New Glenn Update
blueorigin.com
blueorigin.com
On a funnier note, the 9 in Falcon 9 is the number of engines. So blue origin is somewhat picking up on their naming scheme. Or, by BO's scheme, it'd be the Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.
...and we'd be back to steam engine wheel formulas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whyte_notation
Ignoring that weaponizing space would backfire badly (you want hundreds of nukes in orbit? yeah actually let's just not do that) and thus no one considering it either.
If you think about that, a lot of fuel for in-space nuclear reactors will already have been launched, so, if a new peace treaty outlaws them, it'll be a boon to whoever operates fission reactors in space. Or wants to use them for propulsion.
Once in space, they can't be disposed of - deorbiting is a big no-no, as it's blowing them up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
I don't need a YT influencer to know my NASA history. I'm old enough it was taught in school while young enough to not have lived through any of it.
FYI, that talk was poorly received in the aerospace community.
Destin missed that the entire point of Artemis is not to one and done the Moon again but build towards getting to Mars. And the repeated "we're going, right?" shtick was condescending in the same way Hegseth wanting generals to cheer and holler for him was.
He acted like a petulant influencer. Not a science communicator.
Either way, your criticism of Destin's presentation hits. One and done'ing the Moon is not particularly helpful in setting up a sustainable cislunar economy.
In 2017 Space Policy Directive 1 amended the national space policy to pursue "the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations" [1]. This formally established the Artemis program [2].
Destin's criticisms were apt for Constellation [3], which was closer to an Apollo reboot. They were uninformed for Artemis.
[1] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/pr...
Even with the projected 100 ton payload for V3, the minimum number of flights to refuel a V2 HLS Starship is 15 flights and 26 flights for V3 HLS.
If we are optimistic about New Glenn and the cislunar transporter, then it will take 4 flights to refuel the transporter for each moon landing plus one flight to launch Orion on New Glenn and another three flights to push Orion using the cislunar transporter. There is also a hypothetical option to use a second Blue Moon MK2 between LEO and NRHO plus a crew capsule launch that says in LEO.
Given a budget of 4 billion USD, this could pay for 50 New Glenn flights assuming falcon 9 pricing. 8 flights per moon landing means one moon landing every two months.
That seems pretty promising unlike SpaceX, which is locked entirely behind a functioning reusable second stage or they don't get to participate at all, because expending 15 to 26 upper stages is not viable at all.
But you do you. SLS only has to launch a few times until the cislunar transporter gets established, which means it is exactly the safe bet that the US needs to reach the moon.
Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine any kind of sustainability when each launch costs north of $2 Billion and nearly all hardware is thrown away each time. In that sense, his criticism was very valid, even if tough to hear.
I said aerospace community. Not NASA. Plenty of people hate Artemis. Most people hate SLS. But they hate it for good reason. Destin touched on some of that. But because he missed Artemis's purpose, he bungled that criticism too.
I like Destin. But he missed the mark pretty badly on that video, and I judge him for now following up with clarification.
NASA doesn't build rockets. ULA (Lockheed Martin + Boeing), Northrup Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, etc. do. That's what I took "aerospace community" to mean. The community of people working in aerospace. Artemis has shifted focus several times now, since before it was called "Artemis" as each political administration has emphasized different goals, and as mission planning has evolved with hardware development. Over the years I have read everything from an abstract Moon-to-Mars testbed, a 5 year deadline crash program to land "the first woman and the next man" at the lunar south pole, a sustained lunar presence, the "first woman and first person of color" on the moon, safety science and Mars prep, and latest a de-scoping of the cis-lunar gateway station and shift toward private industry. Such things are difficult to avoid under constantly changing leadership.
Given that, I don't see any problem with the way Dustin presented the situation, nor do I feel any kind of need for an apology or clarification.
Fair. Not who I talk to. None of them get their bread buttered by Artemis. A few would if it were dumped.
> I don't see any problem with the way Dustin presented the situation, nor do I feel any kind of need for an apology or clarification
Fair enough. I thought the "we're going, right" was childish. But it works for YouTube, and it's not like NASA didn't know they were inviting an influencer.
But suggesting NASA should just redo Apollo was dumb, and he should realise it's dumb. If that were the case, I'd argue for cancelling the programme.
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-partners/
"NASA prime contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne, Axiom Space, Bechtel, Blue Origin, Boeing, Amentum, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX"
> suggesting NASA should just redo Apollo was dumb
Dumber than redoing Shuttle and throwing away proven reusable RS-25 engines? It's been a while since I watched it, but it seems to me one example highlights the absurdity of the other.
The factory tours for the two show this difference. New Glenn production is a lot more classical aerospace in terms of a high tech cleanroom factory being built from the start, versus a rocket that started out being built in tents that is slowly guiding the factory design as the tolerances are sorted out.
