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

Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–588 of 588 posts

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#581

Post by panick21_ »

infinitewars wrote: post #268
xethos wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket. > It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon

The real concern was Russia, given SpaceX has always been a MIC project, now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome" .. a program which undermines M.A.D. and obviously greatly incentives sabotage. There just happened to be a ULA building nearby that was in range and investigated as a possible vector of attack.

People need to stop with this SpaceX has always been about golden dome theory. Its just a silly conspiricy theory that boils down to, lots of people have worked in the US space industry for a long time.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#582

Post by panick21_ »

locknitpicker wrote: post #207
wahern wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigor…

> Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. T…

> Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin.

I have been following the Space industry for 1-2 decades and I would love to know what you base this number on.

In terms of what we know, is that we know that at times in the 2010s BlueOrigin had almost the same amount of people while launching much less often, having many many fewer projects (like no human capsule, no Starlink). It is well known that Bezos spend more then 1 billion a year on BlueOrigin, people estimate 2-3 billion $. And that was in a period where their overwhelming spend was on New Glenn.

The idea that SpaceX spent 20x that even on Starship is insane and not credible.

In fact, every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 at a incredibly small budget, like literally vanishingly small compared to what New Glenn in spending. And then SpaceX iterated on the design while generating revenue.

New Glenn cost many, many billions before revenue and has a budget that is not that different from Starship will being more comparable to Falcon Heavy.

We also have other evidence. Lunar lander document from NASA suggested as much. NASA estimate that SpaceX would assume 50% of the cost, Blue bid was much higher and they were less willing to self finance (at least initially). Those numbers suggested that SpaceX and BlueOrigin lander cost were not that different, except of course the SpaceX lander had much higher capability.

And pretty much everything we know about Blue is that they spend a huge amount of money and are nowhere near as thrifty as SpaceX, specially compared to the same stage of development. SpaceX had to do that because they simply didn't have the finances. They couldn't just use the 1-3 billion $ of free money flowing into the company.

I open to being proven wrong here with some actual numbers. But I have been following this space in detail and try to look at the best numbers we know publicly and follow some companies that estimate these things. For example, for early SpaceX NASA did a study on cost and how SpaceX could do it at these costs. So we have some good knowledge on that period. We can also look at when SpaceX raised money and do some estimates of their budget and so on. If there are reliable numbers out-there that exist I don't know about, I would love know what you are talking about.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#583

Post by panick21_ »

GMoromisato wrote: post #426
steve1977 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say is Jeff Bezos' motivation behind it?

Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project. The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.

He might have bought the Washington Post as a vanity project, but that has not stopped him as using it as a propaganda tool.

> Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.

If that was his strategy he would have been much better of in actually investing his money in, actual space stations. There is a clear aspect of dick measuring with Musk. Like Blue literally threw out a lot of their plans because SpaceX was moving ahead of them so fast.

But instead of using SpaceX capability, they fight against it, sue SpaceX and do everything to compete with SpaceX.

For example, its well known how much Bezos wants to beat Musk and SpaceX in a major NASA competition. This has been reported on. They regularly change plans and reorient themselves and go 'all in' on some major project. This has been reported on quite a bit. Even when it is not profitable for them.

They have also de-empathized their Space station, partly because NASA is less interested. But if Bezos has 2-3 billion $ per year to burn, that would be his actual focus.

So this whole 'its all about getting to O'Neil vision' faster is really only part of the situation and do not really explain much of BlueOrigin strategy as company.

Maybe in the early days when Blue was basically a think-tank, this was true, but its not any longer.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#584

Post by panick21_ »

m4rtink wrote: post #383
kolinko wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t help much, sadly. Getting to orbit is about speed, not height — you need 27000 kph to get to orbit, and having an air launched platform would shave off 1k kph off it at most, perhaps 5k with some insane hypersonic engineering.

Main advantage of air launch is that you can better match your target inclination or perhaps even orbit timing - just drop the rocket at the right time in the right direction over the ocean. With a fixed launch site you always need to adjust for some difference of your point of origin versus the orbit you want to achieve.

Sure but the main disadvantage that you need another highly complex vehicle. Best case its a existing commercial platform like Virgin Orbit, but then you are limited by the size. Or you design another whole vehicle that more complex then the rocket itself.

And even then you need to have all the infrastructure flying and integrated rather as nice static pad.

You are also putting human in bigger danger unless you want to have another autonomous highly complex vehicle.

The benefits are simply better addressed by having 2-3 launch pads.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#585

Post by panick21_ »

RivieraKid wrote: post #260

Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.

It has been stupid from the beginning. They literally have been getting billion of $ in free no strings attached money without any market reality to back it up. Their 'approach' is basically only even possible because they literally have a basically infinite money glitch.

That they make a big deal out of this is just embarrassing, they act like they are competing, but they really don't. They are hobby project for the richest man on the planet and they don't compete for investment $ with other companies like RocketLab.

No sane investor would put their money into Blue Origin and their 'slow and steady' approach.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#586

Post by panick21_ »

thot_experiment wrote: post #106
SilverElfin wrote: post #3

Shame. I would love to see a competitor rein in SpaceX.

I agree with the sentiment, but while New Glenn is likely a more economical rocket, it doesn't even have the same payload capacity that Falcon Heavy had eight years ago. They are nowhere near a meaningful competitor yet, and if Starship actually gets up and running the mass to LEO gap between the two systems is like 5x+ with Starship aiming for full reusability while NG expends the second stage. Ofc even whimpy compe…

That New Glenn is more economical then Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy is a huge assumption and I will only believe it when I see it.

New Glenn is an incredibly large incredibly complex rocket with very, very complex and expensive engines. And both things are produced at rates much, much lower then Falcon Heavy.

Not to mention how optimized they are for reused and the fixed cost being split between launches.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#587

Post by scarab92 »

tremon wrote: post #568
scarab92 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very rarely is it appropriate to brainstorm widely. You want to start with a high level of discernment, focusing on the most plausible theories first, then broadening only if necessary. If someone started out with crazy low-discernment ideas, I’d probably ask them to leave to stop distracting everyone else.

You really do want breadth-first exploration, because once a group has identified and explored a few scenarios of high likelihood, the brain is already biased towards those events and more exotic scenarios are less likely to be imagined. Only after that first exploration should you narrow it down according to likelihood. Then, if those likely scenarios appear to be dead ends, you can circle back to the earlier less l…

Not convinced.

Creativity is much easier than reasoning and discernment.

Rarely do I need people to be more creative when problem solving, what I need is better judgement.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#588

Post by panick21_ »

ponector wrote: post #347
cmiles8 wrote: post #346

An unfortunate setback but rockets are hard. The fact that the US has multiple extremely active commercial ventures plus a vibrant government programs with launches every few days just highlights har far ahead the US has become in this area of tech. Many people have never seen a rocket launch ever and yet for a big part of the US looking up in the sky and watching the amazing sight of a rocket going through staging i…

Achievements of SpaceX are enormous. But is US actually far ahead? Both China and EU have pretty much the same capabilities for space exploration.

This is incorrect. If you look at the total size of Space sector, US dominates. Total amount of launches and sats, the US dominates. Total size of spend on civilian research, NASA dominates. Total spent by DoD, US dominates.

Amount of starups and new company formation in space, US dominates.

SpaceX alone dominates so completely that almost everything else is noise. And if you remove SpaceX, the US still ahead in most categories.

Post reply on HN