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Comment by Klaus23 | Hacker News Reader

New Glenn has the throttle range to hover and they test more than SpaceX. You will probably be disappointed.

Testing in simulations and testing in reality are radically different. I hadn't actually heard anything about this until now but I'd be surprised if they're giving themselves more than a 10% chance of success, assuming it's an orbital test. Looking things up, it turns out that the booster is named "So You're Telling Me There's a Chance", and that is probably not entirely tongue in cheek!

The chances of the rocket reaching orbit on the first attempt are not too bad. Ariane 6 did it and only failed on the third engine relight.

Nailing the landing is a lot trickier, but if they have any early problems they would ditch it in the sea. They would have to have a problem just before landing for the rocket to take out the barge. If you want to count tipping over as a crash, that would make it more likely, but still less than SpaceX because of the soft landing and more legs.

Those barges can withstand a ridiculous amount of force - it'll be standing at the end of the day regardless of what happens. But I generally agree. I think the orbital test is likely to succeed, but landing on the first go - that would be simply epic. There's just too many unknown unknowns to go straight to success IMO, but I'd love to be proven wrong!

I guess you were wrong, they scrubbed. But do you really think the barge would survive a direct hit? I mean it might not sink but all the equipment on it would be very broken, would it not?

A scrub isn't generally considered a failure. Lots of things like the cross winds, weather, and so on have to align in order to try to launch, and those are simply outside your control. And there's a lot of normal variance with the different subsystems that can cause a scrub if anything is sub-nominal. Of course things like the SLS 'scrubbing' over a period of years is a bit different, but I'd call that more of an entire program failing, as opposed to a launch.

You can see videos of the SpaceX barges taking multiple direct hits before they managed to start nailing the landings. There's very little exposed equipment and the barges are mostly unharmed.

Given their development pace, they really must succeed if they want their "slowly and carefully" model to be competitive.

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