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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

Honestly just roll my eyes now at these pissing contest blogposts from Bezos. He does his team a disservice by suggesting that what they are achieving is actually more advanced than what SpaceX has done - it all looks like the approach the Soviets took in trumpeting various "firsts" in space in the 60s as the US methodically built capability far beyond what the Russians could sustain.

I am impressed by both companies' ambition, and SpaceX clearly has both the time and money advantage over Blue Origin. Let your accomplishments speak for themselves.

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> US methodically built capability far beyond what the Russians could sustain.

You know what year it is, right? This is not 1998. Unfortunately US "sustainable" technology is mothballed and we are flying into space on Soviet technology. I hate the commies on principle, but at the end of day you gotta accept reality here.

> Soviets took in trumpeting various "firsts" in space

Also I can think of just a few firsts off the top of my head :

First satellite, first ICBM, first human in space, first probe to reach moon, first EVA.

Then looking up on Wikipedia I found: first probe launch to Mars, first probe launched to Moon, first probe to reach another plane (Venus), first unmanned rendezvous and docking, first permanently manned space station.

And even the first fully automated flight of a space shuttle system. Which they did to show off, and then also realized "it was found too expensive to operate as a civilian launcher". It took US how many years and disasters and money to realize that?.

Ontop of all of this.. ULA's heavy lift capability is entirely dependent on Russian engines to reach orbit. Made much worse by the fact ULA had until SpaceX arrived, complete monopoly of the US defence market.

It does make me wonder how much of this is just follow on from the exact events you described. Specifically that the Russians were for the longest time far ahead in liquid fuel rocket engine technology.

> ULA's heavy lift capability is entirely dependent on Russian engines to reach orbit.

Huh? ULA's heavy lift capability is dependent on the Delta IV (specifically the Heavy variant), which does not use Russian engines. ULA's most economic launcher, Atlas V, uses Russian engines however.

Valid. Though as you said, it's not an overly economic platform.

Indeed. The Delta IV Heavy is priced out at above $1 billion per launch, and a regular Delta IV launch is probably about 2-3x as costly as an Atlas V, which itself is about 2x as costly as a Falcon 9.

They still are very ahead — of course, the Merlin and RS-25 are amazing designs, but they're still more of the brute-force American methodology that made the Saturn V so brutally effective at travelling to the moon. The Russian aerospace industry has always tried to approach rocketry with a lot more emphasis on finesse, precision, and clever engineering solutions — the astonishing reliability of the Soyuz is a testament to this. von Braun and his team at Marshall always pulled off amazing technological feats, but at the expense of greatly increased complexity and less efficiency. That legacy has largely carried on to the present day; I hope that this newer generation of American LVs (Falcon 9.1R, Vulcan) will turn things around in the opposite direction.

If it's a pissing contest that accelerates the rate at which we progress space travel and technology then that's fine by me.

Also I feel like perhaps you're underselling their achievements here, it's still impressive and it's still incredible progress in space travel.

Good luck to them both.

What's great about Blue Origins long term is the frequency of launches. Blue Origins will be launching a rocket every day years before SpaceX will, because of obvious differences in rocket magnitude and mission.

There's a fair amount of boilerplate that comes with launching a rocket. From the command terminals (and associated IRL command structure) to the pod's parachute and rocket assisted landing , all components will be used and tested A LOT thanks to Blue Origins' strategy.

Assuming Blue Origins learns as much as possible and iterates on any sliver of weakness, we as a planet can be far more confident in the human carrying structures that are used to transport space-to-surface. SpaceX undeniably has more impactful and impressive rocket technology, but I'll always respect the lower level work Blue Origins is focusing on.

Space is really, really, really hard. Everyone wants to go up, I enjoy how much Blue Origins wants to come back down. :)

Space-X does have a problem with launch rate. They have a backlog of 50 launch orders and are about two years behind. They stopped posting future launch dates on their web site last year; comparing old launch manifests with new ones made their slip rate too clear.

The plan was to open their Brownsville TX launch facility this year, but they've having foundation problems and may slip to 2018.[1]

The first Falcon Heavy is supposed to launch this spring/summer. That will be a major milestone. Nobody has launched anything that big since the Saturn V.

[1] http://www.krgv.com/story/30994915/foundation-problems-delay...

> They stopped posting future launch dates on their web site last year;

The people at Wikipedia have added up between 20 and 30 launches scheduled for 2016. But obviously lack of an official list makes is speculative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

Out of honest curiosity, can you explain the nature of the "lower level work" BO is focusing on that SpaceX is not ?

BO is sub orbital meaning their rockets don't actually break out of the Earth's gravitational field. What they are doing is hard, but much easier than what SpaceX is doing.

For the BO missions, their rockets travel Mach 3.7 (3.72 was the exact top speed from a previous launch). This is called Suborbital. In comparison, since SpaceX is trying to break out of the earth's gravitational pull, its first stage goes around Mach 10 (per the media package of CRS-3).

This article does a better job putting things in laymans terms:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9793220/blue-origin-vs-sp...

In short, the Falcon 9 has unbelievably more thrust than the BO rocket due to being designed for carrying payloads into outer space, not simply small objects into suborbital flight. Both are necessary and both are amazing.

Sorry to be pedantic, but there's no "breaking out of Earth's gravitational field" here in either case.

The essential difference is the huge velocity required for orbit, the kinetic energy for which goes up with the square of that velocity.

Reuse is also much easier for BO - their rocket goes straight up and down.

I believe I might have completely misunderstood what "lower level work" meant. I took it for "more fundamental work" in opposition to "easier work". My bad

Worth noting though, that as mentioned (announced) in this post, they are working on an orbital vehicle too. Part of this is the development of the BE-4 engine, which will also be used on the orbital ULA Vulcan rocket.

> Blue Origins will be launching a rocket every day years before SpaceX will

I would stake my life on you being dead wrong, that's how fucking positive I am. It's such a silly thing to suggest! SpaceX has made dozens of launches, Blue Origin has made a couple ! What in the world implies to you that their rate of scaling will soon outpace Spacex??

The fuel cost of a Falcon 9 launch is ~$200k. In a perfect world (tons of launches), lets say (generously) that we get launch costs down a million a pop, all things included.

BO's New Shepard is shooting for something like $100k or less per flight. The rocket is much smaller, uses less fuel, and is much easier to move around on the ground, reducing fixed launch costs. It's at least an order of magnitude lower in price, for a completely different service (suborbital tourism), which will make it accessible to a much larger market.

Larger market? I think not. The space launch biz is populated by hundreds of different companies, all wanting to spend millions or billions to get a useful sat into orbit. BO is looking to a small group of billionaires with the money to throw 30-50k to spend a few minutes vomiting. And of those, only the ones young enough to participate, a rare thing amongst billionaires.

(1) The launch is not gentle. Everyone will be strapped tightly into chairs, ready for launch escape rocket thrust if necessary.

(2) Time weightless will be measured in minutes, probably less than ten. So nobody is getting out of the chairs. At best they get a few minutes of watching pens hover, unless that is everything has to be secure. In such cases only the vomit will float.

(3) The landing options are not great. Soft if all goes to plan, but parachutes/hard if no. So everyone stays in chairs. No old people and/or heart conditions need apply.

How many people pay to ride the vomit comet every year? How many of them are billionaires? That's BO's market.

Well, I'm not even a millionaire and I would very gladly sell my house to go to the space, even for a few minutes.

Best thing is: with that money, I can go twice!

cc. Here ya go: https://www.gozerog.com/

The Falcon 9 first stage accounts for only 3/4th of the launch cost[1]. Given the $60M+ [2] total current launch cost, that still leaves $15M even if booster reuse is free.

SpaceX no longer has plans to develop second stage reusability for the Falcon[3].

[1] http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/spacex-press-conference-s... section "Question on the changes to the Falcon 9"

[2] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

[3] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10391/how-does-spac...

There's a number of reasons, most notably rocket size. I'm not sure that SpaceX will ever have a rocket every day, and that's okay. I realize it's heresy to question Musk's omniscience, but it's very possible to outscale SpaceX, and that in no way diminishes what they have and will accomplish.

You're assuming a large demand for space tourism and little suborbital hops. Once the novelty wears off and the 0.1% who have the money and want to experience it have gotten their ride, then what is their business model exactly?

If SpaceX get their launch cost per Falcon 9 down to the close order of $1M, and succeed in re-using Dragon 2 for multiple flights, then that's a price on the order of $100-200K per seat to orbit.

If Bigelow then have an inflatastation on orbit -- made a whole lot more plausible with Falcon Heavy on-stream and semi-reusable -- then there's a plausible market for real space tourism (as in, stay in a hotel for multiple nights in orbit) for under $1M, possibly considerably less.

What's the next step? Some kind of Earth Departure Stage and a lunar fly-by?

Just speculating here, but Blue Origin's current rocket is purely sub-orbital. It'll tap out the $100K space tourism market really fast. While SpaceX is building a commercial launch manifest and the infrastructure to support orbital and trans-lunar space tourism as a hobby on the side (I'd expect Musk to go this route with free rides for billionaire potential investors when he's gearing up for Mars).

Oh, I'll bet National Geographic is already thinking about ways and means of recording and monetizing a "Return to the Moon" mega-documentary before 2030. It'd probably be do-able by 2022 for on the order of $1Bn with Apollo-levels of risk and the equivalent of a Block 1 LEM (two astronauts to surface, 24-48 hour excursion, no rover); assume half the money goes on developing the LEM and the rest on Falcon Heavy launches. By 2030 it'll be the same price, but a whole lot more comprehensive (a 4-6 body crew, multi-week excursion).

Utility of Blue Origin's current platform in developing such a "real" space tourism market? Approximately zip.

Yeah this is basically what I'm thinking. It seems like Blue Origin might be able to do some brisk trade for awhile in Russian billionnaires who can drop $100k to hop up into space and impress whatever supermodel they're trying to woo this week. I don't see that ever getting to a launch-a-day.

