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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

#71

Post by zizee »

Good luck to them. SpaceX is great, but healthy competition is always important at driving progress. I'd like to take a trip to space one day, and even if SpaceX nails rapid reusability, the best chance of them being motivated to pass on launch savings is a competitor hot on their heals.

I would also love to see Blue Origin spend more time on building space habitation. If Starship does bring heavy lift costs right down, I want to see all the interesting things that people start putting into space

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

#72

Post by bamboozled »

mattigames wrote: post #6
tahoeskibum wrote: post #5

I'm a big SpaceX fan, nonetheless I am looking forward to some competition for SpaceX. If New Glenn succeeds, it might become a workhorse like Falcon 9/Heavy. And don't forget New Armstrong is the next generation, should be in the works.

I'm sure that as the new pseudo-president he will avoid doing anything that might sabotage SpaceX competitors.

It's sad that this has to come into it, but given both of the companies CEOs "kissing the ring" so to speak, is there really any competition here, or just politics now?

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

#73

Post by sebazzz »

ternnoburn wrote: post #4
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.

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…

Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.

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

#74

Post by Retric »

zizee wrote: post #70
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn’t justify why it’s ridiculous, it’s just a coincidence.

I doubt SpaceX’s internal costs are ~100m/falcon 9 launch, but companies need a markup to be profitable. 100m - 2B is a huge range covering everything from giving up on reusability and paying back R&D over a small number of flights to significant success resulting in a 90% reduction in costs per kg to LEO.

Also, having spent 5B on R&D and doing 5 test flights up to this point works out to 1 billion per flight. That’s not the actual marginal cost per flight, but when people say how expensive each shuttle flight was that’s the number they use. Nothing guarantees they continue to do Starship launches, they could fail it’s among the potential outcomes.

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

#75

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #55
jiggawatts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see how that makes any sense. Starship is 100t dry; simply the fuel costs of a launch will necessarily be higher than disposable alternatives.

fuel is cheap

most expensive part are the engines

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

#76

Post by trollied »

sebazzz wrote: post #73
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…

Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.

People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every time...

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

#77

Post by frodo8sam »

dotancohen wrote: post #69
amluto wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not pure luck though, they tried 15 different baffle configurations. Would of course be easier to filter configuration in simulations.

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

#78

Post by bryanlarsen »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #39
bryanlarsen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 Mu…

Those Starship costs you quote assume an expended booster and the New Glenn costs assume a recovered booster.

We don't have to use Musk's cost figures for Starship. Starship has been built in the open and can be relatively accurately cost estimated by experts.

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

#79

Post by dotancohen »

frodo8sam wrote: post #77
dotancohen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not pure luck though, they tried 15 different baffle configurations. Would of course be easier to filter configuration in simulations.

There was enormous engineering effort put in with close coordination of physicists, but those 14 prior baffle configurations could have just as easily been 140.

For a relevant example, even just the oil formulation for Water Displacement on the exterior of the steel Atlas rockets took 40 iterations. Hence naming the product WD-40.

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

#80

Post by zizee »

Retric wrote: post #74
zizee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That doesn’t justify why it’s ridiculous, it’s just a coincidence. I doubt SpaceX’s internal costs are ~100m/falcon 9 launch, but companies need a markup to be profitable. 100m - 2B is a huge range covering everything from giving up on reusability and paying back R&D over a small number of flights to significant success resulting in a 90% reduction in costs per kg to LEO. Also, having spent 5B on R&D and doing 5 test…

It's ridiculous because the much ridiculed SLS has a launch cost of 2 billion dollars. If you think SpaceX is throwing billions of dollars into developing a vehicle that costs thisuch to launch, you clearly haven't been following SpaceX at all.

You know there is going to be more that 5 flights, and you know people in this thread are not amortizing total R&D into flight costs. People are talking about 68 million per flight for New Glenn, which no doubt has has many hundreds of millions on R&D spend, and hasn't flown one time.

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