[HN Gopher] After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn...
___________________________________________________________________
After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is
ready to fly
Author : fenced_load
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-12-28 20:46 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| teractiveodular wrote:
| We're at 12 years of design and 5 years behind the originally
| announced first launch of 2020 now. Space is hard, rocketry is
| harder and I wish them luck, but Blue Origin has an awfully long
| way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX: this was meant to
| be the Falcon 9 killer, but odds are Starship will be fully
| operational before New Glenn completes testing.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem
| convinced Starship will just "solve" space, but _if_ it works,
| there 's still going to be demand for other mission profiles
| that it won't make sense to send on Starship.
|
| But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by
| Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than
| Starship, yeah, that's true.
|
| I suspect the head start in infrastructure spacex has is pretty
| valuable in developing new programs.
|
| Space is hard. I hope Blue Origin succeeds.
| zizee wrote:
| Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?
| Retric wrote:
| 10t to LEO in an unusual orbit.
|
| Being smaller than Starship while still huge isn't
| necessarily a disadvantage.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Starship should be able to put 10t into LEO significantly
| cheaper than New Glenn can. Why would anybody pay more?
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your
| source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's
| predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a
| lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease
| off.
|
| Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship
| launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says
| a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to
| LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches
| will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an
| "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving
| Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not
| trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his
| companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while
| before it costs $10m to launch a Starship.
|
| This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch
| costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is.
| But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost
| estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we
| should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-
| deal...
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Dudes. You don't have to down-vote me 'cause I'm just
| asking for where you got your numbers. I'm not saying
| you're a horrible person and that SpaceX sucks. I'm
| saying I have numbers that don't match yours. Let's
| compare numbers / sources and see what the most likely
| values would be near-term and long-term.
| zizee wrote:
| Ok, so your argument for Starship not being the best
| choice for all mission profiles is based solely on cost.
| If Starship was cheaper, then you'd agree that it serves
| the mission profiles?
|
| An estimate of 2 billion per launch is laughable, and
| suggests you are not arguing in good faith. 100m is more
| accurate for a fully disposable launch, and SpaceX has
| demonstrated great progress on reusability of the
| booster, which will cut costs considerably.
| Retric wrote:
| 2 billion at the high end isn't actually unreasonable
| when compared to falcon 9's costs which are sitting
| around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.
|
| There's a have a fairly linear relationship between
| rocket payload and size, and for large structures going
| big tends to _increase_ cost per pound so ~10x the size
| resulting in ~20x the cost is just mildly pessimistic.
|
| If and only if they the thing is both rapidly reusable
| _and_ individual starships are actually used for hundreds
| of launches do those highly optimistic numbers become
| vaguely possible. Even just a 0.2% failure rate would
| represent a massive increase over their optimistic
| estimates.
| zizee wrote:
| 2 billion is ridiculous, and I can only imagine that
| number was a misunderstanding SpaceX/Musk saying that
| they were spending 2 billion in a full year of R&D on
| Starship.
|
| https://spacenews.com/spacex-investment-in-starship-
| approach...
| Retric wrote:
| That doesn't justify why it's ridiculous, it's just a
| coincidence.
|
| I doubt SpaceX's internal costs are ~100m/falcon 9
| launch, but companies need a markup to be profitable.
| 100m - 2B is a huge range covering everything from giving
| up on reusability and paying back R&D over a small number
| of flights to significant success resulting in a 90%
| reduction in costs per kg to LEO.
|
| Also, having spent 5B on R&D and doing 5 test flights up
| to this point works out to 1 billion per flight. That's
| not the actual marginal cost per flight, but when people
| say how expensive each shuttle flight was that's the
| number they use. Nothing guarantees they continue to do
| Starship launches, they could fail it's among the
| potential outcomes.
| zizee wrote:
| It's ridiculous because the much ridiculed SLS has a
| launch cost of 2 billion dollars. If you think SpaceX is
| throwing billions of dollars into developing a vehicle
| that costs thisuch to launch, you clearly haven't been
| following SpaceX at all.
|
| You know there is going to be more that 5 flights, and
| you know people in this thread are not amortizing total
| R&D into flight costs. People are talking about 68
| million per flight for New Glenn, which no doubt has has
| many hundreds of millions on R&D spend, and hasn't flown
| one time.
| Retric wrote:
| > You know there is going to be more than 5 flights
|
| No, I don't actually know the future. I can make
| predictions, but we could have a thermonuclear war
| tomorrow etc.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > when compared to falcon 9's costs which are sitting
| around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.
|
| SpaceX's financial situation argues very differently.
| They have raised relatively little money for a company
| that is spending multiple billions on two very expensive
| development programs (Starship and Starlink).
