
America wants hybrids; when Scout offered its vehicles as fully-electric or range-extended hybrid models, the majority of pre-orders were for the hybrids. And for good reasons. Though some EV purists call hybrids “compromises,” in truth, every car is a compromise, and a hybrid’s main advantage is that it’s actually a compromise-minimizer. If you think about the compromises that actually matter in the car world, it’s not compromises to packaging or complexity or even vehicle performance — what matters, big picture, is minimizing compromises to the way a driver actually uses their vehicle, while keeping the biggest compromise — cost — down. And in this way, hybrids are less of a compromise than BEVs.
I live in California, where the infrastructure is better than pretty much anywhere stateside. Still, charging a BEV can be an inconvenience compared to filling up a gas car, and what’s more, it can actually cost as much or more. I’m not saying charging a car here is bad — if you leverage the right apps, and are smart about planning, you can really get a lot out of driving a BEV (and you can save money on driving) — but the compromise is nonzero. It’s not about charging infrastructure or charging times or poor towing range — more than anything, it’s about cost.
Americans want to drive big cars, and they want to be able to not have to worry about range anxiety. This RA term is one that lots of EV journalists have historically dismissed. “Nobody needs 300 miles of range. 100 is just fine!” many say. In fact, here’s a Facebook reply to our story on Ford ditching the BEV Lightning for an EREV:
The Lightning is an excellent vehicle that won’t sell because truck buyers think they’re going to tow a trailer 500 miles every weekend. They won’t, and the range of an Lightning would actually meet their needs 99% of the time, but people stupidly make buying decisions based on that remote possibility that they might need extra capability someday.
I’ve heard this argument 1000 times. “People don’t need 300 miles of range! Just buy a car with a small battery in it!” My engineer-brain totally gets it, and concurs.
But, the truth is, this doesn’t really matter; one of the most important things for any car company to understand is that humans are irrational. A Porsche 911 buyer doesn’t buy a track weapon to actually go on a track. A Jeep Wrangler buyer isn’t going to tackle Pritchett Canyon in Moab. A Ford F-150 buyer isn’t going to tow 10,000 pounds or haul a ton in their bed. On a less extreme level, a typical Toyota Rav4 buyer with one child could probably make do with a Honda Accord. Heck, many Honda Accord buyers could probably make do with a Honda Fit.
This “overbuying” is something inherent to Americans as consumers, and calling us all dumb and trying to force us to buy cars for purely rational reasons has historically not worked. If it had, we’d all have been driving Toyota Priuses for the past 20 years. Instead, the Toyota Rav4 SUV and Ford F-Series pickup are the best-selling cars in 2025.
This is where the market is, and this is where automakers have to go. Give consumers what they want, even if those cars aren’t purely logical. Especially in the current political climate, expecting strict regulations to shape consumer preference doesn’t make sense anymore, and if you let consumers choose, they’ll keep overbuying as we have for the last century. Americans want big cars, they want them cheap, they want them to be able to drive far, and they want them to be able to fill up quickly.
With an EV, this combination of traits simply cannot coexist. Even most modern EV automakers know this. There’s a reason why the best-selling electric cars in the U.S. are ones with ranges over 300 miles. These vehicles force their drivers to carry around 1,000+ pounds worth of expensive batteries that they rarely use. For everyday driving, for those who can charge at home, 50 miles of range would do, but most of the most popular EVs offer over 300 miles. That’s 5/6 of the battery that is just being dragged around daily, waiting for an edge case situation. That’s a lot of expensive weight being hauled around.
An EREV gets rid of half that battery and replaces it with a small gasoline generator. Now, instead of 5/6 of a 100kWh battery being dragged around for most days, a smaller portion of a smaller battery is dragged around daily, along with a small gas generator. The 100 kWh battery can become a 40kWh battery, and now the car can go about 120 miles on a charge. When that runs out, instead of pulling from a huge, pricey 60 kWh battery for the edge case, the little gas engine fires up.
The Gas Generator Doesn’t Have To Be Great Or Expensive
Image: BMW
Installing a small gas generator sounds simple enough, but it really isn’t. Modifying an existing EV platform to accept a gas motor would also take a bit of work (cooling/packaging/crash are all considerations). If you were an independent “EV Car Company,” you’d do best to just buy a cheap gas motor from someone.