I did look up the company, though, and they plan on building vehicles that can compete with the Falcon 9. At that point the competition would start to get more interesting since that opens the doors to everything you just mentioned SpaceX could wind up doing. SpaceX is launching Falcon 9's now though...

Shipping perhaps? Is there a place for science that is covered by satellites or weather balloons? Perhaps deploy emergency connectivity faster than a satellite can be launched? Just thinking out loud here, I'm sure there's tons of applications I haven't considered.

>Perhaps deploy emergency connectivity faster than a satellite can be launched?

New Shepard points straight up for the entire duration of the burn (110 seconds), because the goal is to get the payload to just barely 100km and then land more or less in the same spot. Any object on this ballistic trajectory will fall down to Earth very quickly.

Project Loon is better for communications equipment - the balloons stay up for longer, they are closer to the ground (essential for low power applications), and they're much cheaper to launch. https://www.google.com/loon/

the 0.1% could be hundreds of thousands of people?

I love that Neil deGrasse Tyson quote, "Asteroids are nature's way of asking, 'How's that space program coming along?'"

Sounds like a rather weak comparison, as USSR did manage to get a set of impressive results in space - at least as American specialists were characterizing them.

Not sure if SpaceX really has more money than BlueOrigin - that used to be the other way around. Time advantage is clearly on the side of SpaceX though.

Like what? I'm aware that they were early, but did they accomplish more once the US was landing on the moon?

Once US was landing on the moon? What kind of achievements you'd like to have?

Planetary probes, like Lunokhods - several weeks of Moon exploration? Or Luna-16 - automatic probe which brought lunar soil to Earth? You can say that's less impressive than Apollos, and I'd agree, but that still different things - which USA couldn't do at the time, and those programs had some advantages over Apollos too. Or a series of Venera probes, including landers? Mastery of automated docking? Orbital stations - starting with Salyut-1 - with myriads of experiments (medical, industrial etc.)? Rocket engines - more advanced than American ones by such criteria as working process (gas-gas was tested during 1960's in RD-270 with single chamber thrust rather similar to F-1), Isp and mass ratio (NK-33), total thrust (RD-170)? VEGA comet fly-by?

By which criteria these don't count?

Actually a Venera lander was the first and only (so far) which returned a picture from the surface of Venus. Brilliant engineering imho. Not to mention the MIR space station.

They landed probes on Venus that sent back photos. No one else has done that. And it's not the easiest thing given the surface temperature is 462C.

Look on the bright side - at least you don't need parachutes!

They did use parachutes a bit eg. Venera 14: "After entering the atmosphere a parachute was deployed. At an altitude of about 50 km the parachute was released and simple airbraking was used the rest of the way to the surface." The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 94x Earths so it slows stuff quite well.

It survived 57 minutes before cooking.

(Wikipedia)

Heh. True. What struck me when reading about these probes was more the final descent - dense balls of metal and electronics like the Venera probes had terminal velocities around a walking pace.

They got several probes onto Mars. That's just off the top of my head, though. The Soviet space program was no joke. Though it may have been a combination of brute force and revisionist history over their failings. I personally suspect there are a lot more human corpses in orbit than anyone knows about.

Well, USSR had a really hard time with Mars landers. AFAIK, they got just one landed - and it stopped working shortly after that. But that one landed before Vikings.

People forget how Mars was known as a graveyard for probes for many years. It's only fairly recently that anyone including the US has been able to deliver payloads to Mars with any reliability.

>I personally suspect there are a lot more human corpses in orbit than anyone knows about.

I wouldn't be so sure, since we kind of have to know about them so we don't crash into them.

Well they would be officially registered as unmanned craft.

They were also pioneering in the space station/space habitat arena. We have the Russians to thank for a lot of the technology aboard the ISS, both when it was being built and to this day.

There's also the fact they were the first in space with a true orbit. Whereas Alan Shepard was simply on a ballistic trajectory, much like Bezos's launch a couple of weeks ago.

Also Mir.. They still have more knowledge when it comes to staying in space for longer periods of time. Landing on Venus..

The US's one up is landing on the moon.

> He does his team a disservice by suggesting that what they are achieving is actually more advanced than what SpaceX has done

What does this refer to? That single joke tweet?

There's also this fragment of the article:

> When you do a vertical landing, you’re solving the classic inverted pendulum problem, and the inverted pendulum problem gets a bit easier as the pendulum gets a bit bigger. Try balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger. Now try it with a broomstick. The broomstick is simpler because its greater moment of inertia makes it easier to balance. We solved the inverted pendulum problem on New Shepard with an engine that dynamically gimbals to balance the vehicle as it descends. And since New Shepard is the smallest booster we will ever build, this carefully choreographed dance atop our plume will just get easier from here.

It could be read as a jab at SpaceX.

Blue Origin has actually been around longer than SpaceX. Both companies were also rans of the first XPrize.

I don't know who started this pissing contest but from what I heard it started when Bezos hired a top engineer away from SpaceX for Blue Origin, basically poaching.

Either way, Bezos can p--s all he wants with his shorter rocket that carries less and goes to lower height when SpaceX rockets carry more and go higher.

And not to mention Elon literally bet his farm to get it going during hard times...

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