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.
If you think about that, a lot of fuel for in-space nuclear reactors will already have been launched, so, if a new peace treaty outlaws them, it'll be a boon to whoever operates fission reactors in space. Or wants to use them for propulsion.
Once in space, they can't be disposed of - deorbiting is a big no-no, as it's blowing them up.
If one is using a nuclear reactor for long term power or propulsion you shouldn't need to be disposing of it in the Earth's vicinity anyways - there is plenty of solar in Earth orbit. Not that peace treaties around nukes will inherently ban reactors.
If the nuke is already in orbit, harvesting it for fissile fuel seems like a sensible way of decommissioning it. They you can power your NTR (or RTG if you must) from its fuel. It'll require some in-orbit metallurgy work, to get it in the proper shape and composition.
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 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.
I guess it depends on which decade you look at. The Saturn and Shuttle programmes achieved more novelty for the time on faster timelines. Of course, they also cost a lot more....
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.
How many years ago was it that Elon said that if Starship wasn't completed by the end of the year SpaceX would go out of business? Elon really isn't a candidate for carefully-set-expectations martyrdom.
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.
"NASA prime contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne, Axiom Space, Bechtel, Blue Origin, Boeing, Amentum, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX"
> suggesting NASA should just redo Apollo was dumb
Dumber than redoing Shuttle and throwing away proven reusable RS-25 engines? It's been a while since I watched it, but it seems to me one example highlights the absurdity of the other.
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.
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.
A pet peeve of mine is that the US doesn't actually use "imperial units", as those were established by the Brits well after the declaration of independence.
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'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)
> But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
People confuse familiarity with intuitiveness all the damn time. It's a recurring theme in OS "ease of use" superiority debates as well as metric vs imperial. And date, time or number formats. And road signs.
But I'm never at exactly 1 atm plus the government dumps copious amounts of salt so water never actually freezes at 0°C plus so long as I memorize that 32°F is freezing it's exactly the same as memorizing 0°C is freezing.
I would say the nice thing about the metric system is as long as you convert into a base unit (i.e. Meters, Seconds, etc) then you can easily convert stuff around. But you can't! Metric uses Kilograms not Grams all the time for things like Force (Kg *m/s^2). So I still have the same problem as imperial units ...
If you can't multiple 231 by 5280 what are you going to do when you measure a length of 23.1 cm and need to multiple it by the height of 52.80 cm?
> Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
You have missed the point. Force is a mass * distance / time. So, if I have a 1 g weight I want to move 1 meter in 1 second then it takes 1 Newton of force. Except it doesn't because Force is actually kilo-mass * distance / time. If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away because I can just memorize the imperial way as well.
It just comes down to what you're familiar with. There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
> If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away
Hmmm... no?
With metric, once you know what a "meter" is, you have the distances. <milli>meter, <centi>meter, <deci>meter, ... It's one unit: the meter. And fractions of it that require trivial conversions.
With imperial, you have multiple units of distance: inches, feet, yards, football fields, miles.
The benefit of metric is that you have to memorise fewer units, period. Your example is a formula in physics. There you have to memorise F = m * a AND in which units those are (bonus if they are consistent between the formulas, of course). That's strictly equivalent between imperial and metric there.
> It just comes down to what you're familiar with.
Of course, if you're familiar with imperial and not metric, then you're better off with imperial!
> There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
That's an interesting example: Mandarin is known for being a lot harder than English. Obviously, if you grew up with Mandarin and no English, you will be more comfortable with Mandarin. But people speaking Mandarin don't insist on saying that Mandarin is not harder than English, in my experience :-).
I think in your first point the difference is between "calculation" and "conversion". For calculations, it's generally accepted that arbitrary numbers are possible and a calculator may have to come out. For conversions, it's nice to be able to say that 1250m is 1.250km - I bump into conversions much more commonly than having to do calculations, and it's nice to be able to do them in my head.
I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).
Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well
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. We're used to what we're used to :-).
> Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature
This says that you grew up with imperial, I'm convinced of it!
> 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? What about the fact that in metric, a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, and a millimeter is 1/1000 of a meter? Those are fractions, right?