My BMW i3 REX, for example, uses a little scooter engine from Taiwanese company Kimco. It’s more than adequate because I rarely use it. Most days it sits there doing nothing in much the same way that 1,000 pounds of expensive batteries sit around in a typical BEV, also doing nothing. If you’re a major automaker with gas engines in your other offerings, you can just pluck a little 2.0-liter out of something. The gas motor doesn’t have to be amazing or expensive. It just needs to be able to generate power for edge-case driving scenarios.
Are EV Car Companies EV-First or Environment-First?
Anyway, with Ford’s announcement to turn the F-150 Lightning into an EREV instead of a BEV, I felt compelled to write my thoughts on the matter. I think it’s a great idea — such a great idea that I think other automakers should follow suit.
Surely, 2026 will be the year of the hybrid, and the easiest way for a company that builds EV platforms to hybridize is to incorporate an EREV. This, I want to really emphasize, is not in any way, shape, or form a defeat. I think many EV purists think offering a gasoline range extender is somehow shameful. On the contrary, it’s a fantastic thing for electrification and for the environment, and I think any car company that bills itself as one that cares about the environment should jump on board, as an EREV can actually be better for the environment than a BEV, especially if the range extender is rarely used.
More importantly, the goal should be to, as quickly as possible, get as many people as possible driving electric as often as possible. That can happen if you bring down cost and allay fears related to range anxiety/charging issues. In short, by letting people drive electric vehicles without forcing them to make the biggest compromise, which is a significant change to how they use a product (and also pay a lot for the car).
OK, So There Are Some Huge Branding Problems
Image: Rivian
One topic I cannot ignore is the branding of it all. If a company has built its identity on a powertrain, things get tricky if they want to offer a different one. Rivian is all-electric, anti-gas. Lucid is the same. Tesla is the same. Since their inception, they’ve been no-gas, all-electric companies, largely because none of these companies would exist otherwise. How, then, can you maintain brand integrity if you offer a gasoline range extender?
It’s hard, because brand is everything. That’s the primary value of these companies, especially the ones that aren’t making money — their names, which they’ve painstakingly and precisely built over the years. Had these companies built their brands on environment-first versus BEV-first, this could have been a fairly easy bridge to cross, but again, BEV is what got investors’ ears the past 10 years or so, so the brands find themselves in a tricky spot. How long can they keep burning cash? With no federal rebates and no carbon credits to sell, can they bank on enough organic EV-market growth and battery price reduction to get to the promised land? And if so, can they keep treading water for another year? Five years? Ten years?
Big, diversified car companies like GM can keep rolling out BEVs because they have gas trucks they can make money on. But if you’re Rivian or Lucid, is there a point where hybridizing just makes sense, if not from a financial standpoint, simply from an engineering one? Americans want big trucks, they don’t want range anxiety or long charge times, they want towing capability, and they want a low price tag — the engineering solution, as Lucid’s own Peter Rawlinson made clear — is gas. Why not offer the best engineering solution regardless of powertrain?
The answer is branding. An EV brand is an EV brand. You live by it, you may die by it.
I Love EREVs, But Even They May Have A Hard Time Selling Over Gas Or Conventional Hybrid Cars
Though I think EREVs offer the best of all worlds, and they give EV car companies a way to hybridize on a single platform shared with a BEV, as I wrote in my article I Don’t Think Anyone Really Knows How The U.S. Market Will Respond To EVs With Gasoline Range Extenders, I by no means think EREVs or BEVa are going to be participating in any cake walks over the coming years. With EPA credits and rebates gone, and with gas prices fairly reasonable, consumers are asking themselves why they should electrify at all. And if they do want to save some at the pump, why drive electric when they can just buy a 40 MPG hybrid like a Toyota Rav4 Hybrid? It’s this thinking that led me to my take on the Slate (which I think would have more legs as a cheap gas car).
