Okay. New Glenn's first launch is pushed back to Q4 2022. New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight Blue Origin delays first launch of New Glenn to late 2022 - SpaceNews
They almost imply that now that they don't have the urgency of delivering for NSSL, they are going to take even more time to get to their first flight. Isn't that backwards? They lost NSSL because they were too slow. By delaying, they are increasing the odds of more lost contracts and cancellations. I've never understood Blue Origin. Kinda makes you wonder if Bezos was just lucky with Amazon. Certainly he had first mover advantage - I didn't realize it, but Amazon started operations in 1994, at a time when very few people even knew the Internet existed.
Rivian's videos leave me feeling the same, only this is worse. When I see all this brand new construction, years ahead of first use, I am thinking to myself, what a waste of resources! That giant building is going to be sitting there empty for two years. You can tell Bezos has no real vision beyond this being a vanity project, because otherwise he would be beside himself. If he really wanted to have cities in orbit, or on the moon or whatever his latest professed vision is, he would be aghast at the wasted money since every $ not used efficiently now is one less dollar towards the ultimate end goal of his floating cities, which is going to cost real $$. Elon has a very tough end goal, Martian civilization, which is why he is never satisfied with whatever SpaceX is doing now. He presses that company harder than any company ought to be pressed because he knows the likelihood to achieve his goal is small indeed.
I don't think Bezos was lucky with Amazon because the execution and growth over the years have been too stellar. It fit him like a glove. His huge mistake was modeling Blue Origin after the slow as molasses NASA and Boeing examples instead of trying something different. Next to the "fail fast" and "try again" juggernaut known as SpaceX, Blue Origin appears to be jogging in place. SpaceX videos are an inspiring beehive of activity. That noiseless Blue Origin video was a pathetic, desperate reach. Should have waited a couple more years. We will now find out if space is really a passion of Bezos. He should forget about chasing SpaceX and aim for second place because Starship and Super Heavy will add 10 years to SpaceX' already ridiculous lead.
Eric Berger on the real reason New Glenn is delayed almost certainly into 2023, if then. Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket is delayed for years. What went wrong?
Basically, Bezos decided to go from nothing to a rocket the size of a Saturn five, and make it reusable, and do it without the test and fail iterative engineering that SpaceX has been doing. The difference between Bezos and Musk is that while each ask their teams to do the almost impossible, only Musk works with the team closely enough to lead them through the tough times. That, and SpaceX financed a lot of their engineering by having customers pay for it because they delivered actual products. After all this time, all Blue Origin has is one orbital class engine that is still in testing. No actual rocket. And the company started before SpaceX did.
The other interesting difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin is how people perceive their CEOs. Does anyone actually like Bezos? I mean in the general population? He comes across to me as a snooty arrogant person who has disdain for the common folk. Is there a likeable side to his personality and I've just been missing it? While some people dislike Elon (mostly for political reasons), he has millions of adoring fans. Elon wears his heart on his sleeve and appears very genuine.
SpaceX and Elon are quite willing to fail if they learn from the failure. Apparently, that is not true at B.O. from both Bezos and BO CEO Smith. Also, it seems they aren't so good at multi-tasking since they are focused on getting the BE-4 to work properly before they focus on New Glenn. I am now even more sure that Starship and Super Heavy will be launching and reaching orbit before a single New Glenn launches. Too bad. SpaceX could use a reasonably decent competitor. I'm equally certain that Rocketlab's new Neutron rocket reaches orbit before New Glenn. Great article.
I agree. I actually feel sorry for BO’s engineers. They are being asked to do something no one else has ever done, and do it without failing and blowing up stuff. I don’t think that’s even possible.
The reality is, and it is my opinion, that there will be failures even with BO being extremely careful. The information and techniques they learned from New Shepard does not translate directly over to New Glenn. They are two very different rockets. We are seeing this in real time with Falcon 9 and the very different Starship. Just because SpaceX has one or two rockets landings down does not mean they automatically have Starship and Super Heavy landings down. I will be shocked if BO lands a New Glenn booster the first time they try. Even if they do, it is inevitable that something they didn't anticipate happens within the first few attempts.
