7 ms·

After a 24-second test of its engines, the New Glenn rocket is ready to fly

113 points by fenced_load 2y ago

teractiveodular 2y ago
We're at 12 years of design and 5 years behind the originally announced first launch of 2020 now. Space is hard, rocketry is harder and I wish them luck, but Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX: this was meant to be the Falcon 9 killer, but odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing.
- WWLink 2y ago
  > Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX Maybe we should just give the whole space industry to SpaceX because obviously nobody can touch them. /s
  - foobarian 2y ago
    They seem perfectly good at doing that all on their own
- yeknoda 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ternnoburn 2y ago
  Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem convinced Starship will just "solve" space, but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship. But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true. I suspect the head start in infrastructure spacex has is pretty valuable in developing new programs. Space is hard. I hope Blue Origin succeeds.
  - sebazzz 2y ago
    Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.
    - trollied 2y ago
      People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every time...
      - bamboozled 2y ago
        I think they’re asking the question: “Is there really value in the product” or is it a gimmick like the cyber truck.
  - zizee 2y ago
    Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?
    - Retric 2y ago
      10t to LEO in an unusual orbit. Being smaller than Starship while still huge isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Starship should be able to put 10t into LEO significantly cheaper than New Glenn can. Why would anybody pay more?
        OhMeadhbh 2y ago
        I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease off. Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship. This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal-with-blue-origin-arianespace-ula-for-project-kuiper-internet-satellites.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal...
- reitzensteinm 2y ago
  Do you have some references of New Glenn being positioned as a Falcon 9 killer by any industry professionals, commentators or press with credibility (at the risk of no true Scotsman)? This was certainly thrown around with Tesla, but it's not something I've personally come across with SpaceX. Regardless, if semiconductors have taught us anything over the last decade, strong competition is essential for a healthy market. It's hard to imagine a true (haha) fan of space exploration that isn't cheering on Rocket Lab and Blue Origin (as you are), even if they're destined to forever be runners up. Even if you believe Musk will operate SpaceX entirely selflessly, he won't be in control of it forever.
  - wombatpm 2y ago
    Boeing will probably buy one of the also rams to improve their offerings
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Can an also ran buy another also ran? Does that even make sense?
    - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
      The moment SpaceX is sold to Boeing is the moment Musk doesn't get to go to Mars. And while he may never be able to have the martian colony he seems to covet, he still seems to believe he can do it, so there's zero motivation to sell. Also... Boeing? They've been having some issues lately.
      - wombatpm 2y ago
        I was thinking that Blue Origin was a more likely target.
- Retric 2y ago
  It’s got more than twice the payload capacity of Falcon 9 to LEO and a 7m payload fairing vs 9m for Starship. The real question is if there’s going to be enough demand to justify these systems. With enough reusability it might make sense to fly these things 2/3 empty, but that’s only going to be so profitable.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    New Glenn's main customer will be Kuiper, Amazon's answer to Starlink.
    - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
      But also whatever Amazon's equivalent of NanoRacks is 'cause Amazon also wants to feed their GSaaS (Ground-Station as a Service) play. I think long-term Kuiper is going to be BO's main customer, but selling lift capacity to a NanoRacks-alike could reduce the impact of a Kuiper schedule slip.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Starlink already scaled to 1M US households using Falcon 9 launches and this is twice as large. I think it’s reasonable to question just how many launches a competitor would support.
- imtringued 2y ago
  >odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing. What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this confusing answer that the booster is "already obsolete" even though they have planned to launch three more "obsolete" boosters after the first successful catch. Everyone is bragging how fast SpaceX is, but they are starting to drag their feet. It's like those people who build a demo that looks like the product is almost finished, but it turns out those were the easy and visible 80% that you can show off, now you're left with the hard and time consuming 20% and you're going to run into delays like everyone else. And then there is the fact that New Glenn is going to launch on 5th of January and attempt landing on the first flight. Barring an explosion on the way to orbit, New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 including a moon landing of Blue Moon MK1. Your comment comes across as pessimistically predicting the failure of the first launch or being ignorant that it will launch in four days.
  - grecy 2y ago
    > New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 12 missions is their upper limit of capacity, so it’s “at most 12”. https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2 https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    "the easy and visible 80% that you can show off" There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and the only methane-based engine that ever reached space. AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an important problem, but it also means that many other complicated problems (such as precise exercise of the belly flop) are fully solved.