I think Blue's philosophy is pretty similar to the old space giants, except for being willing to invest a ton of money into improvements and new technologies without waiting around for the government to give them a blank check first.
Maybe we'll find that the thing limiting aerospace progress wasn't even that old space was afraid to test, but rather that they were simply unwilling to progress on their own initiative.
Your confusion stems from trying to use a different definition of the word when reading. Context clues are your friend here :)
The third flight of the Saturn V took 3 astronauts in their spacecraft to lunar orbit and back.
Human spaceflight is more about mitigating risk than anything. Apollo was getting there first, so there was a willingness to take more risks.
Also, NASA at the time had a humongous budget compared to today, adjusted for inflation [1] and it was a lot more focused on just getting to the moon.
Likewise, Liberia set up a transition program in 2018.
AFAIU both still use a bunch of traditional non US units too, like the UK.
After all, they’re the ones manufacturing the imperial screws, etc.
But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..
Can someone from the industry confirm whether they use metric internally and the stream uses imperial just for the patriotic show or whether imperial units are used because some countries use different unit systems and this is normal?
On a related note, I don't think anyone is bothered buying screens (monitor/phone/...) labeled in inches, but orbital elevations and speeds? Weird.
Considering all these, you'd expect space sector to borrow from the aviation sector. But we use SI systems exclusively. Everything in metres, kilograms, seconds. Feet, miles, knots etc are unheard of (Well, we have heard of them. We just don't use them). SI units make calculations and our life a magnitude of order easier. I need to check up how it is with winged reentry vehicles. But they're also likely go with m/s rather than knots. The only time we face difficulty with esoteric units are when we use some rare sensors. You end up looking up the definition of 'BTU' and other similar atrocities.
There are two noteworthy exceptions to this trend though. It's when specifying engine thrust and specific impulse. Engine thrust is often specified in kilograms, (metric) tonnes etc. Of course they mean kgf and Tf (weight equivalent of that mass under 1g). Meanwhile mN, N, kN and MN are also used equally frequently. It's a perennial source of frustration and conflict, with younger generation preferring SI units and the seniors preferring kilograms and tonnes. Meanwhile, specific impulse is even weirder. If you were using SI units, you'd expect N.s/kg or m/s or something similar. Even if you were using imperial units, you'd expect something similar. But the unit everyone actually uses is seconds. For examples, a high end cryogenic engine may deliver an Isp in the range of 450s (SSME had a vacuum Isp of 452s). Sometimes, it's also expressed as 'effective velocity' of exhaust in m/s. There are logical explanations for all these weird units. But the reality is that none of them, including the SI units are strictly correct, because they all use some sort of scaling that isn't linear or an assumption that doesn't apply.
You can blame the US for all these inconsistencies in the space sector. The Americans have a habit of making up units on the spot. For example, the kT, MT yields of nukes were invented by the Manhattan project scientists. Similarly, the unit of nuclear criticality is dollars and cents - thanks to Louis Slotin. (Sadly, he passed away soon after the second criticality accident with the demon core). Anyway, the US also has shot themselves in the foot by mixing up units. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet instead of entering its orbit due to the engineers mixing up the SI and imperial units. Moral of the story, if you plan to go to space, you better choose a measurement system and stick to it. Also, don't make a round scrubber for the command unit and a square scrubber for the lander. Make up your mind first!!
Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature: In Fahrenheit, 0 is roughly the coldest mean day in densely inhabited areas, and 100 is the hottest. In Metric, 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level in ambient temperatures and with a low barometer reading, 100 is boiling in the same conditions.
Since I measure weather much more frequently than I measure water temps, I am driven cukoo by the silly Centigrade system.
Also, The splitting into 12 used by the foot is more useful, in my experience, than the ten of the metric. In fact, I strongly decry that we teach our kids to use base 10 instead of the much more efficient and easier to divde into fractions of base 12. (You can teach kids to count joints on thier fingers [using the thumb as a pointer] to get to 12x12 on two hands, and give the kids a headstart on fractions, multiplication and division, but I digress..)
On the other hand, having both an Imperial Gallon and a US Gallon, etc, where the same word is used for different amounts, now THAT is insane.
Everybody hates swapping between units of measurement. You pick one and stick with it. It's natural having the need to move between two measurement systems irritates you.
>I measure weather much more frequently than I measure water temps,
In cold climates water temp is actually the most important thing to know about the weather by a long shot. The freezing point tells you if it's wet or dry, slippery or non-slippery.
But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
I would say the nice thing about the metric system is as long as you convert into a base unit (i.e. Meters, Seconds, etc) then you can easily convert stuff around. But you can't! Metric uses Kilograms not Grams all the time for things like Force (Kg *m/s^2). So I still have the same problem as imperial units ...