|
| If Falcon cost $100M per launch the 134 launches this
| year would have bankrupted the company. The $1.7B they
| raised in spring 2022 was their last major capital
| injection, and have been self funded since.
|
| If Falcon cost substantially more than $20M to launch
| SpaceX would need to be getting external money from
| somewhere. They aren't. Their revenue is well understood
| and is around $10B per year, and salary costs fot 13,000
| people are going to consume most of that. What NASA and
| the Space Force pay is public knowledge, what they charge
| for a private launch is known, and the number of Starlink
| subscribers has been revealed.
| Retric wrote:
| SpaceX has several million Starlink customers providing
| around 6.6 Billion dollars of revenue in 2024. It not
| clear if it's profitable yet, but it's been stated to
| kick off 100's of millions in positive cash flow.
|
| As to the salaries of its employees, that's a major
| component of launch costs. You can't point to it and say
| launch costs must be cheap because they are paying all
| these people when a large fraction of them are directly
| or indirectly working on launches.
|
| They are spending ~2 billion per year on Spaceship, but
| what they charge per launch varies widely. 5 crewed
| falcon 9 flight cost the government ~260 million each,
| and the 2 ISS missions where 145 million each.
| https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Yes. An estimate for 2 billion is laughable. I did not
| say the cost _WAS_ $2 billion, I said the Google AI gave
| me a range from $100M to $2B. Maybe the total cost of the
| program for the 1st launch was 2 billion? But you 're
| going to amortize that cost over (hopefully) several
| launches.
|
| I think you misunderstand my argument. Let me restate it.
|
| Someone, sometime said the Starship launch was $2b. The
| Google AI picked that up and included it in its answer.
| Someone, sometime said it was around $100m. The Google AI
| picked that up and included it in its answer. There is a
| lot of range between 100m and 2b, which implies there's a
| lot of data getting thrown around and we don't have good
| numbers.
|
| If observing that we don't have good numbers is arguing
| in bad faith... I don't know what to tell you.
|
| Musk at some point said $10m for a Starship launch. I
| think I found a reference for that in a CNBC interview...
| I'll look it up later. But my point is... It is unlikely
| that Starship launches are $10m RIGHT NOW. But sure...
| maybe they will be in the future. I take Elon with a
| grain of salt because of his comments regarding Full
| Self-Driving Mode and Robo-Taxi deployment dates.
|
| I said we should not compare New Glenn estimated launch
| costs RIGHT NOW with Elon's asperational price target of
| $10m. We should compare Starship's cost per kg to LEO
| RIGHT NOW with New Glenn's estimated cost per kg to LEO
| RIGHT NOW. Or we could compare them at a particular point
| in the project history. We could compare per-kg costs at
| first launch or estimated per-kg costs at the 10th
| launch.
|
| Both companies are saying they want to do a lot of
| launches, so we'll eventually have MUCH better data.
|
| I'm suggesting we compare apples to apples and oranges to
| oranges and not apples to oranges.
|
| At the current moment, all Starship launches have been
| fully disposable (though yes, one booster was caught by
| the chopsticks so it's probably more accurate to say the
| whole system is about 1/12th re-usable.) At this point in
| the program, you have to pay for each vehicle that lands
| or crashes in the water. I agree with you when you say
| "100m is more accurate for a fully disposable launch."
| Starship is currently more disposable than it is
| reusable.
|
| When SpaceX re-uses the boosters and the Starships, then
| it will not be fully disposable and the price per launch
| will go down. We are not at that point at the moment. You
| can tell this because a number of boosters and starships
| have fallen into the ocean, some crashing, some coming to
| a controlled stop just over the ocean and then falling
| over.
|
| But the important part here is that the equipment that
| wasn't caught by the chopsticks doesn't get to be re-
| used. So if you want to do another launch, you have to
| build new equipment. That new equipment will cost money.
|
| So if the current, mostly non-reusable Starship launches
| cost $100m a pop, that's after several launches. Even
| though we have someone estimating the first couple of New
| Glenn launches cost $68m, let's wait until it has 6
| launches and THEN compare costs.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| 100m is vaporware pricing. It's the $30k Tesla that
| drives itself. Or any of the numbers on the hyperloop.
| It's a made up number for the press.
|
| I'm begging the internet to please be critical and do
| some basic analysis and not just believe everything they
| hear from that guy!
| fastball wrote:
| SpaceX is mass-producing the engines, mass-producing the
| heat shield tiles, the fuel is cheap, the structure is
| stainless steel (cheap), payload capacity is huge, and
| full rapid re-usability seems well under way. There is no
| way Starship will not be the cheapest launch platform
| (per kilogram) if and when it is operational. It will
| definitely have a launch price tag for under $100m.
| zizee wrote:
| But it's not just that guy.
|
| > Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However,
| Starship is still very much a development program, and
| Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million
| for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The
| vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39
| Raptor engines and labor expenses.
