Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket | Hacker News Reader

Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket

arstechnica.com

377 pointsjohnneville265 comments

Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.

The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.

NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.

The new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.

It also helps that they fairly routinely land boosters (with New Shepard), which means they've likely worked out the 'landing' part.

Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.

Sounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.

Stage 1 is remotely operated? I find that surprising.

I’m not knowledgeable in the deep technical details of rocketry. But curious - how else would the first stage be operated? Should it be autonomous?

Yes. The timings involved would make it impractical to land a rocket reliably via human teleoperation even with zero latency.

I’m not a rocket scientist but my assumption is that it would be internally guided and only take external inputs in the form of GPS and “land on the ship” or “don’t land on the ship”. Saturn V was manned and had a an internal guidance computer.

No, but they want to be able to remotely abort.

Only in the last couple years has blue had a similar headcount https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6851212...

Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?

IMO, there are too few entrants to meaningfully draw any conclusions about "the norm" in this industry.

Exactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency.

Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".

I read about spaceship on one of their launches is that they attempted everything that it could possibly do on one of their boosters because you basically have the next iteration built so why not attempt anything for the telemetry.

Firefly, Rocket Lab and Astra spring to mind as having failed to reach orbit on their first attempt.

Astra drifted on the launch pad before taking off lol

Space shuttle had some harrowing early missions too, just didn’t explode.

Shuttle got very lucky. On the first flight, STS-1, an overpressure caused by the ignition of the SRBs forced the orbiter's body flap into an extreme angle which could have destroyed the hydraulic system controlling it. Had John Young know this had happened, he and Robert Crippen would have ejected, which would have destroyed the orbiter on its first flight.

You could eject from the Space Shuttle? At what speed and altitude? What was the mechanism?

There were only 2 ejection seats, enough for the crew of test flights but not the larger crew of operational flights.

The seats were only installed in Enterprise (the prototype, used only for suborbital tests) and Columbia (only enabled for STS-1 through STS-4 test flights, disabled for STS-5 the first operational flight)

The seats would only work at low altitude and speed (I've seen differing numbers cited). For the Challenger disaster they would've theoretically been useful (ignoring all the other factors), but they would've been useless for Columbia due to speed.

And it's not clear ejection would have actually been successful with the SRBs still active and right there.

As o11c mentioned, they only existed for the first few flights, the ones that only had two crew. It wasn't possible to have the election seats with the full shuttle crew so they were removed.

The ejection seats were essentially the same as those used in the SR-71, so they were survivable at shockingly high speeds and altitudes.

ULA is pretty remarkable for it's run of new rockets not blowing up. Looking at ESA, JAXA, RosCosmos, ISRO, etc too is how I'm setting the par. A history like the Ariane 5 is pretty typical where flights 1 and 14 failed.

Wouldn't really consider that NewSpace. These are as old as space industry gets...

China's various new rockets are another example.

What are you talking about? They'll launch of their own volition!

"Chinese rocket static-fire test results in unintended launch and huge explosion" (30 June 2024)

<https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-result...>

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=IlQkeKa4IKg> (Shakeycam video)

TBF: that wasn't an unsuccessful launch attempt, but a failure to not launch. Which affirms parent in that they seem to have work out all the kinks out during development.

that wasn't an unsuccessful launch attempt, but a failure to not launch.

My point exactly.

The comment at the root of this thread was specifically addressing making it to orbit on first launch - which a bench test isn't.

<https://youtube.com/watch?v=4zRbWNtd05w>

Yeah, 2 failures is par for OldSpace. NewSpace usually does much worse, though SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron managed to get the traditional par.

Norm is something like 3 rescheduling within a week from launch, 3 auto-aborts or equipment NoGo, 2 wayward boats, and 0.15-0.3 kaboom per launch. The fact that SpaceX haven't been letting wayward boats/planes for a while is remarkable by itself.

My perception is that SpaceX do in fact move fast, curious why you feel the need to put that in inverted commas?

> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.

Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?

I grew up on the space coast, have watched many new expensive fireworks. I expect one of the next ones to either go boom, or the less exciting hear the 2nd stage separation failed.

Why are you disagreeing like this? It would be like asking for a source if a software developer said “most software launches encounter some issues on their initial release”.

Really, that was your take away?

All I did was ask for the data used to come to that conclusion. I was only aware of SpaceX as a new space company. I was curious as to what other companies were included in her/his model.

How did you possible take offense to someone trying to learn?

And how did you possibly manage to find any ill will in the question?

> Why are you disagreeing like this?

I never once disagreed with the OP. Again, how did you get to this wild of a take from what i wrote?

I read it the same way as combative or at least skeptic.

If you say that was not your intent, then you might want to consider your approach.

A common hostile debate tactic is to ask the other person to "bring the receipts", and then pick through them for something to object to. It is akin to saying "prove it", and puts all of the burden on the other person with minimal effort.

In a world where the internet is often combative and full of bad faith actors, you may want to be more specific to distinguish yourself from them. If you have a specific question, ask it directly instead of asking them to provide more and sorting it yourself. You may also want to be clear about intent eg "what other companies are you considering".

GP here, thanks for this reply. It's exactly what I wanted to say before remembering my goal of not getting in too many internet disagreements.

Firefly and Astra both come to mind.

Not all of the rockets blow up on the pad or dance around near the launch pad [0], but lots certainly do not make it to orbit in the first try. Space is pretty hard.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PS6z9P9nqs

Competition here is great

> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch.

It's only because SpaceX lowered the bar so much that if it clears the launchpad it's deemed success.

I wish the cameras used film like NASA did for Saturn V. The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film. And this is made worse with the night launches that Blue Origin are doing.

In Saturn V launches you could see see detail in the bright flame structures along with background detail.

Maybe some of the upcoming digital cameras chips will have higher dynamic range eventually. I know Nikon has a paper talking about stacked sensors that are trading off high frame rate for high dynamic range: https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2

> talking about stacked sensors

why not just stacked cameras with a range of filters? modern cameras cost and weight nothing (and that rocket puts 45 ton into LEO)

those engineering cameras were not your regular run-of-the mill cameras neither.