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 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 downvotes for an innocent opinion. I don't share your opinion, but it's not offensive or anything like that :-).
I think the mistake you have is starting from the wrong premise. The premise, IMO, should be that OP has been harassed, demeaned, and otherwise been made to feel bad for 20+ years for using the units they were raised with. At least that's my experience as an American.
Most people don't seem to care about the units, what the haters care about (not you, but the general experience) is having an opportunity to proclaim how much better they are than other people, mostly over an accident of birth.
I totally feel for that, you should not be harassed, demeaned or made to feel bad for that (or anything else for that matter).
But I don't think that the rational answer is to try to convince everybody that your system is more intuitive because the other has "ridiculous" features. I answered to a comment that said: "ridiculously better in the imperial system".
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.
I was with the space industry in India. The aviation sector is uniform throughout the world and uses feet, ft/s (vertical rates), knots (air and ground speed) etc. But I believe ground ranges are in kilometres and fuel loads are in kilogram, though I have heard pounds used in some places. Some ex-Soviet countries used to work with SI units even for aviation. But that difference between them and the world was partially responsible for a very tragic and horrific mid-air collision over Charkhi-Dadri near New Delhi in 1996. I don't know if they changed that afterwards. Meanwhile the naval and marine sectors also use nautical miles (different from the imperial miles) and knots exclusively. I believe that it's because the naval conventions were formed before the SI system was devised. Aviation sector just borrowed from them.
Considering all these, you'd expect space sector to borrow from the aviation sector. But we use SI systems exclusively. Everything in metres, kilograms, seconds. Feet, miles, knots etc are unheard of (Well, we have heard of them. We just don't use them). SI units make calculations and our life a magnitude of order easier. I need to check up how it is with winged reentry vehicles. But they're also likely go with m/s rather than knots. The only time we face difficulty with esoteric units are when we use some rare sensors. You end up looking up the definition of 'BTU' and other similar atrocities.
There are two noteworthy exceptions to this trend though. It's when specifying engine thrust and specific impulse. Engine thrust is often specified in kilograms, (metric) tonnes etc. Of course they mean kgf and Tf (weight equivalent of that mass under 1g). Meanwhile mN, N, kN and MN are also used equally frequently. It's a perennial source of frustration and conflict, with younger generation preferring SI units and the seniors preferring kilograms and tonnes. Meanwhile, specific impulse is even weirder. If you were using SI units, you'd expect N.s/kg or m/s or something similar. Even if you were using imperial units, you'd expect something similar. But the unit everyone actually uses is seconds. For examples, a high end cryogenic engine may deliver an Isp in the range of 450s (SSME had a vacuum Isp of 452s). Sometimes, it's also expressed as 'effective velocity' of exhaust in m/s. There are logical explanations for all these weird units. But the reality is that none of them, including the SI units are strictly correct, because they all use some sort of scaling that isn't linear or an assumption that doesn't apply.
You can blame the US for all these inconsistencies in the space sector. The Americans have a habit of making up units on the spot. For example, the kT, MT yields of nukes were invented by the Manhattan project scientists. Similarly, the unit of nuclear criticality is dollars and cents - thanks to Louis Slotin. (Sadly, he passed away soon after the second criticality accident with the demon core). Anyway, the US also has shot themselves in the foot by mixing up units. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet instead of entering its orbit due to the engineers mixing up the SI and imperial units. Moral of the story, if you plan to go to space, you better choose a measurement system and stick to it. Also, don't make a round scrubber for the command unit and a square scrubber for the lander. Make up your mind first!!
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.
Some of use in India don't even grok inches, miles, pounds, pints, ares or cubits. In fact, I haven't met anyone in the professional fields (science, engineering and medicine) who is comfortable with imperial or any other non-metric systems. Not even our parents are comfortable with them. It was a nightmare when we were faced with such units in public exams. That's an arcane skill that disappeared 3 or 4 generations ago. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the whole of India is like that. But I'm pointing to the fact that there are entire regions in India where it has been like that for generations.
Its not uniform across domains. For example in Singapore or Hong Kong if you ask someone's height it's CM but flat apartment area or price is psf. Ounces are unknown. I guess it's same in India.