Sure seems like Eric Berger enjoys taking swipes at Bezos. Reporting on the Bezos meeting with NASA's Lori Garver. "As Christian Davenport recounts in his book The Space Barons, Bezos told Garver at the time, "I want to tell you about my big rocket." Eric failed to suggest Jeff could have saved a little time by sending her a few text photos.
Except for just about the entire history of humans putting things into space. Failure has traditionally never been an option for any kind of space activity (mis-attributed quote not withstanding), and certainly not big/expensive space activity, like 'real' satellites (so, not student cubesats and such), 'big' rockets, and of course human flight. Even with SpaceX there was no Starship-like "let's see what happens" approach to Falcon 9. That things in the past have figuratively and literally blown up--of course leading to lessons well learned--doesn't mean the singular goal of those exercises (Redstone development, Apollo 1, STS, etc.) wasn't explicitly one of success.
According to Tom Mueller they blew up almost one hundred face shut off valves and associated engineering test hardware when designing the Merlin engine. Also the problem with New Glenn is that it is huge. Their engineers are going from basically nothing to a Saturn five in one go. Not easy.
Fair, but if that's the bar here the entire history of humans putting things into space includes intentionally testing components to failure. Far from it. As has been discussed here before [somewhere] there's a massive amount of relevance from New Shepard.
Well, I’m no rocket scientist but there’s a huge difference between a sub orbital rocket that has zero reentry heating and a massive orbital one that does. Not to mention that landing at sea on a floating drone ship isn’t exactly a piece of cake. And then isn’t there about a 10x difference in thrust? Or more? Anyways, we shall see what BO ends up doing.
While not the main point, I think its worth noting that: --The NG core stage, like F9, is sub-orbital. (Not apples to apples of course, but NS actually goes higher than F9 and, presumably, the NG core stage) --While there will certainly be post-separation aero heating on the control surfaces of NG, that kind of thermal load is pretty well understood and pretty well managed by modeling such that v0.X will, with high confidence, be able to do The Thing --A lot of the thermal load on the core stage is from the exhaust reversing...and NS will certainly provide useful insight into that kind of phenomenon... Sure. Of course, there's been no public statement (to my knowledge, anyway) regarding their recovery plans for their initial launch(es). For instance, we don't know that they're going to even try to land on their drone ship on launch 1, what they define as "success" for launch 1 recovery attempt, etc. Logic would strongly suggest that even if they have plans to attempt a barge landing on launch 1, there will be a very light abort trigger to a soft water landing. And, as noted elsewhere in similar discussions on this topic, Blue's experience designing, building, and launching NS provides NG, among other things: --All things BE-3 --Quite a bit of the recovery sequence (control/targeting algos, vertical flight dynamics, final landing sequence) --A litany of relevant lessons learned (design, manufacturing, reliability, redundancy, etc) --Standards and processes for production, operations, etc.
Test to failure is different than test to see if/ how it works. Method one: simulate/ analyze the heck out of an expensive part. Then test expecting it to work and verify the limits. Method two: build something that may work as cheaply and quickly as possible. Test to see where it fails. SpaceX went through three Falcon 1s to achieve orbit, Blue can't afford that (ignoring Bezos deep pockets) due to jumping to the full version (SpaceX only barely afforded it). Following that, many F9s were sacrificed in developing the ability to land. This was maintainable due to the launch being profitable (or close to) to begin with. Part of the article's point was NG was set up as too big to iterate/ fail. Total velocity vs atmospheric density is the driving factor though so doesn't horizontal velocity have more of an impact than inital altitude? NS has near zero horizontal velocity. F9's first stage peaks out at 6,000 - 8,000 kph. Heating of the non-aero surfaces (engines compartment ) is also critical and harder to manage/ simulate. Isn't the atmospheric breaking the main heat source? The F9 reenty burn uses the engines as a virtual heat shield/ speed brake. Based on this post, the exhaust temp at 60km is only 300C. Why don't SpaceX first stage boosters need heat shields on reentry? - Quora
I had simialr thoughts... the Max Q during ascent on an orbital class rocket as compared to relatively slow but high-altitude hopper is a whole different ballgame it would seem.