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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

#121

Post by FireBeyond »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #39
bryanlarsen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship should be able to put 10t into LEO significantly cheaper than New Glenn can. Why would anybody pay more?

I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease off. Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Mu…

> He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025.

He did. He also said it'd be available in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024.

So yeah...

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

#122

Post by inglor_cz »

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…

"the easy and visible 80% that you can show off"

There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and the only methane-based engine that ever reached space.

AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an important problem, but it also means that many other complicated problems (such as precise exercise of the belly flop) are fully solved.

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

#123

Post by bamboozled »

trollied wrote: post #76
sebazzz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.

People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every time...

I think they’re asking the question: “Is there really value in the product” or is it a gimmick like the cyber truck.

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

#124

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Novosell wrote: post #8

How much data do you guys reckon they gather during this 24-second window? Gigabytes? Terabytes? I imagine they have redundant sensors for every measurement, if possible. The LHC generates 1 PB/s, though it filters it down to roughly 200MB/s[0]. I wonder how this compares. 0: https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_...

> Terabytes

Terabytes to petabytes. Much is noise. But you’re already making sensor-level keep/discard decisions due to the magnitude of the deluge.

Note that this includes cameras, of which modern telemetry includes many.

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

#125

Post by minetest2048 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #122
imtringued wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"the easy and visible 80% that you can show off" There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and the only methane-based engine that ever reached space. AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an important problem, but it also means that many other complicated problems…

> the only methane-based engine that ever reached space.

TQ-12 that is used by Zhuque-2 reached orbit first. Of course Raptor is much better, as TQ-12 is a simple gas generator engine

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

#126

Post by minetest2048 »

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…

You worked for Kubos? How is it? We were using KubOS the linux OS for our cubesats when they went bankrupt (?) and got acquired by someone else

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

#127

Post by ChuckMcM »

avmich wrote: post #116
grecy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I guess 10 flights per booster is an average over, say, the whole time since the first booster successfully landed. In the list by this link there are ~70 boosters, and I don't think Falcons flew ~700 missions yet, so 10 flights per booster looks on average approximately correct, even though some - even quite a few - boosters flew significantly more that 10 times.

And recently, many payloads had their booster fly exactly once because the payload needed some extra 'oomph' to get into orbit so the booster was going to fast and to high to re-enter. When you are pricing for an average of 10x booster re-use you need boosters to go much more than 10x because one booster going 1x is going to bring your average down quickly.

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

#128

Post by OhMeadhbh »

perihelions wrote: post #65
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper." I don't buy this. I think small startups like that can't get the economies of scale that would let them compete on price, for any payload. So long as they are targeting low-value niche markets like one-off smallsats, they won't have the revenue to support that. At what Rocket Labs is currently chargi…

I think the $2m per Starship launch is "asperational." As in... they "aspire" to have launch costs that low. I do not believe Starship launches are currently as low as $2m (or $10m, which is the other figure I saw mentioned.) I believe their current launch cost (cost to launch the rocket, not the price they charge people to launch their payload) is considerably higher than $50m.

But... yes... if you can re-use your launch vehicle, then per-launch cost SHOULD go down. But at the current time, after 6 launches, only one booster has been snagged by the chop-sticks. The Starships themselves have NOT been re-used.

So if you're going to compare Starship with Electron, you should compare costs of Starship after it's fully re-usable with Electron after it's as re-usable as it's intended to be.

Rocket Lab claims they're at 7.5m per launch, but again, THAT price may come down as they use re-usable components on subsequent launches. So instead of comparing costs of Starship sometime in the future with Electron now, compare Starship sometime in the future with Electron sometime in the future.

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

#129

Post by OhMeadhbh »

IshKebab wrote: post #102
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who do I talk to at SpaceX RIGHT NOW to launch my small sat?

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

#130

Post by OhMeadhbh »

imtringued wrote: post #67
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration. >Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe 150 tons if they are lucky. >Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be. 60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a fully expendable…

I was going off data from the wikipedia, so yeah, it may not be the most current or most accurate. It's in the ballpark, though.

And most of what I care about is small-sats, so Falcon Heavy's are more than enough lift for me. But yeah, other people may have have a completely different set of requirements and see the Heavy in a different light.

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