NASA published a 45 min documentary of the 10-15 engineering cameras of an STS launch., with comments on the engineering aspets of the launch procedure.

Very beautiful, relaxing, has an almost meditative quality. Highly recommend it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwqZ4qAUkE

Yeah and Shuttle cost a fortune per launch.

Views are distinctly secondary to an affordable launch program.

And the cost of the camera program was paid back a hundred times as that footage was used to diagnose, correct and improve countless systems. Accident investigations would have taken ten times as long without that footage.

I absolutely love that beautiful film footage, particularly well-exhibited in one of my favorite documentaries, the spectacular "When We Left Earth" (a lovely and lengthy series). That said...

Modern rockets have the ability to stream a great deal more data, including live camera streams, than the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo or Space Shuttle could. This increased real-time data bandwidth is probably much more valuable than high-dynamic-range cameras were.

Telemetry only records what you deem interesting prior to flight. When something goes really wrong it probably came from something you were not expecting, like foam insulation. Cameras recorded everything visible, even the stuff you don't think important.

I'd assume that BO has plenty of high-res/high-contrast-range imagery - that's just too useful for engineering analysis, post-launch.

What they release to the public is a separate issue.

> The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film.

Film negatives have a dynamic range of between 12 to 15 stops, but a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print (perhaps less if digitally scanned).

The Arri ALEXA Mini LF has 14.5 stops of dynamic range, and the ALEXA 35 has 17 (Table 2):

* https://www.arri.com/resource/blob/295460/e10ff8a5b3abf26c33...

> a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print

I’m not sure if by "optical print"[0] you mean a film developing process (like C41), but the info is not lost and stays on the film. The developer job is to fine tune the parameters to print the infos you’re seeking, and that include adjusting white and black points thresholds (range). You can also do several print if you want to extract more infos, and print it so large you see the grain shapes! If there’s is something lost it’s when the picture is taken, after that it’s up to you to exploit it the way you need.

It’s very similar to a numeric device capturing RAWs and the developer finishing the picture on a software like Camera Raw, or what some modern phone does automatically for you.

0 not English native, perhaps this is a synonym of developement?

> I’m not sure if by "optical print"[0] you mean a film developing process (like C41), but the info is not lost and stays on the film.

You have a negative, which you develop.

For photos you then have to transfer that to paper. For cinema you want to distribute it, so you have to take the originally captured image(s) and make copies to distribute.

In both cases, because it's an analog process, and so things will degrade.

Of course if you scan the negative then further copies after are easy to duplicate.

I believe it's possible to get higher than that, this work by kodak for examples shows 20!! stops on film[1]. I seem to remember reading somewhere that for example Kodak TMax 100 can be pushed up to 18 stops, maybe higher. The limitation is not usually the film itself but the development process' used I think?

Its also crucial to note at what SNR they use for their cutoff when stating their dynamic range in stops, in addition to their tone curve.

I'm only a hobbyist though, perhaps someone else can enlighten me further.

Digital is mostly limited by bits, since a 14 bit image with a linear tone curve will have at most 14 stops of info right? So we won't expect to see values pushing higher until camera manufacturers leave behind 14 bit as a standard and go higher, as in the arri cameras. They use a 16 bit sensor, and squeeze the last stop out by using a more gradual tone curve in their shadows. This means technically the shadow stops contain less information than the highlight stops, thus meaning not all stops are equal I believe (quite confusing).

[1]: "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data" in the February/March 2002 issue of the SMPTE Journal (Volume 111, No. 2, pp. 85-96).

What we're doing here to get higher SNR, generally, is growing the CMOS sensors larger and larger. The limitation is ultimately either depth of field or IC manufacturing issues. A hypothetical meter-wide sensor could be manufactured to combine with a catadioptric lense of extreme cost, but you'd expect most of a scene to be bokeh, like in macro or microscope lenses.

In reality there are limits imposed by manufacturing. At the extreme, we have wafer-scale sensors used in, eg, night-time wildlife videography - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11497922/ . Anything larger than that is typically a not-perfectly-contiguous array of smaller chips.

You can also cryocool the camera, at the expense of weight, versatility, and complexity. Most astrophotography is collected with cryocooled CCD or cryocooled CMOS sensors. This helps much more with long exposures than it does with video, but it does help.

> The limitation is not usually the film itself but the development process' used

I respectfully doubt that, development process is a combinaison of techniques that lets you do many thinks with your row data and the line between that and special effects is quite blurry (joke intended).

One way to make HDR-like with films and cheap-not-advanced material is to do a several development of the same film to the same paper, with different exposures parameters. That way you combine different ranges of the image (eg stop 1-4 + stop 4-10 + stop 10-18) to produce you final image. This is a great craft workship.

The only limit is the chemistry of the films used (giving grains at almost nano scale), multiplied by the size of the film.

Side note: development is basically a picture of a picture (usually) done with different chemicals and photographic setup.

20 stops dynamic range is about the human eye's range. Achieving that for digital capture and display would be mind blowing.

I still don’t understand how vision only self driving cars are viable without also having 20 stops of dynamic range.

I’m amazed that they only have one camera. A cheap solution to dynamic range would be to have two cameras, one for bright, high resolution, and one for low light, low resolution.

I thought that was what HDR was at first in my young naive days: for the same sensor put several ADCs in parallel with overlapping ranges and auto-switch to the non-saturated one...

I actually used to design image sensor chips. The dynamic range is due to the electron well size. Each pixel has a diode that stores typically between 10,000-100,000 electrons in them. When the shutter is open, each photon that arrives pushes out an electron across the diode. When the shutter closes, sensors count how many electrons remain. This is how they calculate how much light each pixel received.

The well size itself is usually a function of the pixel size. A larger pixel means a larger diode that can store more electrons, and hence a larger range of light that can be measured - dynamic range.

So there's a tradeoff between image resolution and dynamic range, for a given sensor size?

Sorta. If you subdivide an area into more pixels you get lower dynamic range for each pixel, but you can average across multiple pixels to gain back the some of the dynamic range.

Dumb question, but if it’s super windy, does that make the photos brighter?