|
| So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully
| disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing
| the booster? What happens when they have optimised
| production further?
|
| Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your
| judgement?
|
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-
| new-es...
| signatoremo wrote:
| Are you arguing in good faith? What are you based on to
| say $100mil is vaporware? Most commercial flights (i.e.
| non-Starlink) are priced starting at $70 millions - [0],
| increased from $60m previously. That's not for the press,
| although government customers such as NASA often pay much
| more. SpaceX is very dominant at this point that they'd
| be foolish to charge under cost.
|
| And then there are Starlink launches. They made money on
| it on 2024, according to Shotwell, so launch cost must be
| way lower than external price.
|
| [0] -
| https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
| imtringued wrote:
| $100m might be correct though. Elon Musk himself has said
| that just the hardware for each Starship test flight has
| cost $100 million. This doesn't count all the hardware
| that hasn't flown so in practice each test flight was
| even more expensive than this, but there is no reason to
| argue that Starship will cost more than $200 million for
| an expendable launch and maybe a quarter of that assuming
| reuse via booster catch.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Those Starship costs you quote assume an expended booster
| and the New Glenn costs assume a recovered booster.
|
| We don't have to use Musk's cost figures for Starship.
| Starship has been built in the open and can be relatively
| accurately cost estimated by experts.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available
| in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025.
|
| He did. He also said it'd be available in 2016, 2017,
| 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024.
|
| So yeah...
| ternnoburn wrote:
| Smaller launch to a specific orbit. As an analogy, freight
| trains are one of the most efficient, cheapest ways to move
| freight. But moving my laundry to the laundromat is better
| served by another vehicle.
| zizee wrote:
| This changes if SpaceX can get full reusability working,
| which they have been making very steady progress towards.
| avmich wrote:
| Yeah, that's the main proposition Starship has for the
| market. Going to analogy with laundromat, you need to
| include the cost of single-use laundry cart and remember
| that your laundromat is on another end of the same
| asphalted road which the truck nearby can easily drive
| on.
|
| Not sure at all if costs - and hassles, of course - of
| buying a cart are less than some change for the costs of
| the fuel - the truck is autonomous, of course.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Starship is heavy lift / heavy expense. If you want to put
| 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use Starship, you use a
| Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH cheaper. Or you wait until
| you find 600 other small sat users who want to launch into
| the same / similar orbit.
|
| The talk I heard was that New Glenn was supposed to be BO's
| answer to Starship (or more likely Falcon Heavy) that could
| launch a bunch of Project Kuiper satellites into LEO so
| Amazon could compete with Starlink and feed Amazon's Ground
| Station as a Service offering.
|
| If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn can
| lift 50 imperial tons to LEO, Starship Block III will hoist
| 200 tons and Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how
| re-usable you want your launch to be.
|
| I'm not a heavy lift sales-person, but I've been in the
| room when they discussed what they thought they could sell
| to govt / mil / commercial customers. So take this with a
| little bit of salt... Seems to me BO was targeting a
| slightly smaller launch vehicle than SpaceX was going with
| so they could decouple schedule with Amazon's Kuiper
| Project. You don't want to have that cool new rocket you
| developed dependent on a satellite constellation that gets
| delayed. So you have a rocket that would be easier to fill
| with a number of small to medium sized satellites to LEO or
| (fewer) to GEO.
|
| And like other people on the thread have commented, it
| seems BO is a decade behind SpaceX, so... yeah... a big
| rocket that competes with Starship is pretty risky for BO.
|
| And yes, I understand that BO is independent from Amazon,
| but from what I've seen this is just so they can execute on
| a schedule that isn't determined by AMZN's board of
| directors. They seem pretty closely related, just from
| talking with Kuiper, GSaaS and BO engineers.
|
| I don't work for any of the above mentioned companies and
| have no insider information. YMMV. Just my guesses from
| watching some of the personalities involved for the last 30
| years.
| starik36 wrote:
| I am going out on a limb and say that Project Kuiper
| satellites themselves are nowhere near ready. Amazon is
| supposed to launch 50% of the constellation of ~6000 into
| orbit by July 2026 or risk losing frequencies. So you
| would think there would be some urgency.
|
| Amazon purchased pretty much all remaining Atlas 5
| launches from ULA. This is a proven rocket and ready to
| fly. Why aren't the satellites being launched? The only
| thing I can think of is that they are not ready yet.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't
| use Starship, you use a Rocket Lab Electron. It's MUCH
| cheaper."_
|
| I don't buy this. I think small startups like that can't
| get the economies of scale that would let them compete on
| price, for any payload. So long as they are targeting
| low-value niche markets like one-off smallsats, they
| won't have the revenue to support that.