The kids need to learn a new system first for things to change. Canada understood this. The US insists on teaching future generations imperial units, so it won't change quickly.
I love how you mischaracterize it. All measurement systems are as artificial as Esperanto. So that analogy is meaningless here. But as far as popularity goes, the SI system is like English and the imperial units are like Esperanto. Never mind the age difference. So you're better off choosing the system that maintains consistent prefixes and units without arbitrary conversion constants. And that's what the rest of the world does. Meanwhile, enjoy the company of Myanmar and Liberia!
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.
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 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.
Trying to compete against Falcon 9 is like entering the TV market against TCL. At best, you won't lose your shirt trying and can quit gracefully. Several other rockets startups think they do want to try. Let them.
Being a better Falcon Heavy is a much more realistic goal. Just having a larger payload fairing is enough to win some business.
I'm not sure what Starship is designed for. But I don't think it's worth even comparing until it can demonstrate deploying a payload other than a flat pack satellite, in orbit refueling, recovering both stages and turning the rocket around fast enough that you don't have to build 17 Starships to refuel one in orbit. Before these milestones are reached, the cost-effectiveness is very theoretical.
The big difference is that one of these rockets flew a successful mission, and the other one might be years away from key milestones.
You have no choice. It’s the largest and most profitable sector of your market. If you don’t compete in it, SpaceX can subsidize Falcon Heavy launches with their Falcon 9 launches to put you out of business.
I’m honestly not sure what Starship is designed for either. Despite all the hype, it might bankrupt SpaceX. Or seems like the poster child for second system syndrome.
I strongly suspect they already have been pricing Falcon Heavy launches below cost, with the exception of national security launches. IIRC spaceX claims that falcon heavy has a lower cost per kilogram to orbit than Falcon 9.
I also suspect that they are burning capital everywhere and their margins are extremely thin. The charitable assessment of that is that they are being like Amazon and they know what they are doing. A less charitable assessment is that Amazon could simply turn a pricing knob and become profitable. There is no knob at SpaceX. They need to make a very risky rocket project work for things to work in general. Not that that's a pattern in Elon's businesses or anything.
Your expectations are wrong, and we know that because being selected for HLS included letting NASA go over their books and determining the odds of success financial.
"Or seems like the poster child for second system syndrome." is spot on. Finding that they could actually land a Falcon 9 is exactly the serendipitous kind of win that leads to second system syndrome. There's a bit of Cybertruck-ism in the mix, too.
I assume they'll have figured out a deployment strategy for Project Kuiper where the unit economics works; there are advantages and disadvantages to launching more satellites, less frequently. SpaceX isn't that different in creating its own demand: the launch cadence of the Falcon 9 is so frequent mainly because they have a lot of their own satellites to launch.
You can make money on infrequent launches of niche stuff (and Blue Origin will target orbit injections and stuff like handling nuclear material for big one-off missions that SpaceX isn't interested in competing for). But New Glenn and to an even greater extent Starship owe their existence to an assumption that we'll be launching bigger stuff than constellation class satellites in volume to build space infrastructure in the next decade: space stations, space solar, lunar resource extraction stuff etc. If that comes to pass, the bigger question is whether New Glenn is too small...
Incorrect. Starship is predicated on the idea that reusing the second stage will let them lower the cost of launch another ten times and it won’t matter if you don’t fill Starship completely, it will still be the cheapest option.
And the unit economics of a smaller launch vehicle with a reusable second stage would be better still, especially since rapid launch cadences are what SpaceX does best. They've built it big because they think the demand exists.
Starship's maximum payload doesn't matter - it's cost per launch is all that matters, and with full reuse it will be cheaper to launch a medium payload on Starship than F9. SpaceX has already stated some of their launch contracts include the option to switch the launch vehicle to Starship from F9.
It really does matter because SpaceX has to recover the cost of developing the program. I have no idea what all these test launches cost (where they lose the vehicle) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the $300-500M range. Plus development time for all the components, particularly the engines.
Starship is complex. The Raptor engines are complex. There are valid reasons to use Methane instead of Kerosene (ie to avoid coking and the ccost to reuse) but now you need two chilled propellants with everything that entails.
