Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#31

Post by jofer »

nickik wrote: post #18
vermontdevil wrote: post #15

Biggest thing to me is the use of fuel here. Liquified natural gas has a lot of benefits. Simpler pressurization system, less soot etc The future is exciting.

One of the price advantages that Blue has over SpaceX is that they will fly with LNG rather then pure methane. Edit: Will New Glenn also not use a third gas for pressurisation? Like BFR?

Wait, I'm confused... LNG is pure methane. Are there rockets that use methane that aren't storing it as a liquid? I would have to guess that any rocket using methane would pressurize it enough to be in liquid form for storage, anyway. Surely they wouldn't use methane in a gas state... It would take up far too much space to be practical.

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#33

Post by valuearb »

brianwawok wrote: post #22
Retric wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several buyers are uninstered in a launch monopoly developing which is likely to prevent such a strategy from working. A more likely scenario is for a major player to gain a process advantage and leverage that into higher profits for decades like Intel vs AMD etc.

Intel leveraged monopolostic deals to hold the lead, not process advantage

Intel had a massive process advantage.

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#34

Post by valuearb »

Nokinside wrote: post #10
shasheene wrote: post #3

Anyone know the price to low-earth orbit using New Glenn? (perhaps can be inferred from Eutelsat or OneWeb's financial disclosures to regulators?) With Jeff Bezos selling $1 billion worth of Amazon shares a year to fund Blue Origin, will he choose to sell below cost for significant periods of time to stay competitive with the Falcon 9 and Heavy?

It would be interesting to see how the market share affects the profits and how these two companies plan to compete in long term. If Blue Origin and SpaceX compete in the same segment and divide the market, development and manufacturing costs per launch will increase for both. Assuming each will price the launch price so low that they get roughly 50 percent of the market they would get without the other, both lose ha…

A 3% profit margin isn’t modest, it’s catastrophic. With a their heavy capital requirements and massive technology lead they should be banking 30%. 3% says please shut us down first time we have a bad year.

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#35

Post by shmerl »

vermontdevil wrote: post #15

Biggest thing to me is the use of fuel here. Liquified natural gas has a lot of benefits. Simpler pressurization system, less soot etc The future is exciting.

The major benefit is that it's possible to synthesize methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Which is way easier let's say on Mars, than obtaining kerosene.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

http://www.co2club.it/agenda/abstracts/19_Barbarossa.pdf

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#36

Post by JshWright »

rwmj wrote: post #32

How are they planning to reuse the engine? Will they land the first stage like SpaceX? It took SpaceX a lot of attempts to get that right ...

That depends on who you mean by "they". BO is planning on landing the whole first stage, like SpaceX. BO has some experience doing stuff in that arena with their New Glenn rocket (there are a number of factors that make the New Glenn landings a lot easier than the Falcon 9 landings, but it's still very useful experience).

The BE-4 will also be used by ULA, on their Vulcan rocket. ULA has talked about detaching the engines from the first stage of the rocket and having them fall under parachutes (to be caught be a helicopter). It remains to be seen if they ever implement that (it kinda feels like a token nod to reuse to get people to stop asking question).

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#37

Post by nashashmi »

valuearb wrote: post #34
Nokinside wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see how the market share affects the profits and how these two companies plan to compete in long term. If Blue Origin and SpaceX compete in the same segment and divide the market, development and manufacturing costs per launch will increase for both. Assuming each will price the launch price so low that they get roughly 50 percent of the market they would get without the other, both lose ha…

A 3% profit margin isn’t modest, it’s catastrophic. With a their heavy capital requirements and massive technology lead they should be banking 30%. 3% says please shut us down first time we have a bad year.

What lead? They are a cockroach compared to boeing/lockheed/northrop. 3% is not just modest, it is a healthy sign they are in the game.

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#39

Post by philipkglass »

jofer wrote: post #31
nickik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the price advantages that Blue has over SpaceX is that they will fly with LNG rather then pure methane. Edit: Will New Glenn also not use a third gas for pressurisation? Like BFR?

Wait, I'm confused... LNG is pure methane. Are there rockets that use methane that aren't storing it as a liquid? I would have to guess that any rocket using methane would pressurize it enough to be in liquid form for storage, anyway. Surely they wouldn't use methane in a gas state... It would take up far too much space to be practical.

LNG is 85-95% methane, typically, with ethane making up most of the rest. It contains small amounts of propane and butane.

I hadn't known that SpaceX was using a special grade of ~100% liquefied CH4 as nickik says above.

EDIT: shale gas is richer in ethane and higher hydrocarbons than traditional sources of natural gas. Maybe SpaceX is sticking to 100% methane just so they don't have to ponder variability of composition depending on how gas is being extracted.

Re: Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time

#40

Post by caconym_ »

iamcreasy wrote: post #38

Anybody knows what's special about this engine besides it being able produces more thrust than SpaceX's Raptor engine?

It's a new commercially viable rocket engine (not a pork-barrel jobs program) of a size suitable for serious heavy-lift applications, designed and built in America.

Obviously SpaceX is doing similar things, but Merlin, Raptor, and the BE-4 are all part of a pretty exclusive club. I don't know why SpaceX chose to go with a greater number of smaller engines for their planned heavy lifter; I imagine it might be something to do with the difficulty of building bigger engines scaling non-linearly, and the fact that modern analysis and engineering ought to give us some advantages relative to the last time someone tried to make a really big rocket with a lot of little engines (Soviet N1).

Post reply on HN