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

Formula 1 car has over 300 sensors and generates 1.5Gb a lap.

So I would imagine this is generating hundreds of megabytes.

You are going to be limited by what you can transfer over radio.

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

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 but was working at Amazon and didn't want to leave, then spent some time nursing a family member through cancer treatments. Finally I'm ready to talk to them and I start with back-channel chats to make sure they still have open reqs. They do so I informally talk about specific things I've done and what I might do at BO. Finally I put my resume together and submit it to the hiring manager I had been talking about, emphasizing the bits he said he was interested in. 15 minutes later I'm rejected for the position they had been recruiting me for.

I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the shop.

Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to optimize complete functional or value chains is when something breaks.

Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar" to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the number of engineers.

I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone weird.

I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in an intense experience to check out their jobs page.

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 satellites into LEO so Amazon could compete with Starlink and feed Amazon's Ground Station as a Service offering.

If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO, Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons and Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.

I'm not a heavy lift sales-person, but I've been in the room when they discussed what they thought they could sell to govt / mil / commercial customers. So take this with a little bit of salt... Seems to me BO was targeting a slightly smaller launch vehicle than SpaceX was going with so they could decouple schedule with Amazon's Kuiper Project. You don't want to have that cool new rocket you developed dependent on a satellite constellation that gets delayed. So you have a rocket that would be easier to fill with a number of small to medium sized satellites to LEO or (fewer) to GEO.

And like other people on the thread have commented, it seems BO is a decade behind SpaceX, so... yeah... a big rocket that competes with Starship is pretty risky for BO.

And yes, I understand that BO is independent from Amazon, but from what I've seen this is just so they can execute on a schedule that isn't determined by AMZN's board of directors. They seem pretty closely related, just from talking with Kuiper, GSaaS and BO engineers.

I don't work for any of the above mentioned companies and have no insider information. YMMV. Just my guesses from watching some of the personalities involved for the last 30 years.

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 Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship.

This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal...