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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

Mentioning Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the same breath as SpaceX seems disingenuous. It's like comparing an horse+cart with a modern car.

Maybe Electron and Virgin Orbit are in the race, but these hop 100km (or 80!) up and about 5 miles downrange are nowhere near the same league.

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Understanding the difference between orbital and suborbital space flight need not cause one to be cynical and negative about things.

Especially since blue origin has a design that can scale up quickly, as SpaceX did with falcon 1 to 9

Falcon 1 put a payload into orbit though, so it's really not the same. Falcon 9's first flight was less than 2 years after Falcon 1 made it to orbit.

For myriad reasons Blue can't just "scale up quickly" in any meaningful way from NS to New Glenn, hence why it's going to take them 8+ years between the first NS and first NG launches. Being realistic about this is not cynical and negative.

that's a good point, i think orbit was the minimum planned for Falcon1. I don't believe SpaceX every just went to the karman line and back. I think all of their flights have been either crashes or fully orbital.

> Think all of their flights have been either crashes or fully orbital.

Certainly applies to the operational launches of all their rocket vehicles, however they've also done suborbital test flights with with Grasshopper, F9R, Starhopper, Starship (and maybe Super Heavy soon as well depending on if they do a sub-orbital with that first).

The important difference is that SpaceX has never considered the Karman line as a target in its own right (somewhat rightly, its only value is for "whelming" space tourism).

“Scale up”, a software term that has almost zero value when translated to aerospace engineering.

Will see how Elon's 100 of Starships per year will affect costs of transport to space.

I suspect that as they scale up their costs will increase due to logistics and maintenance costs not necessarily scaling linearly with launches. Furthermore, I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up and hence costs associated with launch failures also increase.

> I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up

So you're saying that after say the initial 100 launches

Launch 100-199 would have 5 failures

Launch 200-299 would have 7 failures

Launch 300-399 would have 10 failures

Why?

Generally doing more of something reduces the cost per something. Why do you think the inverse will hold with spacex?

"Scale up" is fine once you have a working design and can just pup out copies of that design by the dozen with mass production - what SpaceX is doing with Raptors (and did with Merlins) for example.

You need the demand to make that worthwhile though.

Falcon 9 was a direct extension of Falcon 1. New Glenn shares almost nothing in common with New Shepard. They don't even use the same fuel or engine.

Second stage of New Glenn uses a variant of the New Shephard engine.

The US was behind the USSR at the beginning of the last space race. Jeff Bezos is an extremely smart and talented guy, and is now focusing a lot more of his time on Blue Origin. I wouldn't count them out.

Blue Origin technically started before SpaceX and has an increasing delta in accomplishments... They're easily a decade plus behind and SpaceX doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Bezos is smart and talented... but it's hard to overcome a lead like that.

Bezos is a businessman, rockets require engineering.

Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.

Bezos can hire engineers to work for him. Amazon requires lots of engineers and that works fine.

Bezos’s big contributions will be leadership, creating efficient processes, etc. He’s good at those things. You don’t need to be able to build the product to run a company.

Then why hasn't he done so earlier?

Because he was busy being CEO of Amazon, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Now he will spend most of his time on Blue Origin.

And the US was behind Russia at the end of the last space race, as Americans had to take Russian rockets to even get to orbit

This tweet summed it up well:

https://twitter.com/Charly923407591/status/14162863209561210...

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