I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
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New Glenn Update
41–50 of 154 posts
Re: New Glenn Update
#42> These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond.
It sounds as if they already have a long line of customers which have booked flights to all these destinations. (If they actually do, splendid!)
Re: New Glenn Update
#43Re: New Glenn Update
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems like a big jump between flights. I'm used to the spend and explode fast incremental iterations of SpaceX.
Seems BO is taking the NASA approach of not being so cavalier with testing. You can tell people you expect the thing to fail, but repeatedly seeing them fail is still seen as a negative.
New Glenn is manufactured with a different philosophy, so Blue can't be Starship levels of cavalier with testing. It would cost way too much to do with their current approach.
The factory tours for the two show this difference. New Glenn production is a lot more classical aerospace in terms of a high tech cleanroom factory being built from the start, versus a rocket that started out being built in tents that is slowly guiding the factory design as the tolerances are sorted out.
I think Blue's philosophy is pretty similar to the old space giants, except for being willing to invest a ton of money into improvements and new technologies without waiting around for the government to give them a blank check first.
Maybe we'll find that the thing limiting aerospace progress wasn't even that old space was afraid to test, but rather that they were simply unwilling to progress on their own initiative.
Re: New Glenn Update
#45This is also good news for SpaceX. Satellite and payload designers generally design to common fairing sizes so they have a choice in launch providers. The 8.7m 9x4 fairing is similar to the 9m Starship fairing so more designers will now be designing payloads that use the full Starship capacity.
I agree, though I think the real winner here is the customers. The New Glenn 9x4 has a higher targeted payload capacity that an expended Falcon Heavy. Mission design takes years, and payload mass is the most important constraining factor. So it'd now be fairly reasonable approach to start building now for 9x4's constraints, and then fly on it or Starship depending on readiness and price. If customers start doing this…
> Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.
...and we'd be back to steam engine wheel formulas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whyte_notation
Re: New Glenn Update
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure. Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because…
Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9. Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I…
The really big change will be launch thrust to weight ratio. Going from ~1.2 to ~1.35 gives you 75% more thrust at launch which means you spend less time fighting gravity, less time in the thick parts of the atmosphere, and less time to get past the trans-sonic region.
Re: New Glenn Update
#47I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
Good thing they didn’t use two of those units.
Re: New Glenn Update
#48[deleted]
Re: New Glenn Update
#49I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
Wait until you find the places people use non-SI but still metric units, it's super fun.
Re: New Glenn Update
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems BO is taking the NASA approach of not being so cavalier with testing. You can tell people you expect the thing to fail, but repeatedly seeing them fail is still seen as a negative.
Sad part is that even though SpaceX / Elon has been very clear about expected outcomes it's still used against them.
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