Blue Origin aims to land next New Glenn booster, then reuse it for Moon mission
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According to Reddit, the third booster could be ready around April next year.
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Might you be confusing Bezos with Branson? New Shepard's capsule apogee is usually somewhere around 105 km, give or take a km or two - so firmly above the Karman line.
As for BO's orbital rockets, launching even just twice within the first year of a heavy-lift rocket's debut, is actually not bad. Compare to ULA's Vulcan, for instance (which wouldn't even exist without Blue Origin's engines).
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I have to admit, my eyes saw "Blue Moon Mark II" and my brain got "Blue Moonshark II" ... I'm gonna blame the forums, plus my lack of coffee.
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Moonshark have no need for lunar lander, already on the moon.
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Of course there's good reasons. Once you get your booster reuse working, you shift that manufacturing capacity over to building upper stages. You can do that, because you designed your upper stage to use the same architecture and engines, right?
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SpaceX landed a SuperHeavy booster on the fifth attempt. #1 failed to stage, and never had the chance for an attempt. #2 failed during descent. This is where New Glenn is currently at. #3 failed during the landing burn. New Glenn didn't make it as far as a landing burn, because they failed to relight for the re-entry burn. #4 made a controlled simulated landing over the water. #5 finally attempted (and succeeded) the same process on land. Then #6 aborted and failed the attempt.
So if you're taking SpaceX as par, Blue Origin still has three more flights to go.
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Could Blue actually do something quickly? Is it even possible? They did succeed in landing their suborbital New Shepard rocket on the first try, and beat SpaceX to the punch in doing so (albeit with a much less energetic and therefore less challenging recovery regime).
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A NET date being too early is useless we both agree, but the math still checks out.
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If you are using SpaceX as par, BO has 2 more flights to go. The simulated landing over water (#4) would be a landing attempt for anyone not trying to get caught by a very expensive launch tower.
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It's still a simulated attempt, as opposed to an actual attempt on a barge.
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Get your photos now. We're gonna find a way to slap ads up on it, and make a mess of it in general.
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SpaceX takes a much more incremental approach. They didn't even have a barge out for the first several Falcon soft landings. Blue had the barge out last time, and will send it out again for flight 2. They are all done simulating landings.
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Blue Origin putting all it's eggs in one basket hoping for a successful landing.
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Well, not quite. If they fail to land, they'll be set back another several months until the next NG1 stage is built. Not a pleasant prospect, but they'll survive...
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I trust that everyone involved has already been issued their own, personal, pee bottle, so there's no need for them to ever leave the production floor.That...is a bold move. But who knows, maybe getting rid of over 10% of their workforce and demanding everyone go back to the office will pay off for them.
"Never Tell Me The Odds", well, I certainly can't do that, since I don't know what they are. But I am not overly optimistic.
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Those better boosters (Block 5) were designed and built with data from tearing down B1019. Which proves the point that sane engineers will not pass up the opportunity of inspecting flown hardware. Simulations only go so far.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
They may not have to tear it down. Simply inspecting and non destructive testing may give them enough info.
I'm impressed that you are so entirely sure that a random new poster understands rocket engineering better than actual rocket engineers. You do realize that other companies don't have to follow SpaceX in every detail, yes?
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I think it's pretty clear from the media that has been shared of GS1 that it is more than a bit over engineered. They'll be going in the opposite direction from what SpaceX did, i.e. taking the conservatism out rather than putting it in. Long term they are going to want to do those teardowns to support optimizing the performance while maintaining the life rating, but it's reasonable when the stage is built like a tank to defer that until you have a stable of boosters built up to support your cadence.
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Built like a tank... what, specifically, makes you say that? It looks like pretty bog-standard aluminum alloy CNC-machined, bump-formed, and stir-welded construction. Nothing about it obviously jumps out as overbuilt, to my eye.
They are obviously instrumenting it with all sorts of sensors everywhere, for data collection - but that's to be expected for the first flights, and I wouldn't consider it "over engineered" in that regard.
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Well at least Jeff Bezo is entertained by his hobby rockets VS being in the basement shit posting 24/7 on twitter like Musk.
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To start with corporate history, New Shepard was built like a tank. There's no other way they could hover on 20% throttle, especially on an empty tank and with no capsule.
New Glenn is also supposed to hover at ~1MN, or 100t. Full stack mass is on the order of 1400, and likely around 200t for upper stage and payload, so 1200t wet. That's a propellant fraction probably not even 90%. Falcon 9 is around 94-95%, with less efficient construction methods, but it has the benefit of higher density propellant. SuperHeavy is around 92-93% with less efficient construction methods, heavier materials, and the same propellant. Vulcan is 92-93% with the same materials, construction methods, propellant, and even engines.
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Wikipedia quotes the GS1 numbers as follows:
2/95 = 2.1%, which makes for a propellant fraction of 97.9%, no?
Edit: it really doesn't seem like New Glenn will be able to hover - unless it reserves way too much propellant for ballast, or is able to throttle an engine down to like 10% (whereas BE-4 is supposedly capable of at best 40%). I'd guess it'll be doing a suicide burn a la Falcon 9. Or did I miss some explicit confirmation from BO about NG's hover capability?
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20 t dry mass? Hah.
Ed Kyle estimates 110 t. And he's probably being optimistic there.
https://launchreport.neocities.org/newglenn.txt
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20t would make it lighter than falcon 9, which has some of the highest thrust to weight ratio engines ever produced and is like a third the size. That isn't even close to passing a basic sanity check. Also IIRC the tour that bezos gave to Dodd he confirmed the constant velocity descent and the rough min throttle setting of BE-4, which backs up the at least 100 tonnes booster mass.
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Ok... And I see someone's edited the Wikipedia article to remove those mass numbers.
