This is also good news for SpaceX. Satellite and payload designers generally design to common fairing sizes so they have a choice in launch providers. The 8.7m 9x4 fairing is similar to the 9m Starship fairing so more designers will now be designing payloads that use the full Starship capacity.
I agree, though I think the real winner here is the customers. The New Glenn 9x4 has a higher targeted payload capacity that an expended Falcon Heavy. Mission design takes years, and payload mass is the most important constraining factor. So it'd now be fairly reasonable approach to start building now for 9x4's constraints, and then fly on it or Starship depending on readiness and price. If customers start doing this now, that also means a quicker pickup on using the increased launch capability.
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.
Launch cost was already a single digit percentage of total cost when using Falcon-9s. Reduction in launch cost doesn't really change anything at that point.
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.
Shh. Forget the physical limits. Just tell him that everyone is working on his golden hat idea. Thats what everyone did the last time an old man demanded space lasers. In a few years, one way or another, someone new will come along who might understand math well enough that we can explain why it wont work.
I am the first to complain about imperial units but this article is mostly metric. As long as metric/SI is there, I have no problem with what they chose to show next to it, including swimming pools, football fields and Hiroshima bombs.
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.
Good lord, find something else to be angry about. Decades of metric vs imperial threads should have you convinced by now that no matter how hated they are, these units aren't going away any time soon.
I don't understand why this is being downvoted. I would love if metric were used universally, but I don't really see any difference between that and wanting a single language to be used universally. In fact, the cost of different languages is certainly much higher than different systems of units. Converting between systems of units is just trivial arithmetic after all.
I split my time between Europe and the US, and I am totally not convinced that metric is better.
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.
I am ready to bet big that you would never hear that kind of opinions from someone who learned the metric system first. Am I right in your case?
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.
> Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature
All this says is that you grew up with imperial.
> 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?
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 manage to 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 upvotes for an innocent opinion. I don't share your opinion, but it's not offensive or anything like that :-).
I've always found the weather argument somewhat unconvincing, because 0°C being the freezing point of water is very much a useful point of reference in weather contexts - it's roughly where one may expect iced-over pavements and rain to turn to snow! And then the higher temperatures are a question of getting used to it - 40°C instead of 100°F is very very warm, 30 is pretty hot, 20 is reasonably warm, etc.
But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
Yeah, frankly Celsius is very easy for weather temperatures in temperate environments. Snow and ice is approx 0, room temperature approx 20, a hot summer's day approx 30 and it won't reach 40 unless you go on holiday in a desert region. Easy to approximate on a small range (and the nominal extra precision of Fahrenheit is illusory for talking about weather anyway because you care far more about humidity and wind than sub 1 Celsius differences)
Imperial is more familiar to you. You could just have said that.
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.
I don't think that's the OP's issue, it's just in this context.
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.
In India, decades after metric, many will only understand feet and inches for height, length etc.. Think it's the same in many Asian countries, though some have moved on.
The incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course. The exciting thing in this announcement is the new 9x4 configuration (9 and 4 engines in the first and second stages vs the current 7x2). They don't mention whether the tanks will get stretched to allow for more fuel, or if this just burns the fuel faster. Starship generations keep getting both more engines and longer.
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.
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.
Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9.
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.
The really big change will be launch thrust to weight ratio. Going from ~1.2 to ~1.35 gives you 75% more thrust at launch which means you spend less time fighting gravity, less time in the thick parts of the atmosphere, and less time to get past the trans-sonic region.
There are other constraints on how quick the vehicle should be, even when engine performance allows: you probably won't want to hit maximum dynamic pressure in too-thick air.
> New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass.
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?)
I believe that a larger fairing and vertical integration capability for Falcon is in the works as a result of the last round of the National Security Launch Contracts that SpaceX won.
The fairings aren't constrained to the diameter of the booster, they already have a larger diameter than the booster.
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.
I'm sure there's a limit, but it's not really that big an effect as you'd think. The fairing is lifted almost entirely by the first stage, and as SpaceX increased confidence in the landings they were able to reduce to fuel margins, leaving move for a heavier fairing. The aerodynamic effects are secondary to the added weight, and are only a really a bother for a few seconds at max q. In fact, the larger volume to surface area makes designing for max q easier in some respects, such as audio energy.