You need to do a lot of launches to become human-rated (like Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon is now). In-orbit refueling is going to take a lot of launches to perfect and prove and it's going to have fairly limited applications to boot.
Plus the entire program is a massive opportunity cost. SpaceX is in their Boeing 747 era now. The 747 was such a massive profit center for Boeing for decades, particularly when the program was paid for so it didn't need to be recovered on each plane delivered.
Ultimately that ends. Engines are so reliable that they don't make 4 engine commercial planes anymore. I read it's likely that the engine will never have to be replaced for the entire life of the plane, which is a vastly different situation to 50-60 years ago when the 747 was first developed.
The Falcon 9 is currently the most successful launch system ever made and it is a cash cow. But if SpaceX spends a decade or more delivering Starship and recovering the program cost, that's a long time for somebody else to come along with an even cheaper platform in the same class as Falcon 9.
Falcon wasn’t in the mix until Amazon faced a shareholder lawsuit for not contracting with the cheapest provider. I’m not sure if that is true given the volume limitations of F9, but the only hope Amazon has of getting to the FCC halfway point is a lot more F9 launches. No one else can launch fast enough.
> 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!)
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.
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.
> Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.
...and we'd be back to steam engine wheel formulas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whyte_notation
Though not identical, more commonly well known are the 4x2 and 4x4 designations for vehicle drive wheel specification.
Such standardization will set a design envelope for the Golden Dome weapons..
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.
> you want hundreds of nukes in orbit?
If you think about that, a lot of fuel for in-space nuclear reactors will already have been launched, so, if a new peace treaty outlaws them, it'll be a boon to whoever operates fission reactors in space. Or wants to use them for propulsion.
Once in space, they can't be disposed of - deorbiting is a big no-no, as it's blowing them up.
If one is using a nuclear reactor for long term power or propulsion you shouldn't need to be disposing of it in the Earth's vicinity anyways - there is plenty of solar in Earth orbit. Not that peace treaties around nukes will inherently ban reactors.
If the nuke is already in orbit, harvesting it for fissile fuel seems like a sensible way of decommissioning it. They you can power your NTR (or RTG if you must) from its fuel. It'll require some in-orbit metallurgy work, to get it in the proper shape and composition.
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.
Indeed, exciting times! What looked like science fiction in Reagan's era (brilliant pebbles)? now seems almost too banal and simple to even build.
For those who aren’t aware, the next flight is to lunar orbit, with a planned landing on the moon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
That seems like a big jump between flights. I'm used to the spend and explode fast incremental iterations of SpaceX.
The first flight of the Saturn V was 'all up'. Every stage was the real live thing. No dummy stages, real payload.
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/
That's true, but there were several prior rockets in the Saturn family which were used to test various parts of the design and mission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_(rocket_family)
And no one would be ok today with the risks taken in those launches.
Human spaceflight is more about mitigating risk than anything. Apollo was getting there first, so there was a willingness to take more risks.
Also, NASA at the time had a humongous budget compared to today, adjusted for inflation [1] and it was a lot more focused on just getting to the moon.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
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).
Starship can fly to orbit, it's just not cheaper than a reusable falcon 9 that way
Starship has only flown 11 times. I suspect it's more cost effective than the Falcon 9 was when it had 11 launches, long before any reuse.
Counting all those explosions as "flown" is pretty charitable.
It's a technical rocketry term that encompasses all attempted flights, successful or otherwise.
Your confusion stems from trying to use a different definition of the word when reading. Context clues are your friend here :)
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.
Even old space got further in 20 years than Blue Origin.
Did I miss a privately funded, reusable heavy lift rocket coming out of old space in the past 20 years?
I guess it depends on which decade you look at. The Saturn and Shuttle programmes achieved more novelty for the time on faster timelines. Of course, they also cost a lot more....
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.
Sad part is that even though SpaceX / Elon has been very clear about expected outcomes it's still used against them.
How many years ago was it that Elon said that if Starship wasn't completed by the end of the year SpaceX would go out of business? Elon really isn't a candidate for carefully-set-expectations martyrdom.
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.
NASA still had much smaller jumps in capability between flights. Check out the Smarter Every Day NASA talk.