|
| At what Rocket Labs is currently charging, $7.5 million
| [0], it's within the realm of possibility you could even
| launch an entire reusable Starship with a one-cubesat
| payload for less than that. (The target figure Musk uses
| is $2 million/launch; take that with the appropriate
| bucket of salt).
|
| How many tens of billions of R&D have gone into SpaceX,
| and how many launches are they able to amortize that cost
| over? How many decades have they invested in their
| manufacturing processes? Do their competitors' engines
| roll off factory assembly lines?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron
| imtringued wrote:
| >If we are to believe the published numbers, New Glenn
| can lift 50 imperial tons to LEO
|
| Well 45 tons, but this is in a reusable configuration.
|
| >Starship Block III will hoist 200 tons
|
| This is definitely not a reusable configuration. Maybe
| 150 tons if they are lucky.
|
| >Falcon Heavy will lift 50-60 depending on how re-usable
| you want your launch to be.
|
| 60 tons for Falcon Heavy means zero reuse, that is a
| fully expendable launch. Falcon heavy also hasn't carried
| payloads heavier than 18 tons so far. So this number is
| something you can whip out to pretend that New Glenn
| sucks and yet completely miss the mark.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9792046>
| IshKebab wrote:
| > If you want to put 1 small-sat in orbit, you don't use
| Starship
|
| Why not? Unless you need a custom orbit that nobody else
| is interested in then Starship will be by far the
| cheapest way to put a small satellite in orbit, as part
| of a ride-share mission.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think the cheapest smallsat launches now available are
| being pushed out of the Japanese airlock on the ISS. It's
| very popular.
|
| Really limits your options in terms of height/inclination
| but it's been popular enough that they're almost at
| capacity.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Non-orbital. But it can do that as well. Just sacrifice the
| rocket and use the landing fuel for more delta-v.
| avmich wrote:
| I hope Blue Origin succeeds too, but I'm not sure which
| mission profiles wouldn't be served best by the Starship in
| comparison to other launchers. There could be some ultra-
| light ones, where the cost for the whole launch is less than
| refueling the Starship, but...
| imtringued wrote:
| Obviously any mission that goes beyond LEO that does not
| aeorbrake at the destination, because that means you're
| expending an upper stage with aerodynamic surfaces for no
| reason.
|
| Also anything that does a direct TLI or TMI, because you
| will have to stop for in-orbit refuelling.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Huh? If Starship can cheaply lift 150T to LEO, you can
| allocate some of that 150T to a propulsion system.
| basementcat wrote:
| That means the customer has to buy an additional
| propulsion stage (plus time for integration testing and
| insurance in case it damages the launch vehicle, in case
| it becomes reusable). Also, it is not yet clear what the
| LEO payload capability of the vehicle is.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The cost of an expendable third stage is surely more than
| made up for the brute force cost savings of being able to
| launch 150T to LEO for the cost of fuel and a car wash.
| basementcat wrote:
| I think it depends on the situation. It is not yet clear
| if 150T to LEO is real (and even if it is, you're likely
| sharing it with a bunch of other customers who might not
| want to fly with another rocket motor unless it has gone
| through quite a bit of vetting and paperwork; Shuttle
| banned the use of solid rocket motor 3rd stages after the
| Challenger accident) and it is not yet clear what the
| cost for a typical customer is going to be. Rocket
| engines designed to start in a vacuum are more difficult
| and expensive to develop and test than engines designed
| to operate closer to STP.
| avmich wrote:
| The cost to get to LEO dominates in most, if not all,
| launches, and it's relatively trivial to add a booster
| stage which solves additional delta-v problems while
| being cost preferential to alternatives.
|
| Maybe SpaceX will make those stages, if the market would
| interest them. Maybe fellow companies like Impulse Space
| would manage those requests. Starship still looks like a
| probable winner in the area.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other
| mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship
|
| I'm rooting for any and all US launch providers to succeed,
| but I don't think this is true. Starship at full reusability
| will be better than any other launcher for every single
| mission profile imaginable.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| There's simply no way one vehicle will be the best option
| in every case.
|
| If you have a small satellite you need placed somewhere
| unique, firing up a huge launch vehicle makes no sense.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It does if it's _still_ cheaper than any other rocket.
| timewizard wrote:
| Your launch price may somehow be cheaper; although,
| that's incredibly unlikely. Anyways as your insurance
| underwriter I'm going to jack up the rate on you so high
| for that launch it will no longer be cheaper.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Starship's launch price is highly likely to be cheaper if
| New Glenn's second stage isn't reusable.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| It's also a bit of a straw-man to assume people will only
| fly on the cheapest lift option. Virgin Orbit lasted as
| long as it did only because there was one (maybe two)
| customers who were willing to pay a premium for being
| guinea pigs for a new technology. Their reasoning was
| something like "if this pans out, it'll be very cool long
| term" so they were willing to put their small-sats on a
| largely untested platform.
