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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

#131

Post by OhMeadhbh »

minetest2048 wrote: post #126
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

I really enjoyed working with the KubOS team (though I was more on the Major Tom side.) They were a great bunch -- everyone involved on the project has my highest recommendation.

I was definitely worried when I heard KubOS (the company) was struggling. I don't know too much about Xplore, but I think I saw Tyler was working there now, so there's SOME continuity at least.

KubOS (the codebase) doesn't look like it's received any love in the last couple of years, which is sort of sad. Some really bright people poured a lot of time and effort into it. Just looking at the contributors list: Ryan, Catherine, Kyle and Tim... all very bright people and a pleasure to work with.

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

#132

Post by OhMeadhbh »

mannyv wrote: post #110
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?

It was about two or three years ago for me. Not sure when Limp joined (actually... not sure who Limp is.) Oh wait... google is your friend... David Limp... new CEO... Looks like he joined in December 2023. So this was before that.

I overlapped with David at Amazon and had a few interactions with him and some of his direct reports. Don't know if that's good or bad; pretty sure I didn't embarrass myself there.

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

#133

Post by donavanm »

starik36 wrote: post #42
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…

I am going out on a limb and say that Project Kuiper satellites themselves are nowhere near ready. Amazon is supposed to launch 50% of the constellation of ~6000 into orbit by July 2026 or risk losing frequencies. So you would think there would be some urgency. Amazon purchased pretty much all remaining Atlas 5 launches from ULA. This is a proven rocket and ready to fly. Why aren't the satellites being launched? The…

I am unfortunately skeptical. As you say theyve got two test units in orbit and every day the frequency allocations tick closer. Whats the launch schedule look like for 3000 successful units inside 18 months? What about the in house build process. I havent heard anything that reflects the exponential process growth & delivery theyll need.

That first real launch also starts the recurring costs ticking on the limited orbit lifetime of that hardware. I havent thought through the numbers in a while, but something like a billion or three per year to maintain the constellation? Swag (an optimistic?) $2m satellite and $2m launch cost and 7 year lifetime, thats an yearly average of $1.7b in “maintenance” to keep the very minimal constellation up there. Easily double if their

Im also pretty skeptical of their business. AFAICT its a bunch of ex telecoms and space/defense contractors. So theyre going to try and soak US DoD for connectivity with a more uh, “reliable”, company and a consumer side of “space comcast.” Im pretty skeptical on consumer space “broadband” due to the density problems. And I use comcast as a perjorative for their business & network interop coming from CDN & ISP land.

Lastly on a positive note, I dont expect the same employee resignation bloodbath that AMZN at large is going through at the moment. Kuiper (afaik) has been pretty top down “you shall come in to the office” the whole time, so any rto mandate is unlikely to change the existing experience.

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

#134

Post by mauvehaus »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #129
IshKebab wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Sales? Accounts receivable?

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

#135

Post by mmustapic »

numpad0 wrote: post #17
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…

Is Starship really not following the exact step of N-1 && VentureStar?

N-1 failed because of a lack of time/funding, not because the design was inherently flawed.

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

#136

Post by verzali »

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_...

I'd be surprised if it was more than a gigabyte. I work in spacecraft operations and the sampling and telemetry rates are not that high. At most they'll be monitoring a few hundred parameters at the order of 10Hz. That doesn't add up to a lot over 24 seconds. The biggest contribution to the data budget is most likely to be the video.

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

#137

Post by OhMeadhbh »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #118
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…

I think the cheapest smallsat launches now available are being pushed out of the Japanese airlock on the ISS. It's very popular. Really limits your options in terms of height/inclination but it's been popular enough that they're almost at capacity.

Aye, NanoRacks is pretty cool. I often bump into some of their people at conferences. They're cool and competent as well.

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

#138

Post by OhMeadhbh »

mauvehaus wrote: post #134
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sales? Accounts receivable?

Give me a phone number. Electron and NanoRacks have phone numbers (email, actually.) I can contact them and get info on dates and costs. SpaceX will give me info on Falcon launches but not Starship launches (and they pick the orbit.)

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

#139

Post by IshKebab »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #129
IshKebab wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

rideshare@spacex.com

I just googled SpaceX rideshare, it was the very first result.

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

#140

Post by numpad0 »

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…

F9 reusable is like $70M. $7.5M is already changes. Starship at $2M is not an innovation class event, it has to be some side effect of WW3.
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