> Digital is mostly limited by bits, since a 14 bit image with a linear tone curve will have at most 14 stops of info right?

Bit depth ≠ dynamic range.

The dynaic range is about the highest and lowest value that can be measure ("stops" are a ratio per log_2, db are a ratio per log_10):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range#Human_perception

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range#Photography

The bits are about the gradation with-in that range. You can have 12-stop image recorded using a 10-bit, 12-bit, 14-bit, or 16-bit format.

And at least when it comes to film, it is not a linear curve, at least when you get to the darkest and lightest parts. That's why there's an old saying "expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights"

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnt5yFArWo

* https://www.kimhildebrand.com/how-to-use-the-zone-system/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_System

It could be an exposure issue. Film has a response curve with a big “shoulder” in the highest values. It makes it really hard to blow out highlights.

Digital sensors have a linear response to light, so if the highlights are a bit over a threshold, they are gone.

If you’re willing to tolerate more noise and shoot RAW, you could underexpose, perhaps by as much as 4 stops, and apply a strong curve in post. It would pretty much guarantee no blown out highlights.

Most people find luminance noise aesthetically pleasing up to a point and digital is already much cleaner than film ever was, so it’s a worthy trade off, if you ask me. But “Expose To The Left/Right” is a heated topic among photographers.

Spitballing, but a HDR digital camera could be designed with a beamsplitter similar to that of the 3CCD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-CCD_camera ) designs that projects to an assembly with only a sensor behind it, another to an assembly that has a 4 stop neutral density and sensor, and another to an assembly that has an 8 stop neutral density and and sensor.

This way it wouldn't suffer from any parallax issues and sensor images should then also line up to allow it to be reconstructed from the multiple sources.

That said... HDR images can be "bland" with it being washed out. It would probably take a bit more post processing work to get the image both high dynamic range and providing the dynamism of what those old Saturn V launches showed.

I think what you need is a plain old half-silvered beam splitter, not the 3CCD prism. The dichroic prism uses combinations of coatings to separate RGB into different optical paths. You don't need that.

Half silvered would work too. I was using the 3CCD prism as an example of splitting an image into multiple parts and avoiding issues with parallax. If you stacked cameras on top of each other with their own lenses, you'd inevitably get slightly different focal lengths, focal distances, and camera positions.

Aside with the dichotic filter... there was a neat trick that was lost (and refound) with a sodium 589nm dichromic (notch) prism. https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk

Back in the day, Fuji had a sensor in which half the pixels had a 2-stop neutral density filter, IIRC. It was a 12MP sensor, with an effective resolution a bit higher than 6MP. It was amazing the amount of highlight you could recover in Adobe Camera Raw and the TIFs/JPGs were beautiful, as it’s usually the case with Fuji.

Alas, it didn’t work out in the market, people weren’t willing to trade half their resolution for more DR, turns out. Also, regular sensors got much wider latitude.

I don't think it's a technical issue, they probably just don't care, we lost a bit of the magic and ideals we had back then

I think the last thing you could probably say about the teams involved in this is that they don’t care.

We must not have seen the same footage, they even had rain drops on the lens, that was an amateur move in the 60s, in 2025 it should be a crime lol

Like, what the fuck is this ? https://imgur.com/6sVSXGd Did they strap an iphone 12 on the launchpad and leave it on auto settings ? The flood light is aimed straight at the lens too...

This is an amateur shot from 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/coppj8/a_dramatic_cl...

I'm telling you, they didn't care one bit about that video, it looks like absolute ass

The detailed Apollo shots were not live. The Blue Origin frame is from a live video feed. The ULA picture is a post-processed still photo.

You should check out the Artemis I engineering footage.

Even on film, if you expose for the rocket you don't get any flame detail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#/media/File:Apollo_11...

This is footage hours after the event. It's no doubt been stomped on for streaming and other reasons. I wouldn't give up on something better being out there for a little while yet.

What am I missing? I can sit in my den and watch SpaceX and now Blue Origin launches, in real time see the telemetry data, see stage separation, reentry burns, etc, etc. As for Saturn V, to quote the Byrds "I was so much older then..." but I don't recall any of that. Doesn't film require taking the exposed product to a lab for after the fact processing? While the Blue Origin images this morning were not nearly as good as the SpaceX, to me the images are absolutely incredible. I am a serious amateur photographer and I do still shoot film on occasion but I see little dynamic range differences now in 2025.

Webcast of the launch @ T-20 seconds - https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859

Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.

People in the internet don't enjoy rocket launch with roaring sounds unless there is laugh track over it that validates that the launch is awesome and simulates social connection.

You don't say. SpaceX used to have "technical" launch streams with just launch status updates, but even they no longer do that :-/

Didnt they get caught when a launch went badly but their narrator keep reading from the script, reporting events that clearly were not happening? I would watch a technical stream, but i can read a canned script myself.

No, that never happened.

There was an F9 loss early in the program where the presenter was overcome by emotion. I would love to find an archive of all the launches including that one.

I distinctly recall that occurring. The event was 28 January 1986, and whilst I didn't watch it live, I did catch it within a few hours.

Though that wasn't a SpaceX launch.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...>

The launch broadcast narration continued for several seconds following the vehicle explosion reporting either telemetry or programmed flight path information before breaking script with the infamous announcement "There's obviously been a major malfunction". Various reports I've seen are that the previous commentary was based on telemetry rather than watching video.

Unintentional remedy: with Starlink now giving them HD video coverage for the whole flight, I doubt they would be able to do this convincingly anymore. (Assuming they ever did. I do not know about any such launch)

Is there a footage without the hysterical screeching?

Worst part of any SpaceX live stream.

Yeah that excessive cheering and laughing really diminished it for me. Everything apparently needs an added hype team/track. What a world we live in.

Most news stories on tv are presented as being "Breaking News!" It's absolutely bonkers some of the things they'll push that way.

Its a feed of the Blue Origin staff, who have been working towards this for years and years - makes sense that they would be pretty excited considering the level of success this was.

You dont have to consider everything you dont like to be a negative on the world

"I'm unhappy, so I'll force everyone else to be unhappy too" :/

Those are the real emotions of the people at Blue Origin watching the launch. They've been working toward this moment for 24 years. Should they censor themselves because their "excessive" emotions offend you? Or maybe they should hire newscasters to do an disinterested presentation up to your standards, instead of employees who actually worked on it?

But you hear no crying or shouting during e.g. Moon landing [1]. TBH I expect "disinterested" behavior from professionals in such situations.

[1] https://youtu.be/xc1SzgGhMKc

That's not a video of live broadcast TV coverage. It's a recording of the operational communcations (which you could hear in the BO livestream and it didn't have crying or shouting). Actual TV broadcasts at the time did show some actual emotions including laughter and possibly even tears, despite being from professional newscasters rather than employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMF58ZP681A

> from professional newscasters rather than employees

Then it's not relevant.

>Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.

You may have never done anything that warrants an emotional response.

Some of us have.

We enjoy seeing others express the joy we ourselves have felt at the end of a long, winding, process.

SpaceX started it. NASA launches before it didn't have any of it.

All of them can't shut up and just let us watch the launch without listening to their bs like "...aand lift off for Orion space mission off Cape Canaveral which is a huge leap for humanity"

As has been noted by others, the emoting is a distraction. I could only watch this for a few seconds.

Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.

Just a guess, but aerospace generally works with feet for altitude and knots/mph for airspeed, internationally. I’m doing a PPL in Europe and we, like everybody, use feet and knots/mph. I believe this is because the US have been on the forefront of aerospace regulation (a set of rules called the chicago convention is the basis of all air law) and aircraft manufacturing.

Can confirm, all aviation worldwide deals in feet and knots. It's also because it's much easier to do calculations on the fly (literally) - in your head. Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations.

Can you please give some real-world example of why it's easier to do calculations? Not disputing what you say, just hard for me to imagine why it would be so.

1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%.

Knots are also handy for navigation as 1 nautical mile equals 1 minute of latitude. And of course a knot is 1 nautical mile per hour. So if you're doing 300 knots, that's 5 degrees of latitude per hour.

The units fit together nicely as a system.

This sums it up. Metric is nice and clean tenths, but the real world is seldomly easily expressed in clean tenths.

Another example: The feet is cleanly divisible in thirds, quarters, and twelfths, which is greatly appreciated in industry and particularly construction.

Also to be bluntly mundane, almost everyone can just look down and have a rough measure of a foot which is good enough for daily use.

Also, the "sterility" of metric doesn't do it any sentimental favours. Japan loves measuring size/volume in Tokyo Domes, for example.

Not really, I have no idea what a foot is. But I can just look at yhe tiles and know they are 1*1 meter

If you're an amputee I truly am sorry for you and hope the handicap hasn't disrupted your life too much.

Jokes(...?) aside though, your absolute deference to precision is an example of why metric flies over people's heads. Feets, Tokyo Domes, arguably even nautical miles and so on are relatable at a human level unlike metric which is too nice and clean.

This sort of argument is odd to someone in a country which uses both, where a yard is intuitively "a bit smaller than a metre", a pint corresponds to a pint glass or "about half a litre" rather than anything meaningful and I'm aware that a rod and a furlong are things but have absolutely no idea what they correspond to. A foot is comfortably bigger than the average foot size, and an inch really isn't an easier unit to approximate than a centimeter

The SI was specially aimed to reduce such meaningless discussions, yet we steel have big endians and little endians comparisons, long after the dust settled.

Now I'm wondering if right-to-left languages (e.g. funnily enough, Arabic) write the least significant digits at the left or the right.

EDIT: numbers in those languages are the same way as in English, the "ones" are at the right. Kinda strange!

One meter is about one long step for an adult. To approximate the length of a field, you just walk along it with big steps and count. It will not be correct, but pretty close. A cm is a little bit smaller than the width of your index finger. It's all bout what you are used to. Metric doesn't "fly over people's head" where metric is the standard way to measure things, but inches, feet, gallons, pounds, miles fly over our head because we are not used to it so don't have any frame of reference.

Who cares? It's what the indicator says, I don't need to visualize feet to do calculations and talk to the tower about them.

If you can see a 1x1m tile from the cockpit, you're dead.

A foot is about 1 sheet of metric A4 paper :)

A meter is _exactly_ square root of area of A0 paper.

Yes and a blank 80 gsm A4 sheet weighs exactly 5g, if you need a weight reference!

I suspect that the math is even easier using meters, meters, and meters per second than nautical miles, feet, and knots. I'll eat my hat if you can tell me the conversion from feet or inches to nautical miles without looking it up

Well if what they say is true then 100ft/min = 1 nautical mile/60min, so one nautical mile is 6000ft. Or I guess I missed the about so not exactly.

It's within about 1%

The calculation in the metric system would not necessarily be more complicated, but it would be different because the reference points in the metric system are not directly aligned with the geography of the Earth.

"1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%."

You are right. It's an easy calculation. But I would say its easy because its historically based on imperial units. Its easy to think about easy calculations like this in metric units like:

A 5% slope means descending 1 meter vertically for every 20 meters horizontally.

The gradient thing would work if ground speed and vertical speed were both in m/s, but km/h is more common in metric for a ground speed. You don't usually think in terms of hours during a climb/descent!

Glide slope of 3.6% would fit nicely though. Then, 100 km/h ground speed goes with vertical speed 1 m/s.

Metric navigation would use the fact 90 degrees of latitude is 10,000 km.

who is flying exactly north/south?

Certainly not "worldwide". China uses metres. Recreational aircraft in Europe often use metres (almost all sailplanes).

Thank you, I wasn't aware of China using metres. It turns out Russia uses them as well, confusingly below the transition level.

No glider I have ever stepped in used metres. It doesn't make any sense, the tower wants to hear feet and knots and will communicate using that.

"Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations."

That fully depends on your cultural background. Feet, miles etc. are so foreign to me that I would be unable to calculate with them under stress.

But I am not a pilot nor a navigator, so...

No, it doesn't. I'm European, never used imperial before I became a pilot, and it's easier. Check it out, the formulas are much simpler to do in your head. Intuition doesn't matter, all that matters is that I can do the calculations quickly so I know I'm within parameter limits.

I'm curious which ones you find easier? There or a few thermodynamics equations that are much more practical in SAE. This is because the many units are often developed out of within discipline experiment, whereas metric tries to use fundamental units across disciplines.

Take a look into a pilot handbook, they are all written down there.

Are you saying that every single equation in the book is easier in SAE than metric?

Nope

You can be just as precise with either system.

Not for aerospace no

And knots are not mph, they're "nautical miles per hour" which are a different measure (1nm is 1.8km, not 1.6km as the regular mile")

Sorry, not a native speaker, I was under the impression that aerospace means air and space. I guess i meant aviation.

I didn’t imply knots are mph, I used the slash to signify “or”. They are completely different units, but both are used. Sometimes the airspeed indicator even has two scales, one for kt and one for mph.

Glad to hear it wasn't just me being grumpy, I also found it immensely annoying and distracting.

Perhaps it's considered more patriotic to reject scientific units?

I don't understand why they reserve 6 digits for the speed in mph either. Are they expecting it to go beyond 99,999 mph?

Do they also report the speed of light as Walmart parking lots per standard commercial tv break duration?

Edit: as an Amazon product it would probably use Amazon(tm) cardboard box unit as the length metric and standardized warehouse drone toilet break as duration.

You're trying to break free of Earth's gravity well, so you might as well use Freedom Units.

Do you count them as Freedoms per second or is time included in a Freedom?

Definitely should be football fields or school buses to make it comprehensible for the average viewer. Or “2 times the speed of a bullet”

> Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.

The audience that matters most to them is Americans, and they're happy to accommodate even those who are less interested in space.

Who cares what units they use? Anyone who is interested in space will have some knowledge of both kinds of units, and can do conversions if they need to.

Have to agree with others that the horrible laughing ruins what should be a monumentous occasion for the company and humanity.

Think about it. The fruit of their hard work over all those years while enduring people pointing fingers and memes at them... and now their powerful rocket roars, rumbles and lifts... Ofcourse it is emotional. And looks like me personally enjoy it. Perhaps that is taken from spacex stream where you see people cheering on achieving significant milestones... just gives you some of it.

Perhaps that audio could have been only when showing people cheering or what, but anyways, I'm surprised BO even set up that much of a show for external viewers.

SpaceX obviously has spoiled us. Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?

Personally I like the contrast between the laugh of joy and relief and background cheers from the team that have spent the past few years building it, and the calm technical announcements coming from somebody who probably feels the same way...

> Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?

What do you mean? Rocket launches have been filmed for ages, and without the laugh track, see that random launch of Ariane 4 in 1988 for example, that includes an on-board view (the replay does include some clapping from spectators though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_E4naQgTl0

You could already see them on live TV at the time. The Space X launches today certainly have better quality but it's not like launches were impossible to watch in the past.

As a non-USian looking in, it seemed fairly average and non-horrible to me? I find it interesting to find several comments like this one here so prominently compared to the discussion thread about SpaceX launches.

Why is that interesting?

It’s just people looking for something to crap on. God forbid those engineers celebrate years of their own work.

Yeah, I have seen some pretty annoying ones (on the spaceX streams) where they really make the cheering too loud, and from these comments I expected similar, but that... Really wasn't that bad at all. Just someone being excited. C'mon guys

Don't make fun of the way someone laughs. It'll sour someone's spontaneous joy, to think that every time they laugh, someone finds it annoying.

True. When I was in 9th grade, shortly before I was due to get braces, my teeth were quite crooked, and someone pointed out (in front of a lot of my friends) that they thought it looked grotesque when I laughed or smiled. It had a lasting negative effect on me, even after the braces came off and I had a great smile.

Great point to always consider people's humanity when doing something.

This is such a bizarre comment for me. If you strip that "momentous occasion for humanity" from its human component, then how is it a worthwhile historical document?

I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but hats off to the BlueOrigin team. Orbit on the first try is no small feat. Congrats!

Why do people feel the need to add qualifiers like "I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but...". Are you so attached to some company that it was hard for you to congratulate people on an accomplishment? It seems strange.

There's such a thing as sports watching, when you're associating yourself with a team and are glad and sad together with them. I guess something like this could happen elsewhere...

If you don't praise Elon Musk he will say bad things about you on Twitter

Still love the car!

Because of the popularity of the ‘I’m no Elon fan’ preamble on HN.

Let's flip it: Why do you care? Does it really bother you that much?

P.S. Wait a second, why do I care about why do you care? Oh god...

Stop! You'll get us in an infinite feedback loop!

It was just a reflex and a sports team rivalry is a good analogy. In other forums on the inet there's definitely a team spacex vs team blueorigin feeling. Think about American college football, imagine someone at UT congratulating A&M for scoring a touchdown. That would require finesse in some crowds :)

> Why do people feel the need to

Whenever it's used, it applies to the comment using it as well as the comment it's referring to.

It's a way to add emphasis on "They did a good job". We could translate it as

"I'm somewhat biased against BlueOrigin, but BlueOrigin managed to overcome my personal bias with how impressive their launch was".

It's similar to saying "I normally don't like country music, but that was a good song". In that sentence the intended message isn't "I don't like country music", instead it's "I liked that song"

Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.

And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.

Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink.

For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone.

So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.

> Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.

Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.

you spent 10% of your NW on a ski season pass?

Good point but money has diminishing marginal utility so I wouldn’t be surprised if Bezos sees it that way.

I would prefer not to add up 25 years (BO founded in 2000) worth of passes, travel, equipment and lessons. That would be an uncomfortable result.

It's going to replace ULA as the secondary option for DoD launches. That's a multi-billion dollar contract.

It'll put price pressure on SpaceX who have been able to charge increasingly large amounts without the competition from ULA recently.

SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin will all three be on Space Force's National Security Space Launch Phase III Lane 2 IDIQ.

Blue Origin won't replace ULA on that contract, but will compete head to head with SpaceX and ULA to win launch task orders.