|
| The same could be said about some of the entrenched
| players in earth observation. They're willing to pay a
| bit of a premium for a reasonable amount of time to
| ensure there's not a monopoly player (which definitely
| looks like it will be SpaceX.)
|
| How much of a premium they're willing to pay and for how
| long seems like anyone's guess.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This. If, and it's a big if, starship can be 100%
| reusable and less than 24 hours turn around, then it will
| be the space truck NASA envisioned with the shuttle
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Even if it's not 100% reusable it's still likely to be
| cheaper than New Glenn. New Glenn uses extremely
| expensive methods of construction. Starship is assembled
| like a glorified water tank.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I'm not sure I see it that way, I wonder sometimes how
| much of the expensive construction can be systematized
| into something less expensive, and how much of Starship's
| "cheap" construction will remain as they work harder and
| harder to get to their reuse and turnaround goals. My
| intuition is that Starship will get more expensive to
| make over time and New Glenn less expensive but beyond
| that I can't say if they would meet in the middle or
| cross.
|
| That said, platform construction costs only dominate when
| you can't re-use the platform. Anything you can re-use
| gets amortized over each re-use. That is what had made
| Falcon 9 so cost effective. Mostly because they get
| nearly 10 flights per booster.
| aarmot wrote:
| > ... Falcon 9 ... nearly 10 flights per booster
|
| Just curious: what year is your data from?
| grecy wrote:
| > _That is what had made Falcon 9 so cost effective.
| Mostly because they get nearly 10 flights per booster._
|
| You're way out of date. Multiple boosters have flown over
| 20, a couple are at 23.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-
| stage...
| avmich wrote:
| I guess 10 flights per booster is an average over, say,
| the whole time since the first booster successfully
| landed. In the list by this link there are ~70 boosters,
| and I don't think Falcons flew ~700 missions yet, so 10
| flights per booster looks on average approximately
| correct, even though some - even quite a few - boosters
| flew significantly more that 10 times.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I'm looking at overall re-use numbers. Yes, boosters are
| now being certified for more launches which will, over
| time, bring both the average and the median number of
| launches per booster up.
|
| In this conversation, I think the relevant point is that
| as the 'resusability' of the F9 booster has gone up, so
| has the cost to make a single booster. That's because
| they've added things and changed how they make them in
| order to boost re-usability. I expect the same evolution
| in Starship/Booster which will increase the unit cost in
| order to make them more reusable which will lower overall
| cost of launches because you can amortize those costs
| across multiple flights.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I agree w/ Chuck. It's a BIG IF. I'm hoping for them. I
| really hope BO turns out to be a good competitor for
| SpaceX so they're both highly motivated. I've seen the
| sausage being made at a couple of new space companies
| (and at least one old space company.) Even more than chip
| vendors and PC clone manufacturers, Heavy Lift providers
| are their own worst enemies. If SpaceX fails, it will be
| because of something they decided to do, not something
| that was foisted upon them. Ditto for Rocket Lab and Blue
| Origin. But the cool flip side of that is they're free to
| do extremely cool/innovative things. The guys who are
| privately held aren't beholden to a board that wants
| increasingly dependable revenue and profits (looking at
| you, ULA.) And this does not seem to be the industry that
| can tolerate that. I'm bullish on SpaceX, BO _and_ Rocket
| Lab (assuming Rocket Lab doesn 't run out of runway.)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There's no way they're getting rapid turnaround with the
| damage it's has sustained on the last two tests.
| grecy wrote:
| I'm always amazed by statements like this. Starship is
| currently a test program and is rapidly evolving. They're
| improving it as they learn.
|
| What you said is akin to looking at the Wright brothers
| plane and saying "no way that thing crosses the
| Atlantic."
|
| It will improve rapidly until it does.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| I don't see how that makes any sense. Starship is 100t
| dry; simply the fuel costs of a launch will necessarily
| be higher than disposable alternatives.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| fuel is cheap
|
| most expensive part are the engines
| perihelions wrote:
| Fuel is cheap: it's $900,000 per Starship launch,
| according to Musk [0]. No disposable rocket comes within
| even a factor-of-10 of that.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/elon-musk-says-
| spacexs-sta...
