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After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

arstechnica.com

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Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#101

Post by grecy »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #59
ChuckMcM wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If, and it’s a big if, starship can be 100% reusable and less than 24 hours turn around, then it will be the space truck NASA envisioned with the shuttle

There's no way they're getting rapid turnaround with the damage it's has sustained on the last two tests.

I’m always amazed by statements like this. Starship is currently a test program and is rapidly evolving. They’re improving it as they learn.

What you said is akin to looking at the Wright brothers plane and saying “no way that thing crosses the Atlantic.”

It will improve rapidly until it does.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#102

Post by IshKebab »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37
zizee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or you wait until you find 600 other small sat users who want to launch into the same / similar orbit. The talk I heard was that New Glenn was supposed to be BO's answer to Starship (or more likely Falcon Heavy) that could launch a bunch of Project Kuiper satellite…

> If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship

Why not? Unless you need a custom orbit that nobody else is interested in then Starship will be by far the cheapest way to put a small satellite in orbit, as part of a ride-share mission.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#103

Post by grecy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38
bryanlarsen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's not 100% reusable it's still likely to be cheaper than New Glenn. New Glenn uses extremely expensive methods of construction. Starship is assembled like a glorified water tank.

I'm not sure I see it that way, I wonder sometimes how much of the expensive construction can be systematized into something less expensive, and how much of Starship's "cheap" construction will remain as they work harder and harder to get to their reuse and turnaround goals. My intuition is that Starship will get more expensive to make over time and New Glenn less expensive but beyond that I can't say if they would m…

> That is what had made Falcon 9 so cost effective. Mostly because they get nearly 10 flights per booster.

You’re way out of date. Multiple boosters have flown over 20, a couple are at 23.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage...

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#104

Post by grecy »

imtringued wrote: post #63
teractiveodular wrote: post #2

We're at 12 years of design and 5 years behind the originally announced first launch of 2020 now. Space is hard, rocketry is harder and I wish them luck, but Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX: this was meant to be the Falcon 9 killer, but odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing.

>odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing. What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this confusing answer that the booste…

> New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025

12 missions is their upper limit of capacity, so it’s “at most 12”.

https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#105

Post by DrBazza »

baq wrote: post #98
ternnoburn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem convinced Starship will just "solve" space, but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship. But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true. I suspect the head start in infrastruct…

I’m not sure which profiles don’t make sense unless they can’t figure out payload doors. Stage 2 reuse means you can put up 50 tons or so of stage 3 in LEO for approximately free in current payload pricing terms, it’s a crazy number. (Advertised capacity of 100-150 tons is probably pointless and/or volume-limited anyway for a third stage.)

Not all profiles end up in orbit. At this point in time, reusuability sacrifices delta-v for fuel. If you want to launch scientific missions you want to escape Earth orbit. If we're going to land on Mars, we're going to need a lot of stuff sent there first.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#106

Post by DrBazza »

zizee wrote: post #10
ternnoburn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem convinced Starship will just "solve" space, but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship. But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true. I suspect the head start in infrastruct…

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

Non-orbital. But it can do that as well. Just sacrifice the rocket and use the landing fuel for more delta-v.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#107

Post by dotancohen »

HPsquared wrote: post #94
dotancohen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was enormous engineering effort put in with close coordination of physicists, but those 14 prior baffle configurations could have just as easily been 140. For a relevant example, even just the oil formulation for Water Displacement on the exterior of the steel Atlas rockets took 40 iterations. Hence naming the product WD-40.

I wonder how many of the other baffle designs and water displacement formulations would still have been "good enough" - not optimal but usable?

At least for the baffles: None. That's why they kept going. Presumably there are even better possibly designs, but they were not discovered because one that works was found.

I don't know about the prior WD formulations.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#108

Post by quotemstr »

basementcat wrote: post #99
quotemstr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If Starship can cheaply lift 150T to LEO, you can allocate some of that 150T to a propulsion system.

That means the customer has to buy an additional propulsion stage (plus time for integration testing and insurance in case it damages the launch vehicle, in case it becomes reusable). Also, it is not yet clear what the LEO payload capability of the vehicle is.

The cost of an expendable third stage is surely more than made up for the brute force cost savings of being able to launch 150T to LEO for the cost of fuel and a car wash.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#109

Post by ChuckMcM »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38
bryanlarsen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's not 100% reusable it's still likely to be cheaper than New Glenn. New Glenn uses extremely expensive methods of construction. Starship is assembled like a glorified water tank.

I'm not sure I see it that way, I wonder sometimes how much of the expensive construction can be systematized into something less expensive, and how much of Starship's "cheap" construction will remain as they work harder and harder to get to their reuse and turnaround goals. My intuition is that Starship will get more expensive to make over time and New Glenn less expensive but beyond that I can't say if they would m…

I'm looking at overall re-use numbers. Yes, boosters are now being certified for more launches which will, over time, bring both the average and the median number of launches per booster up.

In this conversation, I think the relevant point is that as the 'resusability' of the F9 booster has gone up, so has the cost to make a single booster. That's because they've added things and changed how they make them in order to boost re-usability. I expect the same evolution in Starship/Booster which will increase the unit cost in order to make them more reusable which will lower overall cost of launches because you can amortize those costs across multiple flights.

Re: After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

#110

Post by mannyv »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #35

Blue Origin is a funny company. I worked for TerraBella/SkySat/Google Satellite, Planet Labs and Kubos, each as a consultant/contractor/whatever. I struck up a conversation w/ Rob Meyerson @ a conference and told him what I was working on (mostly comms / ground station work, but with a tiny bit of GNC test infrastructure.) I mean, I'm not God's gift to rocket scientists, but... I was pretty heavily recruited by them…

Was this before or after Limp joined?
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