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.
I believe Raptor 2 operates at a lower chamber pressure. According to Wikipedia, Raptor 3 is 350 bar, and its thrust to weight ratio is 183.6:1.
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.
Based on the photo posted by the Blue Origin CEO the tanks are definitely getting stretched (also looks like a slightly different fin, landing leg, and fairing config)
> Thing that doesn’t exist yet will, ideally, have 6% better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!
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.
I think SpaceX is taking the re-usability part of Starship as foundation. Meaning they won't move forward until it's solved. With Falcon they added it as a bit of a secondary priority. They've spent so much resources trying to get the second stage back to earth. I think they should have just focused on getting the whole system flying to orbit, throwing away second stage for now, and using that platform to replace falcon. Eventually, they could refactor second stage to get it back to earth. But perhaps it's all too coupled that it has to be solved at one time (not later).
Seems BO is taking the NASA approach of not being so cavalier with testing. You can tell people you expect the thing to fail, but repeatedly seeing them fail is still seen as a negative.
New Glenn is manufactured with a different philosophy, so Blue can't be Starship levels of cavalier with testing. It would cost way too much to do with their current approach.
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.
That is clearly not true. SLS is much more expensive by any measure and is not reusable in any way. Other interesting work, e.g. rocket lab, is not old space.
Sure, we went through Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo 1-7 before humans orbited the moon. However, we started from blank sheet of paper back then. BO has the knowledge learned from Gemini, Mercury, and all of Apollo to start.
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.
I am so old I lived through it! - 13 years old staying up all night to watch Neil take his little stroll. Genuine question, how DO they teach it in school? Do they get into the physics of any of it (orbital mechanics, rocketry etc)? Do they get into the cold war geopolitics of it? Do they teach the amazing accomplishments of the Soviet Union as well as NASA?
It's not like it was a class on rocket science, but more of just history of each program being a stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of landing on the moon
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.
Few of us like having our work critiqued by an "outsider". Especially when such critique threatens your paycheck.
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.
> Few of us like having our work critiqued by an "outsider"
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.
> ULA (Lockheed Martin + Boeing), Northrup Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, etc. do. That's what I took "aerospace community" to mean
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.
That was my interpretation of that talk. It seemed like a regurgitation of opinions of an old aerospace engineer. But that's probably unfair to Dustin, I believe that he actually came to that conclusion himself. But it was a really incorrect take that SLS was somehow the "safe bet" in comparison to betting on Starship. The whole talk just seemed insane based on what I knew about both programs.
The payload capacity of Starship version 2 is around 35 tons to LEO. The propellant capacity is 1500 tons. This means it takes 42 tanker loads to fill up one Starship. This means Destin was extremely optimistic with respect to how well Starship is going to perform.
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.
AFAICT it's "getting to Mars" for SpaceX and their ecosystem, and "sustainable cislunar economy" for Nasa, ULA and Blue Origin and their respective ecosystem. For example, see ULA's "cislunar 1000" concept from ~10 years ago.
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.
> it's "getting to Mars" for SpaceX and their ecosystem, and "sustainable cislunar economy" for Nasa, ULA and Blue Origin and their respective ecosystem
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.
I was thinking the same thing - big leap. But maybe there’s no real difference between ending up in Earth orbit versus lunar orbit, in that the basic aspects (thrust, staging, navigation, etc) are all there already? But everything relating to the lander (releasing it, landing it) would be new.
> These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond.
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 think Blue Origin's biggest problem is they don't currently have a planned or real Falcon 9 competitor.
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.
Interesting that "...additional vehicle upgrades include a reusable fairing..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature
All this says is that you grew up with imperial.
> 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?
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 manage to 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 upvotes for an innocent opinion. I don't share your opinion, but it's not offensive or anything like that :-).
But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
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.
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.
But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton-force#Tonne-force
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
The third flight of the Saturn V took 3 astronauts in their spacecraft to lunar orbit and back.
https://appel.nasa.gov/2010/02/25/ao_1-7_f_snapshot-html/
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!)
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.
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?