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| I was perhaps exaggerating a little with the fuel cost
| comparison, but we've had rockets like Astra R3 and
| SS-520 fly for under $5M per launch. Rocket Lab's
| Electron is ~$7.5M. That's all within a factor of 10.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| The rocket equation doesn't participate in capitalism --
| moving mass to orbit takes delta-v and that takes fuel.
|
| If you are going to imagine a hypothetical future where
| starship has made technological leaps forward sufficient
| to be the cheapest possible option _despite being
| significantly heavier and larger aerodynamically_ , you
| have to imagine someone else could also improve their
| rocket. A smaller rocket requires less fuel to fly.
|
| The US is not the only place flying rockets, and spacex
| has a lead, but if the industry takes off, there will be
| other contenders. Once rockets start getting more similar
| as they all start contending with physics, a smaller
| rocket will necessarily be cheaper.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is Starship really not following the exact step of N-1 &&
| VentureStar?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Computers and materials came a long way since the N1, as
| Starship's successful tests can attest to.
| numpad0 wrote:
| But they're still losing roughly as many engines as
| Russians did in N1, so that sounds like a dubious claim.
|
| What about the latter? Are they really not tracing the
| footsteps of the X-33 program?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| What? Flight five didn't lose any engines. N1 kept
| blowing up.
|
| X-33 never got to a test flight, let alone a successful
| one.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the
| booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I'm
| not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.
| trollied wrote:
| People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every
| time...
| bamboozled wrote:
| I think they're asking the question: "Is there really
| value in the product" or is it a gimmick like the cyber
| truck.
| baq wrote:
| I'm not sure which profiles don't make sense unless they
| can't figure out payload doors. Stage 2 reuse means you can
| put up 50 tons or so of stage 3 in LEO for approximately free
| in current payload pricing terms, it's a crazy number.
| (Advertised capacity of 100-150 tons is probably pointless
| and/or volume-limited anyway for a third stage.)
| DrBazza wrote:
| Not all profiles end up in _orbit_. At this point in time,
| reusuability sacrifices delta-v for fuel. If you want to
| launch scientific missions you want to escape Earth orbit.
| If we 're going to land on Mars, we're going to need a lot
| of stuff sent there first.
| baq wrote:
| But it doesn't matter if you can launch 10x the mass for
| the same price to LEO and light your stage 3 to get
| anywhere you'd like to be. Stage 3 will have enough delta
| v and starship's doesn't matter as long as it gets you to
| the parking orbit.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| Do you have some references of New Glenn being positioned as a
| Falcon 9 killer by any industry professionals, commentators or
| press with credibility (at the risk of no true Scotsman)?
|
| This was certainly thrown around with Tesla, but it's not
| something I've personally come across with SpaceX.
|
| Regardless, if semiconductors have taught us anything over the
| last decade, strong competition is essential for a healthy
| market. It's hard to imagine a true (haha) fan of space
| exploration that isn't cheering on Rocket Lab and Blue Origin
| (as you are), even if they're destined to forever be runners
| up. Even if you believe Musk will operate SpaceX entirely
| selflessly, he won't be in control of it forever.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Boeing will probably buy one of the also rams to improve
| their offerings
| dylan604 wrote:
| Can an also ran buy another also ran? Does that even make
| sense?
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| The moment SpaceX is sold to Boeing is the moment Musk
| doesn't get to go to Mars. And while he _may_ never be able
| to have the martian colony he seems to covet, he still
| seems to believe he can do it, so there 's zero motivation
| to sell.
|
| Also... Boeing? They've been having some issues lately.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I was thinking that Blue Origin was a more likely target.
| WWLink wrote:
| > Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to
| catch up to SpaceX
|
| Maybe we should just give the whole space industry to SpaceX
| because obviously nobody can touch them. /s
| foobarian wrote:
| They seem perfectly good at doing that all on their own
| Retric wrote:
| It's got more than twice the payload capacity of Falcon 9 to
| LEO and a 7m payload fairing vs 9m for Starship.
|
| The real question is if there's going to be enough demand to
| justify these systems. With enough reusability it might make
| sense to fly these things 2/3 empty, but that's only going to
| be so profitable.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| New Glenn's main customer will be Kuiper, Amazon's answer to
| Starlink.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| But also whatever Amazon's equivalent of NanoRacks is
| 'cause Amazon also wants to feed their GSaaS (Ground-
| Station as a Service) play. I think long-term Kuiper is
| going to be BO's main customer, but selling lift capacity
| to a NanoRacks-alike could reduce the impact of a Kuiper
| schedule slip.
| Retric wrote:
| Starlink already scaled to 1M US households using Falcon 9
| launches and this is twice as large. I think it's
| reasonable to question just how many launches a competitor
| would support.
| imtringued wrote:
| >odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn
| completes testing.
|
| What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three
| versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't
| supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed
| to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask
| people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this
| confusing answer that the booster is "already obsolete" even
| though they have planned to launch three more "obsolete"
| boosters after the first successful catch.
|
| Everyone is bragging how fast SpaceX is, but they are starting
| to drag their feet. It's like those people who build a demo
| that looks like the product is almost finished, but it turns
| out those were the easy and visible 80% that you can show off,
| now you're left with the hard and time consuming 20% and you're
| going to run into delays like everyone else.