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
> Check out the Smarter Every Day NASA talk
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.
> I said aerospace community. Not NASA.
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.
> None of them get their bread buttered by Artemis. A few would if it were dumped.
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis-partners/
"NASA prime contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne, Axiom Space, Bechtel, Blue Origin, Boeing, Amentum, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX"
> suggesting NASA should just redo Apollo was dumb
Dumber than redoing Shuttle and throwing away proven reusable RS-25 engines? It's been a while since I watched it, but it seems to me one example highlights the absurdity of the other.
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.
[1] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/pr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
Nobody is going to Mars anytime soon. It's the moon or nothing.
It worked pretty well for F9.
Mostly because the whole landing thing was pretty novel.
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.
I recognize a fellow Kerbal space program enthusiast by what they consider to be challenges and what is just "more of the same". :)
I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
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.
Not with this attitude they won't!
OK, but is that attitude in radians or degrees?
Gons.
A pet peeve of mine is that the US doesn't actually use "imperial units", as those were established by the Brits well after the declaration of independence.
Intel should announce their new 40ni (40-nanoinch) process node next April Fools' Day.
If one byte equals one grain of rice it would have a bandwidth of 7.47millioncups/s
If I wouldn't know better, I'd assume using the metric system is actually a disadvantage when building SOTA rockets.
Wait until you find the places people use non-SI but still metric units, it's super fun.
Good thing they didn’t use two of those units.
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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'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)
> But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
People confuse familiarity with intuitiveness all the damn time. It's a recurring theme in OS "ease of use" superiority debates as well as metric vs imperial. And date, time or number formats. And road signs.
But I'm never at exactly 1 atm plus the government dumps copious amounts of salt so water never actually freezes at 0°C plus so long as I memorize that 32°F is freezing it's exactly the same as memorizing 0°C is freezing.
I would say the nice thing about the metric system is as long as you convert into a base unit (i.e. Meters, Seconds, etc) then you can easily convert stuff around. But you can't! Metric uses Kilograms not Grams all the time for things like Force (Kg *m/s^2). So I still have the same problem as imperial units ...
It's just whatever your familiar with.
> But you can't! Metric uses Kilograms not Grams all the time for things like Force (Kg *m/s^2)
A <kilo>gram is 1000 times a gram, it's written in the word. Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
A mile is 5280 feet. I can't just convert 231 miles into feet like that, and that's assuming I remember "5280".
If you can't multiple 231 by 5280 what are you going to do when you measure a length of 23.1 cm and need to multiple it by the height of 52.80 cm?
> Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
You have missed the point. Force is a mass * distance / time. So, if I have a 1 g weight I want to move 1 meter in 1 second then it takes 1 Newton of force. Except it doesn't because Force is actually kilo-mass * distance / time. If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away because I can just memorize the imperial way as well.
It just comes down to what you're familiar with. There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
> If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away
Hmmm... no?
With metric, once you know what a "meter" is, you have the distances. <milli>meter, <centi>meter, <deci>meter, ... It's one unit: the meter. And fractions of it that require trivial conversions.
With imperial, you have multiple units of distance: inches, feet, yards, football fields, miles.
The benefit of metric is that you have to memorise fewer units, period. Your example is a formula in physics. There you have to memorise F = m * a AND in which units those are (bonus if they are consistent between the formulas, of course). That's strictly equivalent between imperial and metric there.
> It just comes down to what you're familiar with.
Of course, if you're familiar with imperial and not metric, then you're better off with imperial!
> There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
That's an interesting example: Mandarin is known for being a lot harder than English. Obviously, if you grew up with Mandarin and no English, you will be more comfortable with Mandarin. But people speaking Mandarin don't insist on saying that Mandarin is not harder than English, in my experience :-).
I think in your first point the difference is between "calculation" and "conversion". For calculations, it's generally accepted that arbitrary numbers are possible and a calculator may have to come out. For conversions, it's nice to be able to say that 1250m is 1.250km - I bump into conversions much more commonly than having to do calculations, and it's nice to be able to do them in my head.
I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).
Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well
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. We're used to what we're used to :-).
> Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature
This says that you grew up with imperial, I'm convinced of it!