I think the parent comment refers to ULA being on life support. The new contracts won't be as flush as the company was designed to need, and there won't be 3x launch cadence.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/investing-in-space-how-banke...

Here is a deeper history/analysis of ULA and how they were propped up by maintenance fees to retain launch capacity even when there were no payloads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyxLAezc9k0

> Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.

And Ford Motor Companies was founded in 1903 and still hasn't gotten above the Karman line. Wow, they're a massive failure as a company.

Blue wasn't aiming for an orbital rocket for years.

So what they were aiming for in the last 24 years if not to get into space?

In part, being a ULA supplier so they could get to space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-4

Blue Origin's goal has been to move heavy industry into space, to realize the vision of Gerard O'Neill. For its first 5 years it was a think tank, trying to figure out the best way to get there. Neal Stephenson was one of the employees, and you can see echoes of their work in his writing.

Only after 5 years did they transition to becoming a rocket company, having decided that lowering the cost of access to space was the most important first step to realizing O'Neill's vision.

And they were right, it's just that SpaceX realized the same thing at about the same time and were much more successful at it.

Going from 0 to a large oxygen rich staged combustion engine and a heavy class rocket in 19 years is actually pretty good by industry standards. SpaceX is the exception, not Blue Origin.

Didn't BO have a change in leadership in 2023 precisely because they were slow compared to SpaceX?

Edit: New Glenn was announced in 2016, compared to Starship's 2019, and they're approaching the finish line at around the same time. And I would say Starship was a far more ambitious project.

New Glenn has a payload size that is comparable to that of starship.

Falcon Heavy can launch much heavier stuff than 9, but it uses the same fairing. If you want to launch things that can't fit into Falcon 9s fairing, then your only options are SLS, New Glenn and in a few years Starship.

Especially Space Station Parts and Spy satellites can be quite huge. So there is an established and growing market for larger payloads

The extended Falcon fairing was spotted recently on one of the Falcon launches at the Cape. They are designing that for DoD payloads I think but it's advertised as available for payloads. It's not any wider but it is 18.7 m tall instead of 13.2m. Source: [Falcon User Guide](https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf)

In a fair market this'd be bad news for SpaceX, but from next week he'll have nothing to worry about for at least the next 4 years/until donnie dies.

> As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy

Citation needed

There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches (as I said in my comment) in the almost 6 years since the first flight (February 2018), roughly 2 per year. There were almost 150 Falcon 9 launches in 2024 alone.

What else would you call this than "not a lot of demand"?

Why are you conflating demand with launch cadence?

Falcon Heavy is in R&D mode, which is why there have been fewer launches. That has no bearing on the demand for it.

I think you may be confusing Starship and Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is a production launch vehicle that has launched payloads for NASA, DoD, etc. at this point.

And if Starship succeeds, a complete dead end.

Falcon Heavy has done far too few launches to accurately predict the demand.

It does as many launches as customers buy. If more customers bought Falcon Heavy launches SpaceX would launch more.

It’s been launching operational payloads for 6 years now.

They may be supply constrained as well. Only one of the 3 Falcon launch pads can support Falcon Heavy and it must be reconfigured to go between regular and Falcon launches so each Heavy launch restricts Falcon launches for a week or two on either side. The second launch site at Vandenberg is being built right now and will support both regular and Heavy launches as well. For every other launch company reserving a launch site for a month for one launch wouldn't be a problem but for SpaceX that will prevent scheduling of 4-6 other Falcon launches.

SpaceX might be pricing Heavy launches high enough to dampen demand until they can support more launches.

Because there is not enough demand. If there would be more demand there would be more launches. Because why not?

(Are you sure that you are talking about Falcon Heavy? The heavy launcher which is basically 3 Falcon 9 boosters bungee corded together[1]. First launched in 2018. And not Starship which first launched successfully in 2024?)

1: Not really. Just a joke. Before someone nitpicks

Apropos of nothing, but I appreciate the flaunting of branding best practices, and aerospace superstition, in the naming of Blue Origin (BO) and New Glenn (NG).

What are branding best practices and aerospace superstition?

- Someone who was an aerospace engineer for 8 years and knows many people in the industry, including BO, SpaceX, Boeing

BO is an acronym for body odor, something you don't typically want to associate with any brand.

NG is an acronym for No/Not Good used in various engineering contexts to refer to things that fail to meet requirements. A superstitious aerospace engineer might not want to essentially name something "failure" though in practice I think most aerospace engineers would love to call their rocket Explodey-9000.

Flouting?

Err yes, exactly.

Or perhaps flaunting a disregard for. :)

Important naming rule: Never call your version 2 "New Foo"!

Because the name will remain long after it was new. The naming scheme also crashes at version 3.

The New Glenn name is from 2016.

New Glenn isn't a "version 2". The name is a reference to John Glenn, the first American to orbit earth. Think "New York" not "New iPhone".

Thanks!

Still a weird naming scheme though. A rocket is not a new astronaut. Am I missing something clever?

Rockets aren’t birds either, and yet: Falcon 9 (the Falcon 9 also is the second iteration of the Falcon rockets, not the ninth, so…)

Rockets also aren’t planets, and yet: Saturn V

Rockets also aren’t mythological horse/man creatures, and yet: Vulcan Centaur

You’re overthinking it.

>(the Falcon 9 also is the second iteration of the Falcon rockets, not the ninth, so…)

Falcon 9 has nine first stage engines, Falcon 1 had a single engine. It's not a version number.

Edit: I had to look it up because Saturn 1 is not a single engine vehicle. It turns out that the Saturn V is design C-5 of the Saturn family of rockets, with A, B and C1-4 designs preceding it (not all designs where built), so the "V" in Saturn V is basically a version number, despite the Saturn V first stage having 5 engines

Yes, it not being a version number is the entire point of this thread.

Side note:

"Falcon" was almost certainly chosen so the BFR could be pronounced "Big Fucking Rocket", perhaps also influenced by the BFG in Doom/Quake.

Also note how "SpaceX" is pronounced.

The "Falcon" name dates back to many years before the BFR concept. Then the BFR started out as "Big Fucking Rocket" and the F was retroactively changed to Falcon as a tongue in cheek way of keeping the acronym in respectable conversation. That said, BFR was always just a descriptive placeholder.

