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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

#61

Post by zizee »

ternnoburn wrote: post #54
zizee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles? An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which…

100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop. It's a made up number for the press. I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!

But it's not just that guy.

> Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.

So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing the booster? What happens when they have optimised production further?

Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your judgement?

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-new-es...

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

#62

Post by zizee »

ternnoburn wrote: post #16
zizee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

Smaller launch to a specific orbit. As an analogy, freight trains are one of the most efficient, cheapest ways to move freight. But moving my laundry to the laundromat is better served by another vehicle.

This changes if SpaceX can get full reusability working, which they have been making very steady progress towards.

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

#63

Post by imtringued »

teractiveodular wrote: post #2

We're at 12 years of design and 5 years behind the originally announced first launch of 2020 now. Space is hard, rocketry is harder and I wish them luck, but Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX: this was meant to be the Falcon 9 killer, but odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing.

>odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing.

What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this confusing answer that the booster is "already obsolete" even though they have planned to launch three more "obsolete" boosters after the first successful catch.

Everyone is bragging how fast SpaceX is, but they are starting to drag their feet. It's like those people who build a demo that looks like the product is almost finished, but it turns out those were the easy and visible 80% that you can show off, now you're left with the hard and time consuming 20% and you're going to run into delays like everyone else.

And then there is the fact that New Glenn is going to launch on 5th of January and attempt landing on the first flight. Barring an explosion on the way to orbit, New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 including a moon landing of Blue Moon MK1.

Your comment comes across as pessimistically predicting the failure of the first launch or being ignorant that it will launch in four days.

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

#64

Post by imtringued »

avmich wrote: post #12
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…

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...

Obviously any mission that goes beyond LEO that does not aeorbrake at the destination, because that means you're expending an upper stage with aerodynamic surfaces for no reason.

Also anything that does a direct TLI or TMI, because you will have to stop for in-orbit refuelling.

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

#65

Post by perihelions »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37
zizee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

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 charging, $7.5 million [0], it's within the realm of possibility you could even launch an entire reusable Starship with a one-cubesat payload for less than that. (The target figure Musk uses is $2 million/launch; take that with the appropriate bucket of salt).

How many tens of billions of R&D have gone into SpaceX, and how many launches are they able to amortize that cost over? How many decades have they invested in their manufacturing processes? Do their competitors' engines roll off factory assembly lines?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron

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

#66

Post by signatoremo »

ternnoburn wrote: post #54
zizee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles? An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which…

100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop. It's a made up number for the press. I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!

Are you arguing in good faith? What are you based on to say $100mil is vaporware? Most commercial flights (i.e. non-Starlink) are priced starting at $70 millions - [0], increased from $60m previously. That’s not for the press, although government customers such as NASA often pay much more. SpaceX is very dominant at this point that they’d be foolish to charge under cost.

And then there are Starlink launches. They made money on it on 2024, according to Shotwell, so launch cost must be way lower than external price.

[0] - https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

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

#67

Post by imtringued »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #37
zizee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?

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 we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO

Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration.

>Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons

This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe 150 tons if they are lucky.

>Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable you want your launch to be.

60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a fully expendable launch. Falcon heavy also hasn't carried payloads heavier than 18 tons so far. So this number is something you can whip out to pretend that New Glenn sucks and yet completely miss the mark.

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

#68

Post by imtringued »

ternnoburn wrote: post #54
zizee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles? An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which…

100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop. It's a made up number for the press. I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do some basic analysis and not just believe everything they hear from that guy!

$100m might be correct though. Elon Musk himself has said that just the hardware for each Starship test flight has cost $100 million. This doesn't count all the hardware that hasn't flown so in practice each test flight was even more expensive than this, but there is no reason to argue that Starship will cost more than $200 million for an expendable launch and maybe a quarter of that assuming reuse via booster catch.

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

#69

Post by dotancohen »

amluto wrote: post #27
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 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 r…

Combustion in the chamber happens at roughly the speed of sound in the F/O mixture. I don't know what the speed of sound in gCH4 is, but it's probably within an order of magnitude of air - air at 250 bar.

This is actually extremely important to model. Early F1 engines (Saturn V, not motorsport) were exploding and the engineers pretty much got lucky with the baffle design. Having a suite of sensors and then a computer model it would have saved lots of hardware and time - and really would have pretty much assured success. They were unsure if they'd succeed right up until they did.

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

#70

Post by zizee »

Retric wrote: post #51
zizee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost. If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves the mission profiles? An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has demonstrated great progress on reusability of the booster, which…

2 billion at the high end isn’t actually unreasonable when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation. There’s a have a fairly linear relationship between rocket payload and size, and for large structures going big tends to increase cost per pound so ~10x the size resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic. If and only if they the thing is both rapi…

2 billion is ridiculous, and I can only imagine that number was a misunderstanding SpaceX/Musk saying that they were spending 2 billion in a full year of R&D on Starship.

https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-approach...

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