|
| And then there is the fact that New Glenn is going to launch on
| 5th of January and attempt landing on the first flight. Barring
| an explosion on the way to orbit, New Glenn will be flying at
| least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025
| including a moon landing of Blue Moon MK1.
|
| Your comment comes across as pessimistically predicting the
| failure of the first launch or being ignorant that it will
| launch in four days.
| grecy wrote:
| > _New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions
| carrying payloads throughout 2025_
|
| 12 missions is their upper limit of capacity, so it's "at
| most 12".
|
| https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "the easy and visible 80% that you can show off"
|
| There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It
| is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and
| the only methane-based engine that ever reached space.
|
| AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with
| Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an
| important problem, but it also means that many other
| complicated problems (such as precise exercise of the belly
| flop) are fully solved.
| tahoeskibum wrote:
| I'm a big SpaceX fan, nonetheless I am looking forward to some
| competition for SpaceX. If New Glenn succeeds, it might become a
| workhorse like Falcon 9/Heavy. And don't forget New Armstrong is
| the next generation, should be in the works.
| mattigames wrote:
| I'm sure that as the new pseudo-president he will avoid doing
| anything that might sabotage SpaceX competitors.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's sad that this has to come into it, but given both of the
| companies CEOs "kissing the ring" so to speak, is there
| really any competition here, or just politics now?
| Novosell wrote:
| How much data do you guys reckon they gather during this
| 24-second window? Gigabytes? Terabytes? I imagine they have
| redundant sensors for every measurement, if possible. The LHC
| generates 1 PB/s, though it filters it down to roughly
| 200MB/s[0]. I wonder how this compares.
|
| 0: https://www.lhc-
| closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_...
| timewizard wrote:
| You can fly to space with a 40ms control loop. It's a
| surprisingly low accuracy affair especially compared to
| particle physics. You're more likely capturing some actuator
| positions and discrete outputs and ensuring that everything
| sequences and responds to limits correctly, more on the level
| with an automobile CAN bus capture than it is anything else,
| and likely less than even 1 gigabyte.
|
| There's likely more data stored in the video files from the
| cameras that observed the test than test data itself.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I'm just remembering that the images we got from Doves @
| PlanetLab DWARFED the telemetry from the bus.
| amluto wrote:
| I would imagine far less. The LHC captures many channels of
| sensors (for spatial resolution) and captures at very high
| frequency (because the time scales involved are _fast_ and also
| because LHC is doing time-of-flight measurements).
|
| I doubt that a rocket has anywhere near as many sensors (have
| you seen pictures of the LHC's instruments? They're basically
| all sensor), and I also expect that the timescales involved in
| rocketry are rather longer than in high energy physics.
|
| Here's a slide deck about ATLAS building an ASIC that reads
| something at 25 picosecond precision:
|
| https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/at...
|
| Unless someone at Blue Origin is trying to localize a specific
| part of their flame by time of flight of _light_ , I don't see
| why time resolution even close to that would be at all useful.
| Perhaps they're very fancy and want to tell which part of their
| rocket initiated an explosion by time of flight of _sound_ ,
| but that's rather less demanding.
|
| With the caveat, of course, that LHC events don't explosively
| destroy the instrumentation. If you want useful telemetry in
| the last milliseconds before a rocket failure, you had better
| seriously harden your data logger or have very low latency
| transmission to a remote receiver :)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Combustion in the chamber happens at roughly the speed of
| sound in the F/O mixture. I don't know what the speed of
| sound in gCH4 is, but it's probably within an order of
| magnitude of air - air at 250 bar.
|
| This is actually extremely important to model. Early F1
| engines (Saturn V, not motorsport) were exploding and the
| engineers pretty much got lucky with the baffle design.
| Having a suite of sensors and then a computer model it would
| have saved lots of hardware and time - and really would have
| pretty much assured success. They were unsure if they'd
| succeed right up until they did.
| frodo8sam wrote:
| Not pure luck though, they tried 15 different baffle
| configurations. Would of course be easier to filter
| configuration in simulations.
| dotancohen wrote:
| There was enormous engineering effort put in with close
| coordination of physicists, but those 14 prior baffle
| configurations could have just as easily been 140.
|
| For a relevant example, even just the oil formulation for
| Water Displacement on the exterior of the steel Atlas
| rockets took 40 iterations. Hence naming the product
| WD-40.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder how many of the other baffle designs and water
| displacement formulations would still have been "good
| enough" - not optimal but usable?
| dotancohen wrote:
| At least for the baffles: None. That's why they kept
| going. Presumably there are even better possibly designs,
| but they were not discovered because one that works was
| found.