It's just whatever your familiar with.
A <kilo>gram is 1000 times a gram, it's written in the word. Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
A mile is 5280 feet. I can't just convert 231 miles into feet like that, and that's assuming I remember "5280".
> Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
You have missed the point. Force is a mass * distance / time. So, if I have a 1 g weight I want to move 1 meter in 1 second then it takes 1 Newton of force. Except it doesn't because Force is actually kilo-mass * distance / time. If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away because I can just memorize the imperial way as well.
It just comes down to what you're familiar with. There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).
Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well
Hmmm... no?
With metric, once you know what a "meter" is, you have the distances. <milli>meter, <centi>meter, <deci>meter, ... It's one unit: the meter. And fractions of it that require trivial conversions.
With imperial, you have multiple units of distance: inches, feet, yards, football fields, miles.
The benefit of metric is that you have to memorise fewer units, period. Your example is a formula in physics. There you have to memorise F = m * a AND in which units those are (bonus if they are consistent between the formulas, of course). That's strictly equivalent between imperial and metric there.
> It just comes down to what you're familiar with.
Of course, if you're familiar with imperial and not metric, then you're better off with imperial!
> There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
That's an interesting example: Mandarin is known for being a lot harder than English. Obviously, if you grew up with Mandarin and no English, you will be more comfortable with Mandarin. But people speaking Mandarin don't insist on saying that Mandarin is not harder than English, in my experience :-).
People confuse familiarity with intuitiveness all the damn time. It's a recurring theme in OS "ease of use" superiority debates as well as metric vs imperial. And date, time or number formats. And road signs.
As someone who grew up with metric, my opinion is that nothing that imperial people claim is unintuitive with metric is, in fact, unintuitive to me. Nothing. And I tried hard. We're used to what we're used to :-).
> Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature
This says that you grew up with imperial, I'm convinced of it!
> In fact, I strongly decry that we teach our kids to use base 10 instead of the much more efficient and easier to divde into fractions of base 12.
What's the argument there? That because you can divide 12 by 2, 3, 4 makes it vastly easier than 10, because 10 you can only divide by 2 and 5? How does that make it easier to learn fractions? What about the fact that in metric, a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, and a millimeter is 1/1000 of a meter? Those are fractions, right?
Just to make it clear: I am not claiming anything about imperial being ridiculous; I totally understand that if you grew up with it, then it's intuitive to you. What I don't understand, really, is all those imperial people who just cannot seem to apprehend the idea that maybe, just maybe, they are biased because imperial is what they know better. Is it that hard? It makes me concerned about cultural differences... do those people realise that others may have different cultures, and that it is okay and not ridiculous?
PS: I upvoted you because I don't find it fair that you get so many downvotes for an innocent opinion. I don't share your opinion, but it's not offensive or anything like that :-).
Most people don't seem to care about the units, what the haters care about (not you, but the general experience) is having an opportunity to proclaim how much better they are than other people, mostly over an accident of birth.
But I don't think that the rational answer is to try to convince everybody that your system is more intuitive because the other has "ridiculous" features. I answered to a comment that said: "ridiculously better in the imperial system".
Also feet happen to be the standard measurement of altitude in aviation, which rockets are part of, even in metric countries, I hate it but it's like that. Distances are nautical miles, a not so bad unit (it corresponds to 1 arcminute on earth), which make me hate the use of terrestrial miles in articles partaking to aviation even more. But it is a bit offtopic here because most of the article is metric.
News at 10
FYP as it's rather worse than you framed. I'm happy to see more competition in space, because I think it's the single most important domain for humanity. And Blue Origin is making some rapid improvements, but people are dramatically overstating both this and their history/role in space quite significantly.
Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, back in 2000, and only managed to send a rocket into orbit this year, 25 years later. They remain a complete nonplayer that exists only through the good fortune of endless and clearly unconditional Bezos bucks.
Now if they can keep putting out some good results, ideally start producing some hardware that can compete in terms of price and capability, and generally scaling things up - then I'll be the first to sing their praises. But we're still quite a ways away from that point for now.
Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.
New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also just barely a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.
To be fair, the Falcon Heavy has way too little fairing volume for it's lift capacity (and apparently it is in the process of getting an extra 50% or so?)
The small size of the Falcon Heavy fairing is probably due to the fact that they are the same size as the Falcon fairing, and it was designed when Falcon could throw < 1/2 the mass it can currently throw, let alone the Falcon Heavy.
BE-4 is 140 bar chamber pressure vs SpaceX Raptor 2 at 350 bar. Thrust to weight of BE-4 is 80:1 vs Raptor2 at 140:1.