> 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? What about the fact that in metric, a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, and a millimeter is 1/1000 of a meter? Those are fractions, right?
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 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 downvotes for an innocent opinion. I don't share your opinion, but it's not offensive or anything like that :-).
I think the mistake you have is starting from the wrong premise. The premise, IMO, should be that OP has been harassed, demeaned, and otherwise been made to feel bad for 20+ years for using the units they were raised with. At least that's my experience as an American.
Most people don't seem to care about the units, what the haters care about (not you, but the general experience) is having an opportunity to proclaim how much better they are than other people, mostly over an accident of birth.
I totally feel for that, you should not be harassed, demeaned or made to feel bad for that (or anything else for that matter).
But I don't think that the rational answer is to try to convince everybody that your system is more intuitive because the other has "ridiculous" features. I answered to a comment that said: "ridiculously better in the imperial system".
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.
Welcome to Earth. Some countries use different unit systems. (Some even use a hodge podge of multiple systems!) Please enjoy your stay.
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.
I was with the space industry in India. The aviation sector is uniform throughout the world and uses feet, ft/s (vertical rates), knots (air and ground speed) etc. But I believe ground ranges are in kilometres and fuel loads are in kilogram, though I have heard pounds used in some places. Some ex-Soviet countries used to work with SI units even for aviation. But that difference between them and the world was partially responsible for a very tragic and horrific mid-air collision over Charkhi-Dadri near New Delhi in 1996. I don't know if they changed that afterwards. Meanwhile the naval and marine sectors also use nautical miles (different from the imperial miles) and knots exclusively. I believe that it's because the naval conventions were formed before the SI system was devised. Aviation sector just borrowed from them.
Considering all these, you'd expect space sector to borrow from the aviation sector. But we use SI systems exclusively. Everything in metres, kilograms, seconds. Feet, miles, knots etc are unheard of (Well, we have heard of them. We just don't use them). SI units make calculations and our life a magnitude of order easier. I need to check up how it is with winged reentry vehicles. But they're also likely go with m/s rather than knots. The only time we face difficulty with esoteric units are when we use some rare sensors. You end up looking up the definition of 'BTU' and other similar atrocities.
There are two noteworthy exceptions to this trend though. It's when specifying engine thrust and specific impulse. Engine thrust is often specified in kilograms, (metric) tonnes etc. Of course they mean kgf and Tf (weight equivalent of that mass under 1g). Meanwhile mN, N, kN and MN are also used equally frequently. It's a perennial source of frustration and conflict, with younger generation preferring SI units and the seniors preferring kilograms and tonnes. Meanwhile, specific impulse is even weirder. If you were using SI units, you'd expect N.s/kg or m/s or something similar. Even if you were using imperial units, you'd expect something similar. But the unit everyone actually uses is seconds. For examples, a high end cryogenic engine may deliver an Isp in the range of 450s (SSME had a vacuum Isp of 452s). Sometimes, it's also expressed as 'effective velocity' of exhaust in m/s. There are logical explanations for all these weird units. But the reality is that none of them, including the SI units are strictly correct, because they all use some sort of scaling that isn't linear or an assumption that doesn't apply.
You can blame the US for all these inconsistencies in the space sector. The Americans have a habit of making up units on the spot. For example, the kT, MT yields of nukes were invented by the Manhattan project scientists. Similarly, the unit of nuclear criticality is dollars and cents - thanks to Louis Slotin. (Sadly, he passed away soon after the second criticality accident with the demon core). Anyway, the US also has shot themselves in the foot by mixing up units. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet instead of entering its orbit due to the engineers mixing up the SI and imperial units. Moral of the story, if you plan to go to space, you better choose a measurement system and stick to it. Also, don't make a round scrubber for the command unit and a square scrubber for the lander. Make up your mind first!!
By "some countries" you mean United States, Liberia, and Myanmar
and also by ‘some countries’ they mean about 4% of the earth’s population, or 1 in 25 people.
But 26.3% of the world’s GDP.
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.
But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..