|
| I don't know about the prior WD formulations.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Still way slower than what particle physics throws at you
|
| (Wolphram Alpha gives me 743 m/s @ 250 bar and 1000C -
| could be wrong but probably the same OoM)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yes, of course. I was clarifying, not disputing.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Speed of sound also depends on the temperature (i.e. speed
| of the gas molecules) which is high and variable. These
| kinds of coupled interactions make combustion instability
| really hard to model in CFD hence the importance of full-
| scale testing.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| If you solve the formulas for calculating it, the speed
| of sound _only_ depends on temperature. Mostly because
| temperature is dependant on pressure itself.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Temperature and molecular properties.. which guess what
| are also highly variable in combustion! Very messy stuff.
| Especially when you get into the actual nitty gritty of
| all the intermediate chemical species involved.
| klysm wrote:
| I would wager the actually important data is far smaller. A
| single camera would probably dominate throughput
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| can confirm.
| threeseed wrote:
| Formula 1 car has over 300 sensors and generates 1.5Gb a lap.
|
| So I would imagine this is generating hundreds of megabytes.
|
| You are going to be limited by what you can transfer over
| radio.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| The system I worked on in the 2010s was pretty meager:
| 192kbits-per-second for the bus and about 54kbits-per-second
| (BITS, not BYTES) for the propulsion module. This is without
| video and doesn't count payload. It was also before we got the
| license for the beefy GHz S-Band, so we were sort of forced to
| make due.
|
| But... you _CAN_ get a lot of decent info from a low bandwidth
| link.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Probably gigabytes. When I worked with other systems in the
| past we needed to upgrade our gigabit ethernet to handle the
| full-rate telemetry
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Do you mean upgrade to gigabit or from gigabit to 2.5Gbps or
| 10Gbps?
| elteto wrote:
| Not much, really. Most sensors are low speed: tens to hundreds
| of Hz. Then you have some high speed sensors, like strain
| gages, that are up in the 30+ kHz range.
| black6 wrote:
| It depends on the number of PIDs and the speed of the data
| acquisition system. When I worked on the RS-25 engine project
| the engine had hundreds of PIDs, the low speed DAS was 250
| samples per second, and the high speed DAS was 250,000 sps. The
| high speed DAS generated so much data that it was only started
| a few seconds before engine start so the recorders wouldn't
| fill up before the end of the tests (which were typically 500
| seconds).
|
| EDIT: something to add is that not ever PID was tied into the
| high speed DAS-only a couple-few dozen important PIDs.
| pizlonator wrote:
| I hope they succeed!
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I wish them all the best. I really want to see humans land on the
| moon again. We'll bring humanity together again. One big step for
| mankind.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Blue Origin is a funny company. I worked for
| TerraBella/SkySat/Google Satellite, Planet Labs and Kubos, each
| as a consultant/contractor/whatever. I struck up a conversation
| w/ Rob Meyerson @ a conference and told him what I was working on
| (mostly comms / ground station work, but with a tiny bit of GNC
| test infrastructure.) I mean, I'm not God's gift to rocket
| scientists, but... I was pretty heavily recruited by them but was
| working at Amazon and didn't want to leave, then spent some time
| nursing a family member through cancer treatments. Finally I'm
| ready to talk to them and I start with back-channel chats to make
| sure they still have open reqs. They do so I informally talk
| about specific things I've done and what I might do at BO.
| Finally I put my resume together and submit it to the hiring
| manager I had been talking about, emphasizing the bits he said he
| was interested in. 15 minutes later I'm rejected for the position
| they had been recruiting me for.
|
| I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid
| for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design
| meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we
| agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm
| solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but
| that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the
| shop.
|
| Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like
| Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams
| communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to
| optimize complete functional or value chains is when something
| breaks.
|
| Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar"
| to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization
| religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the
| number of engineers.
|
| I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent
| competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone
| weird.
|
| I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired
| there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in
| an intense experience to check out their jobs page.
| Jach wrote:
| There's several funny stories of their hiring oddities on HN
| going back at least 10 years... For myself, I only talked to
| them about a back-end SWE role, not avionics, but they were the
| only company to ever ask about my college GPA. (Not good.)
| mannyv wrote:
| Was this before or after Limp joined?
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| I wonder if Jeff Bezos also hoses-down Blue Origin workers with
| ice-cold water to passive-aggressively attack demands of livable
| wages and sensible working conditions for Amazon warehouse
| workers.
| zizee wrote:
| Good luck to them. SpaceX is great, but healthy competition is
| always important at driving progress. I'd like to take a trip to
| space one day, and even if SpaceX nails rapid reusability, the
| best chance of them being motivated to pass on launch savings is
| a competitor hot on their heals.
|
| I would also love to see Blue Origin spend more time on building
| space habitation. If Starship does bring heavy lift costs right
| down, I want to see all the interesting things that people start
| putting into space
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