Welp, suppose GS1 is indeed 110 t dry, and 1110 t wet. That'd be exactly a 90% propellant mass fraction. And a hover at ~100 tf thrust still has non-zero residual propellant and ullage mass to contend with, aside from dry mass.
Also, Ed Kyle's mass numbers don't quite add up. He has the full stack GLOW at 1390 t, with GS1 at 1110 t, GS2 at 170 t, and fairings at 4 t. That leaves 106 t for... payload? (Or a 60-tonne payload adapter?)
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SpaceX have also been making changes that reduce mass. Admittedly at the same time as other changes that add it. For them it's less initial conservatism and more being in a frightful hurry. They've implemented mechanisms that are quick and dirty, in order to get something working as soon as possible. Examples include going for hydraulic actuators initially, when they surely knew they'd have to switch to electric (which they've now done). Also Raptors have got progressively lighter as they've got a better understanding of what they're trying to do.
To me it seems despite their "step by step" motto, Blue Origin are making great leaps. They went from a sub-orbital hopper straight to a heavy lift orbital, without a rocket like F9 as an intermediate step. They seem to be betting on reuse being successful at the second attempt, rather than having multiple trial runs proving out stages of the system. Meanwhile SpaceX are the ones proceeding with multiple steps.
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As you said earlier they've got relatively mass efficient milled aluminum tanks. If the booster dry mass fraction is in ~180% falcons with a propellant combo that is around 75-80% as dense, all that extra dry mass must be coming from something non-tanks. The falcon has engines with a higher thrust to weight, but it also has a higher liftoff thrust to weight for the stack (i.e. instead of having less engine mass SpaceX chose more thrust). So the BE-4s probably take up a comparable dry mass fraction to falcon.
So it's the rest of the vehicle, that bulging thrust structure with the 6 metallic legs with doors between engines. The giant strakes. The steering fins with their massive actuators. Among those maybe the strakes do pay for themselves in terms of propellant savings, but the rest is just heavier than SpaceXs solution. Add on top of that the landing profile, it's all just more conservative. And given that SpaceX has made its solutions work extremely reliably while still maintaining pretty easy booster turn around (given it is something they worked up to), one has to say it's unnecessarily conservative. Which was my point, they traded performance for expediency and reliability, but that's something they are going to have to iterate out in the future (the exact opposite of what SpaceX did).
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I'm not making light of what BO has achieved with NG, it's a big honking rocket with a lot of future potential because of its size and partial reusability. That said it took them a long time, significantly longer than they planned, and many times the capital spend to pull off their giant leap. I would argue It was their last CEO Bob Smith who made a lot of questionable decisions in the dev process and maturing BO as a company. The decision to curry political favor and prestige by setting up an engine factory in Huntsville. To delay BE-4s development to redesign them to compete for supplying engines to Vulcan. The decision to scrap the methalox second stage and hydrogen third in favor of developing an entirely new engine and stage with less in common with the booster to 'streamline' the development. Growing the workforce to Byzantine proportions, doing slow linear design, making them so hardware poor that engines blowing up on tests stands set them back unnecessarily and ensuring they pretty much have to land an early booster if they want to get moving. They could have had NG launching years earlier if not for these decisions, and it is going to take Limp quite a while to get BO going much faster.
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Well, I wish them luck. There is a great need for a credible competitor to SpaceX. I'm not thrilled that I have to choose between Besos or Musk, mind you, but I guess a dickhead is better than a Nazi. But only just.
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Also, unlike the F9 with it's "suicide slam" landing because it can't throttle low enough to hover, NG can hover, presumably making landings much easier.
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I don't think SpaceX has had any landing failures related to the hoverslam.
But landing is a lot closer to mission critical for Blue, and they spent a lot more time, money, and mass on it compared to what SpaceX did with F9.
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Merlin 1D can reportedly throttle down to 40%, so that times 1/9 is 4.4% throttle. Falcon 9 cannot hover at 4.4% throttle. BE-4 can also reportedly throttle down to 40%, so that times 1/7 is 5.7%, and New Glenn can hover at 5.7% throttle, reportedly. That's one of the reasons for the claims that it is overweight.
Anyway, the ability to hover doesn't really matter. Your engines should have sufficient throttle response, and your avionics a fast enough control loop, that it's unnecessary. The only value to being able to hover is because you don't trust your hardware to behave in a predictable and reliable fashion. It's also useful if you're landing on an unprepared surface, but this is the flat deck of a barge.
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According to my understanding, the "suicide" burn isn't as crazy as it sounds. I don't recall where I first encountered this comparison, but I find it apt:
Consider how you come to a stop at a stoplight when driving a car. Do you stop well short of the mark, then slowly approach it, just to be safe? I've seen that behavior, but it isn't common. Most people adjust their braking on the fly so that they come to a stop exactly where they want to. For most drivers, this is second nature, and they do it without thinking about it.
Propulsive landing is similar. Sure, there are a lot more things that can go wrong, but the principle is the same.
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That's not a suicide burn though - it's called a suicide burn because (due to minimum throttle giving a TWR greater than unity) the burn has to be timed so that zero velocity coincides with zero altitude (within a margin of error)
Start the burn too soon, and the rocket will come to a halt too far above the landing pad - at that point the options are a) cut the engines and fall a non-survivable distance to the ground, or b) accelerate upwards away from the pad until the fuel runs out.
Start the burn too late, and the rocket will reach zero altitude with a non-survivable downwards velocity.
For your "braking to the stoplight" example, it would be like having a brake pedal that only offered 40-100% braking, and once you release the pedal you can't re-engage the brake for at least 30 seconds. Oh, and failing to stop exactly on the line would result in your car being totalled by the car behind.
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