Back in the 2010s Blue Origin had a naming scheme after the pioneering flights of American astronauts:

The suborbital rocket New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard who was the first American astronaut and whose flight was a suborbital arc.

New Glenn is named after John Glenn whose first flight was the first orbital flight.

There was also talk of a New Armstrong rocket, although Neil Armstrong wasn’t the first American to "reach" the Moon. But then together with Buzz he was the first to land and the first to walk. I don’t know if New Armstrong's still getting developed.

New York is from 1624

The best one I know is the New Forest in England, which is from 1079.

Thank goodness for billionaires.

There's a good case to be made that if it weren't for the likes of Musk and Bezos we'd still be stuck with the likes of ULA.

They are literally pulling us into the future and i'm all for it.

Totally worth the exploitation, amirite?? /s

(You do realize we did this before without them, right?)

No nation has a done what spacex has.

Can you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better.

I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.

I guess it would presuppose some solidarity with the workers at Amazon

At a glance: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-serious...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhau...

It sounds like a bad job so they should work elsewhere. These are not slave labor camps.

Most people require work to pay for food and housing. Not everyone is able to find a wealth of options for selling their labour.

But as I said, I think the argument requires some basic empathy/solidarity to follow.

By your own logic, they must like it?

Do you think they wouldn't if they had viable options??

Billionaires simply cannot exist without exploitation somewhere (though most often throughout the system that enriched them.)

This isn't even controversial.

Many simply choose to think it's acceptable, even preferable, through whatever twisted justifications.

Yes thank you billionaires, if you hadn't vacuumed the wealth of a nation this could have been a government agency success. Why should we all benefit when one man can?

The sums spent on this are trivial to governments. California HSR costs much more than bringing a rocket to life. The annual cost of dialysis to the American government is many times what SpaceX or Blue Origin costs.

Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.

Of course they haven’t, how can they afford to compete with private companies? We’ve all decided that taxes are bad, there’s no money in a govt position.

They have a lot more money than private companies. California HSR alone costs ten times or more than the Starship program. Annually, the American government spends some three or four times as much as the Starship program on dialysis for 0.2% of the population. Money is in abundance for a government.

If this were true, NASA would never need to outsource. Why pay SpaceX when you can build your own rockets.

Because SpaceX can build them cheaper.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Musk and Bezos have generated insane amounts of wealth for the American economy. They're not hoarding dollar bills in some vault like Scrooge McDuck lol.

No indeed, it is not a zero-sum game, billionaires like Musk and Bezos have more money than Scrooge McDuck [0], the cartoon version of Greed. While their share of the global wealth is increasing by each year

"The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today." Jan 16, 2023 [1]

[0] https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/11/23829868/elon-musk-is-ev... [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...

So? I don't think you are really making an argument. $42 trillion created, and by those same accounting rules they got the share that they created. There net worth is just the stock value x number of shares they have. Their wealth is directly correlated by how much value the market thinks their companies are worth.

This is not a problem for me.

I would disagree with some of your reasoning. Workers created the wealth, and by workers I mean everyone from delivery people, software developers, managers etc.

However, due to political decisions most if not all of that wealth is shared among people at the upper levels of the hierarchy, and third party investors.

It might not feel as a problem to you, but increasing inequality has negative consequences for society as a whole. It is well documented that more unequal societies have a higher prevalence of violence and theft, which might have direct consequences for you or your environment.

It actually is a feature of capitalism. Envy can blind though.

There are billionaires all over the world who haven’t built successful space companies. The key ingredient is the government funding which has made the US space industry possible, such as building the launch pads, subsidizing hundreds of companies which build specialized parts, creating the GPS network required to track launches, etc.

Maybe thank the taxpayers instead?

Dupe of / More details & discussion here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 ("Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) (blueorigin.com)", 55 comments)

I might say "More details & discussion here", vs. "Dupe of". For those who don't want to burn time watching video, the Ars story is an excellent summary.

Does anyone have a good sense for the actual purpose of reusing rockets?

Call me skeptical of the actual cost savings. You now need systems in place to catch them, the rockets need more components and fuel and such to control descent, the rocket then need to be refurbished back to launch-ready after going through hellacious stress. It seems like it’d be cheaper, lighter, and simpler on the whole to just make a new one. But I would love to learn more.

Rocket engines are very complex machinery that's difficult and expensive to make. Reusing the rocket allows you to reuse the engine.

SpaceX has also managed to show that reused hardware can be more reliable than brand new hardware. You run the hardware through a number of tests before launch, but there is no better test than an actual launch. Satellites still cost a lot more than rockets, so reliability is a big deal

A NASA planetary probe or a NRO spysat cost more than an order of magnitude more than launch but your run of the mill comm sat is only a bit more expensive than a SpaceX launch.

I do wonder if there's a way to reuse engines without reusing whole rockets, that could wind up cheaper. Pop the engine out of the rocket with some small fuel tanks, spin round and do a retro burn, then ... somehow land. I have not worked out all the details.

ULA calls this "SMART reuse" but has not yet successfully achieved it with their Vulcan rocket.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_2400...

In some ways this is simpler, but in others it is more complex since you need a way to catch the engines before they dunk in the salt water. A rocket booster that is already set up with avionics, engines, and fuel can guide and land itself without needing a precise helicopter catch etc.

I'm not sure how leaving the rest of the booster would make a propulsive landing easier. It seems like more complexity than just leaving some fuel in the tank, for less benefit. But ULA's Vulcan (which incidentally uses the same BE-4 engine as New Glenn) plans on using a helicopter to catch it's engines as they parachute down [1]

[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-images/smart

As Diane Rehm once lamented on her radio show about two decades ago, as she was interviewing some cutting-edge engineer about his work, “why does it have to be so haaaard?!?”

This concept is generally known as "Stage-and-a-half", and it was used on the Atlas rockets

There is an older (2015) discussion on this at https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37390.0

By that logic there should be launchers of similar capabilities cheaper than F9... which there aren't.