I don't think the capabilities are as different as those numbers imply. I believe that it's due to the conservativeness of Blue Origin and SpaceX's willingness to blow up hundreds of engines on the test stand to iteratively push the margins.
BE-4's chamber pressure is low for its design, but it would be very difficult to increase it to Raptor's levels. Full-flow staged combustion causes the propellants to be gasses when they enter the combustion chamber, and chemical reactions in gasses happen more quickly, allowing for efficient combustion in a smaller combustion chamber. The smaller volume makes it easier to contain higher pressures.
Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I don't know a simpler way to estimate this than to run a simulation, and I don't have one with numbers I can toggle.
Blue Origin is matching from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3. Comparing thrust at sea level, lbf:
Raptor 2 | 507,000 [1]
Raptor 3 | 617,000 [1]
BE-4 | 557,143
BE-4' | 642,857
BE-3U | 160,000
BE-3U' | 200,000
These expected and incremental updates (to a years late system that still needs to be proven) are putting the payload capacity in the Falcon Heavy range and there's roughly 1 Falcon Heavy launch per year.
There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches per year. Yes a bunch are Starlink so you can exclude those when estimating demand from external customers but the point remains that there isn't currently a commercial demand for bigger payloads and/or higher orbits than what Falcon 9 can do.
SpaceX has the same problem: Starship is a superheavy lifter where Falcon Heavy has little demand and Starship is even bigger. At least SpaceX has Starlink as induced demand. Blue Origin doesn't.
Defenders will argue the greater volume and payload weights will create new possibilities because payloads can only be designed for available launch systems but satellites don't really seem to be getting any bigger and there are only so many geosynchronous military payloadcs and interplanetary probes that need to be launched.
If other providers had the capacity to launch all of them, I'm sure falcon wouldn't be in the mix there.
You can make money on infrequent launches of niche stuff (and Blue Origin will target orbit injections and stuff like handling nuclear material for big one-off missions that SpaceX isn't interested in competing for). But New Glenn and to an even greater extent Starship owe their existence to an assumption that we'll be launching bigger stuff than constellation class satellites in volume to build space infrastructure in the next decade: space stations, space solar, lunar resource extraction stuff etc. If that comes to pass, the bigger question is whether New Glenn is too small...
Being a better Falcon Heavy is a much more realistic goal. Just having a larger payload fairing is enough to win some business.
I'm not sure what Starship is designed for. But I don't think it's worth even comparing until it can demonstrate deploying a payload other than a flat pack satellite, in orbit refueling, recovering both stages and turning the rocket around fast enough that you don't have to build 17 Starships to refuel one in orbit. Before these milestones are reached, the cost-effectiveness is very theoretical.
The big difference is that one of these rockets flew a successful mission, and the other one might be years away from key milestones.
I’m honestly not sure what Starship is designed for either. Despite all the hype, it might bankrupt SpaceX. Or seems like the poster child for second system syndrome.
I also suspect that they are burning capital everywhere and their margins are extremely thin. The charitable assessment of that is that they are being like Amazon and they know what they are doing. A less charitable assessment is that Amazon could simply turn a pricing knob and become profitable. There is no knob at SpaceX. They need to make a very risky rocket project work for things to work in general. Not that that's a pattern in Elon's businesses or anything.
Starlink is making money hand over fist.
Starship is complex. The Raptor engines are complex. There are valid reasons to use Methane instead of Kerosene (ie to avoid coking and the ccost to reuse) but now you need two chilled propellants with everything that entails.
You need to do a lot of launches to become human-rated (like Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon is now). In-orbit refueling is going to take a lot of launches to perfect and prove and it's going to have fairly limited applications to boot.
Plus the entire program is a massive opportunity cost. SpaceX is in their Boeing 747 era now. The 747 was such a massive profit center for Boeing for decades, particularly when the program was paid for so it didn't need to be recovered on each plane delivered.
Ultimately that ends. Engines are so reliable that they don't make 4 engine commercial planes anymore. I read it's likely that the engine will never have to be replaced for the entire life of the plane, which is a vastly different situation to 50-60 years ago when the 747 was first developed.
The Falcon 9 is currently the most successful launch system ever made and it is a cash cow. But if SpaceX spends a decade or more delivering Starship and recovering the program cost, that's a long time for somebody else to come along with an even cheaper platform in the same class as Falcon 9.
It sounds as if they already have a long line of customers which have booked flights to all these destinations. (If they actually do, splendid!)
I wonder how they'll be implementing that since SpaceX gave up on recapturing fairings (seemingly too soon, but only from the POV of someone with no internal info).
> SpaceX performs some amount of cleaning and refurbishing before using the previously flown fairings on a subsequent flight. SpaceX has reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with one being reflown for 34 times.
They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
What does it mean?