Electric cars are a tough sell, range extender-equipped or not. Performance, though, is fantastic. In cities with high fuel prices (where I live in LA), driving electric daily is awesome. Maintenance is basically zero (I change my range extender’s oil every year or two, and that’s it). In traffic, an EV is a quiet, lovely sanctuary compared to an ICE car. There are so many traits of an electric car that make it a much, much better daily commuter than a gas car. It’s just a matter of making that experience more attainable to more consumers, and allowing consumers to enjoy that without having to change how they want to use their vehicle.
EV Car Companies Are In A Tricky Spot
I just don’t see what the other options are for electric car companies, other than praying costs go down very quickly, that the American market pie-slice for EVs gets bigger, or that American big-car sensibilities change. Big expensive EVs are just not going to work for the masses (see Kia EV9 and Ioniq 9 sales, which admittedly are down due to production woes, but still), and while I’d like to see more small, cheap EVs like Ford’s upcoming Universal platform cars, America today loves Big. So why wait when EREVs offer a great, positive opportunity to get more people driving electric every day? Offering a range extender is not a defeat; it’s a win for the consumer, for the environment, and potentially for car companies.
Potentially.
For a more complete breakdown of Range Extended EVs’ benefits and drawbacks, see my three articles on the topic. Note: I am not an oracle, and many of you, dear readers, are geniuses, so I welcome your thoughts in the comments. Also, for the EV-purists who will inevitably be upset that I like something other than a pure BEV: I also love BEVs. In fact, I love them so much that I wrote positive reviews about the Cybertruck and Fisker Ocean. BEVs are an excellent option for folks who can charge at home/work, requiring less maintenance than an EREV. Neither BEVs nor EREVs are not the answer for everyone, but variety is key.
Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative.
The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company's longest-running program?
"We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn," wrote the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on Friday afternoon. "We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation's goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence."
Move was a surprise
The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission eight days ago, launching six people into space. Moreover, the company has four new boosters in various stages of development as well as two new capsules under construction. Blue Origin has been selling human flights for more than a year and is still commanding a per-seat price of approximately $1 million based on recent sales. It was talking about expansion to new spaceports in September.
Still, there have always been questions about the program's viability. In November 2023, Ars published an article asking how long Bezos would continue to subsidize the New Shepard program, which at the time was “hemorrhaging” money. Sources indicate the program has gotten closer to breaking even, but it remains a drain on Blue Origin's efforts.
More than 500 people spend part or all of their time working on New Shepard, but it also draws on other resources within the company. Although it is a small fraction of the company’s overall workforce, it is nonetheless a distraction from the company's long-term ambitions to build settlements in space where millions of people will live, work, and help move industrial activity off Earth and into orbit.
In a company-wide email on Friday, Phil Joyce, senior vice president for New Shepard at Blue Origin, said the team has safely flown many people to space and proven technologies used to land the New Glenn rocket. "This program has laid the groundwork for our company's future success," he wrote. "We should all be proud of what we've accomplished together."
Limp said the company would support its employees in finding other roles at the company, "particularly within Lunar and New Glenn." This underscores that this decision, almost certainly made by Bezos, is intended to accelerate the company's efforts to fly New Glenn more frequently and deliver on its cargo and crew lunar landers.
Ultimately, this is good for NASA
This certainly dovetails with NASA's priorities, as it is counting on Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX for contracts to land humans on the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.
Multiple industry sources on Friday afternoon expressed both regret and appreciation for the decision to move on from New Shepard. The program offered a safe way to fly humans into space, with minimal training. The dozens of people who flew experienced an amazing 10 minutes: launch, ascent, weightlessness, a grand view of Earth, and a return to the planet; almost all were in awe afterward.
However, the flights of Bezos and other prominent people, notably Katy Perry, opened up Blue Origin and the broader commercial space industry to the criticism that spaceflight was just a plaything for billionaires, celebrities, and their toys.
The decision to end New Shepard will inconvenience a few dozen very rich people waiting their turn to go into space on New Shepard, but more broadly, it is a win for the US space industry. Blue Origin has justifiably been criticized for trying to do too many things at once, resulting in all of its programs moving too slowly. Focusing on New Glenn and the lunar lander program in the near term will be a great boon for space access and the nation's competition with China to secure the Moon.
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