Errant upper stage spoils Blue Origin’s success in reusing New Glenn booster

Blue Origin's reused first stage hit its targets, but New Glenn's upper stage did not.

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[Rachelhikes]

The mission isn't getting the booster back, the mission is delivering the payload to where it is supposed to go. Customers don't care about the launch company's booster — they care about their payload. Blue Origin needs to prove it can do the part that matters reliably. Pretty damn disappointing, even with a successful booster landing.

 

[Rachelhikes]

That is a false opposition. The mission is both getting the booster back and delivering the payload.

if you don’t deliver the payloads, you won’t get any more. Especially not high-value payloads. SpaceX delivered plenty of payloads while working on booster re-use. Destroying payloads while recovering boosters is not a business at all.

 

[Rachelhikes]

Sample size = one so take what I write next with a grain of salt, but I wonder if this is more evidence that the design model used by Falcon 9 is superior.

The Falcon 9 is certainly a simpler design.

The Falcon 9 upper stage uses a vacuum version of the same engine as the lower stage, with, correspondingly, the same fuel. An advantage is that servicing on the launch pad is simpler with the two stages having so much in common, with another that a lot of what is learned about the lower stage from its recovery can be applied to the upper stage.

The New Glenn upper stage, on the other hand, has basically nothing in common with the lower stage: different engine, different fuel. So lessons learned from recovery of the lower stage don't give much/any help to resolving issues with the upper stage. Worse, the upper stage uses not just any different fuel, but the hardest to handle of all rocket fuels: hydrogen. Tiny molecules make hydrogen very prone to leaks, and with a very low temperature for liquification. It is hard to see how the New Glenn upper stage can ever be as reliable or easy to work with as the Falcon 9 upper stage. (This doesn't mean that it can't ever be reliable enough for commercial – or even manned – use, just that it is going to be harder and likely take longer to get it there.)