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

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 148 posts

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

#21
post #12

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 hope Blue Origin succeeds too, but I'm not sure which mission profiles wouldn't be served best by the Starship in comparison to other launchers. There could be some ultra-light ones, where the cost for the whole launch is less than refueling the Starship, but...

[deleted]

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

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I'm rooting for any and all US launch providers to succeed, but I don't think this is true. Starship at full reusability will be better than any other launcher for every single mission profile imaginable.

There's simply no way one vehicle will be the best option in every case. If you have a small satellite you need placed somewhere unique, firing up a huge launch vehicle makes no sense.

It does if it's still cheaper than any other rocket.

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

#23
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_...

You can fly to space with a 40ms control loop. It's a surprisingly low accuracy affair especially compared to particle physics. You're more likely capturing some actuator positions and discrete outputs and ensuring that everything sequences and responds to limits correctly, more on the level with an automobile CAN bus capture than it is anything else, and likely less than even 1 gigabyte.

There's likely more data stored in the video files from the cameras that observed the test than test data itself.

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

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some references of New Glenn being positioned as a Falcon 9 killer by any industry professionals, commentators or press with credibility (at the risk of no true Scotsman)? This was certainly thrown around with Tesla, but it's not something I've personally come across with SpaceX. Regardless, if semiconductors have taught us anything over the last decade, strong competition is essential for a healthy marke…

Boeing will probably buy one of the also rams to improve their offerings

Can an also ran buy another also ran? Does that even make sense?

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

#25
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_...

[deleted]

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

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's simply no way one vehicle will be the best option in every case. If you have a small satellite you need placed somewhere unique, firing up a huge launch vehicle makes no sense.

It does if it's still cheaper than any other rocket.

Your launch price may somehow be cheaper; although, that's incredibly unlikely. Anyways as your insurance underwriter I'm going to jack up the rate on you so high for that launch it will no longer be cheaper.

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

#27
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 would imagine far less. The LHC captures many channels of sensors (for spatial resolution) and captures at very high frequency (because the time scales involved are fast and also because LHC is doing time-of-flight measurements).

I doubt that a rocket has anywhere near as many sensors (have you seen pictures of the LHC’s instruments? They’re basically all sensor), and I also expect that the timescales involved in rocketry are rather longer than in high energy physics.

Here’s a slide deck about ATLAS building an ASIC that reads something at 25 picosecond precision:

https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/at...

Unless someone at Blue Origin is trying to localize a specific part of their flame by time of flight of light, I don’t see why time resolution even close to that would be at all useful. Perhaps they’re very fancy and want to tell which part of their rocket initiated an explosion by time of flight of sound, but that’s rather less demanding.

With the caveat, of course, that LHC events don’t explosively destroy the instrumentation. If you want useful telemetry in the last milliseconds before a rocket failure, you had better seriously harden your data logger or have very low latency transmission to a remote receiver :)

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

#28
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 would wager the actually important data is far smaller. A single camera would probably dominate throughput

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's simply no way one vehicle will be the best option in every case. If you have a small satellite you need placed somewhere unique, firing up a huge launch vehicle makes no sense.

It does if it's still cheaper than any other rocket.

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
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