    - minetest2048 2y ago
tahoeskibum 2y ago
I'm a big SpaceX fan, nonetheless I am looking forward to some competition for SpaceX. If New Glenn succeeds, it might become a workhorse like Falcon 9/Heavy. And don't forget New Armstrong is the next generation, should be in the works.
- mattigames 2y ago
  I'm sure that as the new pseudo-president he will avoid doing anything that might sabotage SpaceX competitors.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    It's sad that this has to come into it, but given both of the companies CEOs "kissing the ring" so to speak, is there really any competition here, or just politics now?
Novosell 2y ago
How much data do you guys reckon they gather during this 24-second window? Gigabytes? Terabytes? I imagine they have redundant sensors for every measurement, if possible. The LHC generates 1 PB/s, though it filters it down to roughly 200MB/s[0]. I wonder how this compares. 0: https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_data_analysis https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_...
- timewizard 2y ago
  You can fly to space with a 40ms control loop. It's a surprisingly low accuracy affair especially compared to particle physics. You're more likely capturing some actuator positions and discrete outputs and ensuring that everything sequences and responds to limits correctly, more on the level with an automobile CAN bus capture than it is anything else, and likely less than even 1 gigabyte. There's likely more data stored in the video files from the cameras that observed the test than test data itself.
  - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
    I'm just remembering that the images we got from Doves @ PlanetLab DWARFED the telemetry from the bus.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- amluto 2y ago
  I would imagine far less. The LHC captures many channels of sensors (for spatial resolution) and captures at very high frequency (because the time scales involved are fast and also because LHC is doing time-of-flight measurements). I doubt that a rocket has anywhere near as many sensors (have you seen pictures of the LHC’s instruments? They’re basically all sensor), and I also expect that the timescales involved in rocketry are rather longer than in high energy physics. Here’s a slide deck about ATLAS building an ASIC that reads something at 25 picosecond precision: https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/attachments/1902028/3140078/ALTIROC_TWEPP19.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/at... Unless someone at Blue Origin is trying to localize a specific part of their flame by time of flight of light, I don’t see why time resolution even close to that would be at all useful. Perhaps they’re very fancy and want to tell which part of their rocket initiated an explosion by time of flight of sound, but that’s rather less demanding. With the caveat, of course, that LHC events don’t explosively destroy the instrumentation. If you want useful telemetry in the last milliseconds before a rocket failure, you had better seriously harden your data logger or have very low latency transmission to a remote receiver :)
pizlonator 2y ago
I hope they succeed!
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I wish them all the best. I really want to see humans land on the moon again. We'll bring humanity together again. One big step for mankind.
OhMeadhbh 2y ago
Blue Origin is a funny company. I worked for TerraBella/SkySat/Google Satellite, Planet Labs and Kubos, each as a consultant/contractor/whatever. I struck up a conversation w/ Rob Meyerson @ a conference and told him what I was working on (mostly comms / ground station work, but with a tiny bit of GNC test infrastructure.) I mean, I'm not God's gift to rocket scientists, but... I was pretty heavily recruited by them but was working at Amazon and didn't want to leave, then spent some time nursing a family member through cancer treatments. Finally I'm ready to talk to them and I start with back-channel chats to make sure they still have open reqs. They do so I informally talk about specific things I've done and what I might do at BO. Finally I put my resume together and submit it to the hiring manager I had been talking about, emphasizing the bits he said he was interested in. 15 minutes later I'm rejected for the position they had been recruiting me for. I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the shop. Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to optimize complete functional or value chains is when something breaks. Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar" to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the number of engineers. I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone weird. I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in an intense experience to check out their jobs page.
- Jach 2y ago
  There's several funny stories of their hiring oddities on HN going back at least 10 years... For myself, I only talked to them about a back-end SWE role, not avionics, but they were the only company to ever ask about my college GPA. (Not good.)
- mannyv 2y ago
  Was this before or after Limp joined?
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
I wonder if Jeff Bezos also hoses-down Blue Origin workers with ice-cold water to passive-aggressively attack demands of livable wages and sensible working conditions for Amazon warehouse workers.
zizee 2y ago
Good luck to them. SpaceX is great, but healthy competition is always important at driving progress. I'd like to take a trip to space one day, and even if SpaceX nails rapid reusability, the best chance of them being motivated to pass on launch savings is a competitor hot on their heals. I would also love to see Blue Origin spend more time on building space habitation. If Starship does bring heavy lift costs right down, I want to see all the interesting things that people start putting into space