Some of use in India don't even grok inches, miles, pounds, pints, ares or cubits. In fact, I haven't met anyone in the professional fields (science, engineering and medicine) who is comfortable with imperial or any other non-metric systems. Not even our parents are comfortable with them. It was a nightmare when we were faced with such units in public exams. That's an arcane skill that disappeared 3 or 4 generations ago. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the whole of India is like that. But I'm pointing to the fact that there are entire regions in India where it has been like that for generations.
Its not uniform across domains. For example in Singapore or Hong Kong if you ask someone's height it's CM but flat apartment area or price is psf. Ounces are unknown. I guess it's same in India.
Yes in a large country it could be regional variations.
Science progresses one funeral at a time.
The kids need to learn a new system first for things to change. Canada understood this. The US insists on teaching future generations imperial units, so it won't change quickly.
Fwiw, Myanmar has been transitioning to metric since 2013 but, well, they had other worries.
Likewise, Liberia set up a transition program in 2018.
AFAIU both still use a bunch of traditional non US units too, like the UK.
You’ll find imperial units in lots of Chinese products too.
After all, they’re the ones manufacturing the imperial screws, etc.
Why use English instead of Esperanto?
I love how you mischaracterize it. All measurement systems are as artificial as Esperanto. So that analogy is meaningless here. But as far as popularity goes, the SI system is like English and the imperial units are like Esperanto. Never mind the age difference. So you're better off choosing the system that maintains consistent prefixes and units without arbitrary conversion constants. And that's what the rest of the world does. Meanwhile, enjoy the company of Myanmar and Liberia!
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.
Because SI units are part of the language of science and communicating about rockets involves the language of science.
Also, SI units aren't some niche idealised standard like Esperanto, they're more widely used than the English language...
Because it is a false dichotomy.
False analogy, in fact. The explanation is in my direct reply to the commenter.
If you feel that strongly, maybe the rest of the world can use the metric system for their reusable rocket programs.
These two entrepreneurs have changed so much.. Musk and Bezos... To think that at one point USA had to rely on Russian engines!
All made in Taiwan!
And Ukraine, depending on the time that is/isn't Russia/USSR
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.
Because the falcon boosters have to be road transportable.
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.
Theoretically the fairing could be any size, but there is a limit to how much bigger than the rocket it can be.
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.
The numbers:
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)
> incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course
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
Yep, 70 tons to LEO is more than the Falcon Heavy.
Thing that doesn’t exist yet will have better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!
News at 10
> 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'm just comparing specs, not dissing anybody. SpaceX of course also has Starship, which may well be fully operational by then.
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.
Trying to compete against Falcon 9 is like entering the TV market against TCL. At best, you won't lose your shirt trying and can quit gracefully. Several other rockets startups think they do want to try. Let them.
Being a better Falcon Heavy is a much more realistic goal. Just having a larger payload fairing is enough to win some business.
I'm not sure what Starship is designed for. But I don't think it's worth even comparing until it can demonstrate deploying a payload other than a flat pack satellite, in orbit refueling, recovering both stages and turning the rocket around fast enough that you don't have to build 17 Starships to refuel one in orbit. Before these milestones are reached, the cost-effectiveness is very theoretical.
The big difference is that one of these rockets flew a successful mission, and the other one might be years away from key milestones.
You have no choice. It’s the largest and most profitable sector of your market. If you don’t compete in it, SpaceX can subsidize Falcon Heavy launches with their Falcon 9 launches to put you out of business.
I’m honestly not sure what Starship is designed for either. Despite all the hype, it might bankrupt SpaceX. Or seems like the poster child for second system syndrome.
I strongly suspect they already have been pricing Falcon Heavy launches below cost, with the exception of national security launches. IIRC spaceX claims that falcon heavy has a lower cost per kilogram to orbit than Falcon 9.
I also suspect that they are burning capital everywhere and their margins are extremely thin. The charitable assessment of that is that they are being like Amazon and they know what they are doing. A less charitable assessment is that Amazon could simply turn a pricing knob and become profitable. There is no knob at SpaceX. They need to make a very risky rocket project work for things to work in general. Not that that's a pattern in Elon's businesses or anything.
Your expectations are wrong, and we know that because being selected for HLS included letting NASA go over their books and determining the odds of success financial.
Starlink is making money hand over fist.
Chosen by an administration known for careful due diligence amirite?