Reason 2: Enables increased launch cadence.

This was the argument a decade ago when SpaceX was the only one seriously talking about reuse. Given SpaceX is now responsible for the vast majoriy of mass to orbit it is hard to argue with the results, and now everyone serious is investing in reuse.

this is survivorship bias. SpaceX made a choice, and it succeeded; but SpaceX also made a million other design choices. Reusability could well be sub-optimal.

Your argument seems logical but the conclusion is wild, and I’m pretty sure extremely wrong. What other design choices, SpaceX made have been more significant for capturing 70% of all rocket launches in the world?

Reusing seems like the obvious and biggest design decision that led to their success

The biggest thing? It’s the leadership. The leadership and the culture has more impact on any individual technical decision. If Elon Musk has decided to go for super cheapo nonreusable rockets, they still would have 70% market share, but the whole market would look different.

For SpaceX to keep up their current launch cadence without reusability, they would need to build a new Falcon 9 booster every 2-3 days instead of every two months. It would also require an 8x increase in their build rate of Merlin engines.

Note that SpaceX's whole schtick at the beginning was to specifically go for a very cheap single use rocket. All of their design decisions were based around making the Flacon 1 and later the Falcon 9 easy to mass produce. This was the prevailing philosophy after the Space Shuttle's reusability failed to bring down launch costs. SpaceX tried that and they failed to achieve the cost savings they wanted. That's when they pivoted to reusability, which did work, propelling them from well branded newcomer to dominant player in the launch market.

It's true that in principle, you need a stronger rocket (the whole rocket, not just the motor) and a bunch of extra infrastructure to be able to reuse.

However, without being able to recover a rocket, it's actually quite difficult to figure out just how much corners you can cut, while remaining reliable. Since blowing up revenue payload is an awful way to optimize this, I think this means that disposal rockets will be inefficient in a different way - there will be excess safety margin in the wrong areas.

Reliable re-use also changes the operating model of the company. Since each rocket in stock represents many customers over time, you don't need to be nearly as stressed about exactly matching your manufacturing pipeline to predicted demand. This likely also enables generally faster turn around time (as in from cheque signed to launch).

Finally, as it turns out, it's not unreasonable to expect a rocket to be reused like 20+ times. I think you're point would be reasonable if it turned out that reusing a rocket more than ~3-5 times was difficult. But like... it's REALLY hard to do disposal anything better than something that can be reused 20+ times.

Rocket engines are very expensive, and the whole rocket is fairly expensive in traditional construction methods. The cost of the rocket engines dominates the others.

For the booster I think it’s fairly well established that it’s cheaper to reuse it. It’s not that hard on a booster to come down again, and it doesn’t seem like it’s that much work for SpaceX to refurbish their boosters.

For the upper stage it still remains to be seen. Having the upper stage return from orbit is a lot harder, as we’re seeing with the Starship. You need a lot of thermal protection. Maybe flaps depending on the design.

Jeff Bezos mentioned in a recent interview that for the upper stage they’re working on a reusable and a cost reduced version of the upper stage in parallell. They can’t determine yet which will end up being cheaper. That tells you something about how hard it is to do second stage reuse.

Rocket Lab has shown with the Neutron rocket what’s possible if you’re really innovative with optimising for cost on the second stage. Their second stage will probably be cheaper than the satellites they send to orbit

I don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.

Reaching orbit on the first try is a big deal. I think it deserves recognition and celebration.

Noone has ever managed to nail the landing of an orbital class booster on the first try.

> Noone

Name another company that even landed orbital class booster on whatever try.

10 years ago it was an impossible feat many were laughing at.

The space shuttle achieved reusable booster landing in the 80s with parachutes and water.

Delta clipper controlled burn relanding in the 90s but not scaled to orbital class.

Solid engine booster isn't in the same category of complexity as liquid engine booster, though.

Sure, just saying it wasn't an impossible feat.

Nobody with any sense for how rockets work should be impressed with parachuting and refurbing SRB tubes. Landing a proper rocket stage the real way is an impressive feat of robotics and engine engineering. The shuttle SRB thing was a wasteful farce meant to pay lip service to the loftier goals set by earlier Shuttle proposals (such as real flyback boosters.)

A far better example, although still not exactly the same sort of thing, would be landing the SSMEs with every orbiter landing. They obviously required refurbishment (as all Falcon 9 Merlin engines do too) and the propellant tanks were expended, but the engineering that went into the SSMEs is a much better example of precedent to Falcon 9 than dropping spent SRBs on parachutes.

SLS/Artemis is actually using some of the specific SSMEs that have flown before on Shuttles. Veteran engines, but they will be discarded this time, no more refurbing. What a damn shame.

Shame for nostalgia reasons perhaps, these engines were made out of unicorn tears and the price tag reflected that. The new gen methalox engines are much saner economically.

I don't understand why you're drawing attention to their failure, it doesn't mean anything. Failure by anyone on the first time of anything is understandable.

But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.

> extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of

New Glenn, Vulcan and Falcon Heavy/Starship.

There'll be a Chinese option shortly for those that are truly launcher-agnostic.

”Many” competitors? I thought that in this vehicle category (large&affordable) Space X was the only competitor?

Blue Origin changed CEOs two years ago and since then it started to pull forward.

They may have failures during flights, but they aren't a failure as a company.

This. I used to be very skeptical of anything Blue Origin. But after the CEO change they appear to have changed their attitude for the better.

They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.

Didn't we laude SpaceX for failing fast and moving forward?

I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.

You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.

This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.

I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.

> ... they even fubared the thrust:weight ration a bit ...

Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.

SpaceX have had much worse recent failures on launches of their new generation rocket.

Blue Origin have moved glacially slow by comparison, but they achieved their primary goal with this launch (get to orbit) and failed a secondary goal (land the booster).

If this were a SpaceX launch of a brand new rocket we'd be calling this a success and noting how they'd almost certainly achieve the secondary goal soon.

I think the question is how well and quickly Blue Origin can iterate to achieve first stage reuse. It took SpaceX quite a long time with a lot of lessons learned to reach the maturity they have now with Falcon 9 landings and re-launches.

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