113 points by fenced_load 2y ago

We're at 12 years of design and 5 years behind the originally announced first launch of 2020 now. Space is hard, rocketry is harder and I wish them luck, but Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX: this was meant to be the Falcon 9 killer, but odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing.

WWLink 2y ago
> Blue Origin has an awfully long way to go if they want to catch up to SpaceX Maybe we should just give the whole space industry to SpaceX because obviously nobody can touch them. /s
- foobarian 2y ago
  They seem perfectly good at doing that all on their own
yeknoda 2y ago
[flagged]
ternnoburn 2y ago
Starship will serve a different mission profile. People seem convinced Starship will just "solve" space, but if it works, there's still going to be demand for other mission profiles that it won't make sense to send on Starship. But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true. I suspect the head start in infrastructure spacex has is pretty valuable in developing new programs. Space is hard. I hope Blue Origin succeeds.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  Starships model seems to hinge on being able to catch the booster every time and the second stage most of the time. I’m not sure if this is a Tesla Model 3, or a Cybertruck.
  - trollied 2y ago
    People had doubts about Falcon 9 landing on a barge every time...
    - bamboozled 2y ago
      I think they’re asking the question: “Is there really value in the product” or is it a gimmick like the cyber truck.
- zizee 2y ago
  Which mission profiles does Starship not make sense for?
  - Retric 2y ago
    10t to LEO in an unusual orbit. Being smaller than Starship while still huge isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Starship should be able to put 10t into LEO significantly cheaper than New Glenn can. Why would anybody pay more?
      - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
        I believe this is factually inaccurate. What's your source? Though admittedly, we have to depend on BO's predictions for per-kg launch costs, and those may be a lot higher for the first few missions and gradually ease off. Google's AI tells me the current costs for a Starship launch is somewhere between $100m and $2b. Wikipedia says a Falcon 9 costs about $50m and can lift about 20t to LEO. I see a blurb that says Musk says Starship launches will get down to $10m each. But... that seems like an "asperational statement." He also said Full Self Driving Mode would be available in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Not trying to take away from the absolutely cool stuff his companies have done, but it seems like it will be a while before it costs $10m to launch a Starship. This link from 2 years ago estimates a New Glenn launch costing $68m. I have no idea how accurate that number is. But if we're going to use Musk's "asperational" cost estimate for Starship launches in the distant future, we should let BO use an "asperational" figure as well. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal-with-blue-origin-arianespace-ula-for-project-kuiper-internet-satellites.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/05/amazon-signs-rocket-deal...
reitzensteinm 2y ago
Do you have some references of New Glenn being positioned as a Falcon 9 killer by any industry professionals, commentators or press with credibility (at the risk of no true Scotsman)? This was certainly thrown around with Tesla, but it's not something I've personally come across with SpaceX. Regardless, if semiconductors have taught us anything over the last decade, strong competition is essential for a healthy market. It's hard to imagine a true (haha) fan of space exploration that isn't cheering on Rocket Lab and Blue Origin (as you are), even if they're destined to forever be runners up. Even if you believe Musk will operate SpaceX entirely selflessly, he won't be in control of it forever.
- wombatpm 2y ago
  Boeing will probably buy one of the also rams to improve their offerings
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Can an also ran buy another also ran? Does that even make sense?
  - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
    The moment SpaceX is sold to Boeing is the moment Musk doesn't get to go to Mars. And while he may never be able to have the martian colony he seems to covet, he still seems to believe he can do it, so there's zero motivation to sell. Also... Boeing? They've been having some issues lately.
    - wombatpm 2y ago
      I was thinking that Blue Origin was a more likely target.
Retric 2y ago
It’s got more than twice the payload capacity of Falcon 9 to LEO and a 7m payload fairing vs 9m for Starship. The real question is if there’s going to be enough demand to justify these systems. With enough reusability it might make sense to fly these things 2/3 empty, but that’s only going to be so profitable.
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  New Glenn's main customer will be Kuiper, Amazon's answer to Starlink.
  - OhMeadhbh 2y ago
    But also whatever Amazon's equivalent of NanoRacks is 'cause Amazon also wants to feed their GSaaS (Ground-Station as a Service) play. I think long-term Kuiper is going to be BO's main customer, but selling lift capacity to a NanoRacks-alike could reduce the impact of a Kuiper schedule slip.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Starlink already scaled to 1M US households using Falcon 9 launches and this is twice as large. I think it’s reasonable to question just how many launches a competitor would support.
imtringued 2y ago
>odds are Starship will be fully operational before New Glenn completes testing. What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this confusing answer that the booster is "already obsolete" even though they have planned to launch three more "obsolete" boosters after the first successful catch. Everyone is bragging how fast SpaceX is, but they are starting to drag their feet. It's like those people who build a demo that looks like the product is almost finished, but it turns out those were the easy and visible 80% that you can show off, now you're left with the hard and time consuming 20% and you're going to run into delays like everyone else. And then there is the fact that New Glenn is going to launch on 5th of January and attempt landing on the first flight. Barring an explosion on the way to orbit, New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 including a moon landing of Blue Moon MK1. Your comment comes across as pessimistically predicting the failure of the first launch or being ignorant that it will launch in four days.
- grecy 2y ago
  > New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 12 missions is their upper limit of capacity, so it’s “at most 12”. https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2 https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1835610703174255074?mx=2
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  "the easy and visible 80% that you can show off" There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and the only methane-based engine that ever reached space. AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an important problem, but it also means that many other complicated problems (such as precise exercise of the belly flop) are fully solved.
  - minetest2048 2y ago

tahoeskibum 2y ago

I'm a big SpaceX fan, nonetheless I am looking forward to some competition for SpaceX. If New Glenn succeeds, it might become a workhorse like Falcon 9/Heavy. And don't forget New Armstrong is the next generation, should be in the works.