"Or seems like the poster child for second system syndrome." is spot on. Finding that they could actually land a Falcon 9 is exactly the serendipitous kind of win that leads to second system syndrome. There's a bit of Cybertruck-ism in the mix, too.
I assume they'll have figured out a deployment strategy for Project Kuiper where the unit economics works; there are advantages and disadvantages to launching more satellites, less frequently. SpaceX isn't that different in creating its own demand: the launch cadence of the Falcon 9 is so frequent mainly because they have a lot of their own satellites to launch.
You can make money on infrequent launches of niche stuff (and Blue Origin will target orbit injections and stuff like handling nuclear material for big one-off missions that SpaceX isn't interested in competing for). But New Glenn and to an even greater extent Starship owe their existence to an assumption that we'll be launching bigger stuff than constellation class satellites in volume to build space infrastructure in the next decade: space stations, space solar, lunar resource extraction stuff etc. If that comes to pass, the bigger question is whether New Glenn is too small...
Incorrect. Starship is predicated on the idea that reusing the second stage will let them lower the cost of launch another ten times and it won’t matter if you don’t fill Starship completely, it will still be the cheapest option.
And the unit economics of a smaller launch vehicle with a reusable second stage would be better still, especially since rapid launch cadences are what SpaceX does best. They've built it big because they think the demand exists.
Starship's maximum payload doesn't matter - it's cost per launch is all that matters, and with full reuse it will be cheaper to launch a medium payload on Starship than F9. SpaceX has already stated some of their launch contracts include the option to switch the launch vehicle to Starship from F9.
It really does matter because SpaceX has to recover the cost of developing the program. I have no idea what all these test launches cost (where they lose the vehicle) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the $300-500M range. Plus development time for all the components, particularly the engines.
Starship is complex. The Raptor engines are complex. There are valid reasons to use Methane instead of Kerosene (ie to avoid coking and the ccost to reuse) but now you need two chilled propellants with everything that entails.
You need to do a lot of launches to become human-rated (like Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon is now). In-orbit refueling is going to take a lot of launches to perfect and prove and it's going to have fairly limited applications to boot.
Plus the entire program is a massive opportunity cost. SpaceX is in their Boeing 747 era now. The 747 was such a massive profit center for Boeing for decades, particularly when the program was paid for so it didn't need to be recovered on each plane delivered.
Ultimately that ends. Engines are so reliable that they don't make 4 engine commercial planes anymore. I read it's likely that the engine will never have to be replaced for the entire life of the plane, which is a vastly different situation to 50-60 years ago when the 747 was first developed.
The Falcon 9 is currently the most successful launch system ever made and it is a cash cow. But if SpaceX spends a decade or more delivering Starship and recovering the program cost, that's a long time for somebody else to come along with an even cheaper platform in the same class as Falcon 9.
Not terribly familiar with the details, but Amazon kuiper has a contract with blue origin and other providers.
Sure, but Kuiper is launching on other rockets to meet an fcc deadline for using enough of their spectrum. They even launch on falcon 9.
If other providers had the capacity to launch all of them, I'm sure falcon wouldn't be in the mix there.
Falcon wasn’t in the mix until Amazon faced a shareholder lawsuit for not contracting with the cheapest provider. I’m not sure if that is true given the volume limitations of F9, but the only hope Amazon has of getting to the FCC halfway point is a lot more F9 launches. No one else can launch fast enough.
> 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!)
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_fairing_recovery_progra...
> 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.
They actually redesigned them to be able to handle the splash down.
Thanks for the updated info!
They still recover the fairings. They gave up on trying to catch them out of the air and now just let them land in the water and pick them up.
Presumably this was written by somebody from aerospace, who's unaware of the nuances of what "An update on New Glenn" usually means in Silicon Valley.
> the nuances of what "An update on New Glenn" usually means in Silicon Valley
What does it mean?
Usually it’s how a closing down business announcement is titled in the startup world. It’s not typically used to give a real update on a project.
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Jeff Bezos is not a net positive to humanity. If we ignored people like him, the world would be a better place...
Hey dont tell these neo-technofeuds that their north star example of "success" is anything but souplesse..!!!