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Comment by eagerpace | Hacker News Reader

And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.

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Raptor is a thing of beauty: https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/Raptor_.... Look how polished it is. It looks like a fucking Apple product.

The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.

Is that why they never made it to the moon, and did their best to hide fatal failures?

They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.

The Russians beat us to all but the last milestone: first object in space, first human in space, first probe to land on the moon, and first probe to photograph the far side of the moon. The Russians would have beat us to the moon landing if the head of their space program hadn’t died on the home stretch of the space race.

That's a non-sequitur, the parent comment simply said they were really good at aerospace.

Depends on what you care about.

For years they were the only vehicle taking humans to and from orbit.

Space Shuttle killed more people than Soyuz in fewer launches.

The engines for New Glenn ain't bad either.

Competition does improve products.

New Glenn's engines are quite a bit less efficient than those at SpaceX. Lower chamber pressures, lower thrust:weight ratio, and they're partial flow staged combustion.

I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.

Spacex's work is out there ( and I am grateful for the excitement that generates ) but BO work in the shadows, surprising us sometimes with major advances.

I suspect BO not as far behind as you think.

They'll remain behind as long as they keep copying SpaceX's concepts since they need to wait and see before they can copy.

I am glad there is competition and BO clearly do enough novel work that calling them copycats is simply incorrect.

That would surprise me, given how much trouble they had supplying engines for Vulcan.

That doesn't make the BE-4 not impressive. It isn't a full flow staged combustion engine like Raptor, but it's still a highly efficient, high thrust, relightable and deeply throttleable rocket engine. These things don't often come in the same package when it comes to rocket engines.

I agree, but I think SpaceX is doing it for goals rather than competition.

They’re amazing too. That’s my point. The legacy launch providers were doing zero innovation, limping along shuttle era designs and literally buying the most critical parts from our biggest competitor. The people who hate Elon have no concept how revolutionary the Merlin engine was given this context. It doesn’t matter if SpaceX is successful or not, they revived the entire US space industry. That’s what matters.

The outcome is guaranteed to be entertaining

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