well.. let him get something to orbit first. Landing comes after sending something to orbit
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For better or worse, Blue leans heavily in the old school direction of ‘failure is not an option’. Not like full stop, but there's basically no chance they're going to light the candle without the highest of confidence they're going to land the main stage.
Well, I did say “get a partially reusable rocket to orbit, just once”. Didn’t say anything about successfully landing it the first time.
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An article about ULA struggling to stay relevant. Not bad considering Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Given that they're going to be a Bezos customer for engines, I'm sure they're happy to be positive about it.
Didn‘t BO make a big deal about their recovery ship, how it was fast and was going to better than what SpaceX is using? Well, they are scrapping it, and … buying an identical barge to what SpaceX is using.
And using the same shipyard company who's "Employees are expecting to build a nut and bolt copy of their previous SpaceX barges."
Oh Jeff... lol
A more comprehensive report about this ship scrapping (and other BO woes) here: Blue Origin scraps New Glenn recovery ship, finishes first 'test tank'
It continues to astonish me how slowly New Glenn is being developed. As Eric Berger points out, BO is using “standard” methods of construction for rockets.
And now BO is showing off its first prototype 2nd stage tank. A tank which will be discarded into the ocean after it boosts the payload into orbit when New Glenn finally flies, a few years from now.
Basically, BO is building a bigger methalox version of the Falcon 9…a decade after SpaceX built and flew the F9 using kerosene.
I would not call that a Great Leap Forward…
Seems they have the wrong team running it. Bezos is an MBA finance kind of guy and he was good for Amazon which at its core is business that doesn’t require any cutting edge science. It’s all about efficiency. A good rocket company, however, is the exact opposite. You can‘t cost cut your way to success. You have to invent new science/engineering to get ahead.
Why bother about landing ships/barges at this time when they are not even close to launching anything successfully on an orbit?
This is like buying furniture for the house you are planning to construct, for which even a mortgage loan has not been approved yet.
This is like buying furniture for the house you are planning to construct, for which even a mortgage loan has not been approved yet.
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Yeah, but if we started listing all the stupid things BO has and is doing, we’d be here all day
Because:
1. The NG program does not contemplate major iterations like falcon had (from 1.0 to landing legs to FT...and everything in-between). Whether or not one agrees with the philosophy, near as makes no difference Blue is planning on full success on their first launch. That's one (of many) reasons why its taking so long--there's so many critical pieces that have to come together. (Make no mistake, they are coming together, and some of the pieces are quite impressive...they just take a traditional while and Blue is notoriously tight lipped about progress in the public domain so nobody really knows what's going on)
2. They've demonstrated they know how to land a rocket; figuring out what kind of thing NG should land on is an incremental step. They're so close that its pretty stupid to throw away a stick without even trying to land and reuse it.
JMHO but landing a rocket isn't easy. NG is very different from NS. How much of the knowledge gained is transferable? WAG on my part but I'd guess at 10%, at best: 25%. I'm expecting a RUD or two. I'm expecting that NG is a pricey vehicle. So a couple RUDs are not going to be something BO will be happy about. We'll see. It's not like I'm rooting for NG to fail. I'd like to see and have a secondary recoverable booster in the mix.
Most of the actual landing logic transfers. The new part is the horizontal energy. Agree its not easy; main point is that--given where they've gotten to thus far--there's no logic in them not trying to land the thing. Basically all the pieces are there except the actual kind of boat they're going to land on, and its come time for them to start working on that one, despite all the fanfare of Jeff and his Big Boat from a few years ago. But now that it is time, why not take the easiest route and go with what's been done [by copying SX]?
And that article goes on to tell a rather unflattering tale of New Glenn's glacial development pace...
And didn't Bezos pull a similar stunt by jumping in ahead of a previously known schedule to one-up The Virgin guys for first flight?:
"Jeff Bezos publicly revealed New Glenn just a few weeks before CEO Elon Musk’s long-planned September 2016 reveal of SpaceX’s next rocket"
And the press was going gaga on how Musk has been snubbed, and how Bezos is a better entrepreneur etc..
And then there was this BO landing which happened a few days before SpaceX first landing, which are two completely different levels of complexity, but the press was enjoying it.
Yeah... Jeffrey seems to have a complex....
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