mattigames 2y ago
I'm sure that as the new pseudo-president he will avoid doing anything that might sabotage SpaceX competitors.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  It's sad that this has to come into it, but given both of the companies CEOs "kissing the ring" so to speak, is there really any competition here, or just politics now?

Novosell 2y ago

How much data do you guys reckon they gather during this 24-second window? Gigabytes? Terabytes? I imagine they have redundant sensors for every measurement, if possible. The LHC generates 1 PB/s, though it filters it down to roughly 200MB/s[0]. I wonder how this compares. 0: https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_data_analysis https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_...

timewizard 2y ago
You can fly to space with a 40ms control loop. It's a surprisingly low accuracy affair especially compared to particle physics. You're more likely capturing some actuator positions and discrete outputs and ensuring that everything sequences and responds to limits correctly, more on the level with an automobile CAN bus capture than it is anything else, and likely less than even 1 gigabyte. There's likely more data stored in the video files from the cameras that observed the test than test data itself.
- OhMeadhbh 2y ago
  I'm just remembering that the images we got from Doves @ PlanetLab DWARFED the telemetry from the bus.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
amluto 2y ago
I would imagine far less. The LHC captures many channels of sensors (for spatial resolution) and captures at very high frequency (because the time scales involved are fast and also because LHC is doing time-of-flight measurements). I doubt that a rocket has anywhere near as many sensors (have you seen pictures of the LHC’s instruments? They’re basically all sensor), and I also expect that the timescales involved in rocketry are rather longer than in high energy physics. Here’s a slide deck about ATLAS building an ASIC that reads something at 25 picosecond precision: https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/attachments/1902028/3140078/ALTIROC_TWEPP19.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/at... Unless someone at Blue Origin is trying to localize a specific part of their flame by time of flight of light, I don’t see why time resolution even close to that would be at all useful. Perhaps they’re very fancy and want to tell which part of their rocket initiated an explosion by time of flight of sound, but that’s rather less demanding. With the caveat, of course, that LHC events don’t explosively destroy the instrumentation. If you want useful telemetry in the last milliseconds before a rocket failure, you had better seriously harden your data logger or have very low latency transmission to a remote receiver :)

pizlonator 2y ago

I hope they succeed!

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

I wish them all the best. I really want to see humans land on the moon again. We'll bring humanity together again. One big step for mankind.

OhMeadhbh 2y ago

Blue Origin is a funny company. I worked for TerraBella/SkySat/Google Satellite, Planet Labs and Kubos, each as a consultant/contractor/whatever. I struck up a conversation w/ Rob Meyerson @ a conference and told him what I was working on (mostly comms / ground station work, but with a tiny bit of GNC test infrastructure.) I mean, I'm not God's gift to rocket scientists, but... I was pretty heavily recruited by them but was working at Amazon and didn't want to leave, then spent some time nursing a family member through cancer treatments. Finally I'm ready to talk to them and I start with back-channel chats to make sure they still have open reqs. They do so I informally talk about specific things I've done and what I might do at BO. Finally I put my resume together and submit it to the hiring manager I had been talking about, emphasizing the bits he said he was interested in. 15 minutes later I'm rejected for the position they had been recruiting me for. I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the shop. Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to optimize complete functional or value chains is when something breaks. Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar" to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the number of engineers. I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone weird. I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in an intense experience to check out their jobs page.

Jach 2y ago
There's several funny stories of their hiring oddities on HN going back at least 10 years... For myself, I only talked to them about a back-end SWE role, not avionics, but they were the only company to ever ask about my college GPA. (Not good.)
mannyv 2y ago
Was this before or after Limp joined?

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

I wonder if Jeff Bezos also hoses-down Blue Origin workers with ice-cold water to passive-aggressively attack demands of livable wages and sensible working conditions for Amazon warehouse workers.

zizee 2y ago

Good luck to them. SpaceX is great, but healthy competition is always important at driving progress. I'd like to take a trip to space one day, and even if SpaceX nails rapid reusability, the best chance of them being motivated to pass on launch savings is a competitor hot on their heals. I would also love to see Blue Origin spend more time on building space habitation. If Starship does bring heavy lift costs right down, I want to see all the interesting things that people start putting into space