[bimmer44]

Having these billionaires willing to throw money at competitive space flight is pretty great - I'm sure positive effects on commercial space exploration and global internet access will inevitably follow.

I'm intrigued that they plan to go from New Shepard straight to a rocket that's bigger than Falcon 9 (3.85m pounds thrust for New Shepard vs. latest Full Thrust version of Falcon 9 at 1.71m pounds). I was under the impression that New Shepard wasn't as serious as Falcon 1 (.e.g not capable of reaching orbit) and that SpaceX spent quite a number of years moving from pre-Falcon 1 to the regular launch successes of Falcon 9.

Maybe someone who knows more about this can explain - are the technical challenges involved less associated with pure size and more to do with design/fabrication processes etc.?

[Klathmon]

Now i'm just an excited but casual bystander in all of this, so don't take anything i say as anything more than rumour. That being said...

I read that Blue Origin (specifically Bezos) has a lot more funding to throw at this problem than SpaceX did/does (IIRC Bezos has something like 6x the net worth of Musk. That alone might not say much, but it's obvious that if push comes to shove, Bezos can throw more money at the problem). And if you look at some of the numbers (not sure if they are completely "confirmed" yet), New Glenn still won't quite have the lifting power of Falcon Heavy (despite it's larger size).

Also, if you look at the timeline of Falcon 9 (Funded in 2006, first launched in 2010), Blue Origin's looks very similar, so it's not exactly impossible.

To me it just looks like they are going in a different direction. SpaceX wanted to get to reusability with an orbital rocket first, then scale up. Blue Origin is nailing down the extreme reusability in sub-orbital land for now, and will apply that to an orbital rocket. And the simpler design (one massive booster VS 3 separate stage-1 boosters) seems like a simpler plan (i'm not trying to imply in any way that any of this is easy, it's still rocket science!)

It's looking like we are going to have another space race in the next decade. And I can't wait!

[snowwrestler]

Bezos has more wealth than Musk, but SpaceX has paying customers. I believe Musk has said that they have about $10 billion committed from customers already. That generates cashflow, plus gives them a good story to tell when they pitch seek outside investors.

[Klathmon]

While not in the same realm, Blue Origin is hoping to start making some money via "space tourism" very soon.

They also make money via manufacturing for other companies. IIRC the engine for New Glenn is going to be used in an upcoming ULA rocket.

It's very early for them, and it's clear that SpaceX has a good decade or so on them, but it's exciting to have the possibility of real competition in this area again.

[jacquesm]

> While not in the same realm, Blue Origin is hoping to start making some money via "space tourism" very soon.

How realistic is this hope? Do they have an assembly line for a fleet of them and are these anywhere close to being certified for travel by the general public?

[Klathmon]

I don't know, but that's been the plan for New Shepard since the beginning.

IIRC it's more of something for millionaires that want to be "among the first" to get into "space".

Again, i'm not sure how viable it is, but that's been their public message. They even have a few videos on youtube advertising it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJhymiZjqc

[DasIch]

You're being incredibly generous assuming that it is possible to make space tourism affordable for enough people to become a viable product.

[stcredzero]

New Glenn still won't quite have the lifting power of Falcon Heavy (despite it's larger size).

If that's true then perhaps they are going the route outlined in The Rocket Company -- Fuel is cheap, so make a really freakin huge rocket that holds a freakin huge amount of fuel and go ahead and send up a relatively small payload, so long as they have true re-usability.

[Klathmon]

(complete speculation here with nothing to back it up).

That's what i'd bet they are going for. Every launch (even GTO launches) will be RTLS. Plenty of fuel on board to avoid the suicide-burns that SpaceX is doing, lots left over to give some wiggle room in case corrections are needed.

If they can maintain the same level of reusability that New Shepard is expected/hoped to have (basically rivaling that of airplanes), then the additional cost of the rocket itself can be amortized over many many launches.

[greglindahl]

SpaceX does suicide burns because of engine throttling issues; that's a separate issue from margin, and a separate issue from landing on a barge vs landing on land. It remains to be seen which of these are dangerous enough that you don't want to do them with a rocket you want to land many times.

[caconym_]

There's also the aspect of the density of the fuel. Blue Origin may be going with a less dense option and dealing with the overhead of a larger rocket to see payoffs elsewhere, e.g. fuel cost, technical difficulty of fueling the vehicle, flexibility with launch schedules, and so on.

[fbender]

> Fuel is cheap

No, you pay with weight. Just using more fuel means your efficiency may(!) go down, with an ultimately worse outcome. But I'm lacking info on the design vs. other designs, so that general rule might be couterbalanced by other gains.

[jstanley]

Of course, the rocket equation[1] means you still need to be somewhat efficient, regardless of how much fuel you want to carry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

[k_lander]

are blue origins rockets any more reusable than spacex's?

[Klathmon]

Their sub-orbital rocket "New Shepard" has launched and landed 4 times (i think, could be 3 times), with very minimal refurb in between each launch so far.

So from that perspective, very reusable.

But that's also a sub-orbital rocket. It's only a little bigger than SpaceX's landing legs without a payload[0]. So it might not be the most accurate comparison. Also, they have yet to launch anything else. So it's clearly still early for them as a company.

[0]https://imgur.com/a/gLqsy

New Shepard is shown in this image in between Delta IV Heavy and New Glenn near the middle.

[vkou]

Making a reusable sub-orbital rocket is a solved problem. We call them airplanes.

There are probably two orders of magnitude in complexity between making a reusable sub-orbital, and a reusable orbital rocket.

[CydeWeys]

An airplane isn't a rocket. New Origins is clearly a rocket, not an airplane. Your comment is waaaaaaay off base. The most salient difference here is that a rocket propels itself forward by using the exhaust gases from burning its fuel as the reaction mass, whereas an airplane uses surrounding air as its reaction mass. New Shepherd can generate thrust just fine in a vacuum (because it's a rocket), whereas an airplane isn't going anywhere.

> There are probably two orders of magnitude in complexity between making a reusable sub-orbital, and a reusable orbital rocket.

Hardly. They've already built all of the necessary control systems, and had multiple successful test flights. Now they just need to scale them up. Admittedly this is not trivial, and I'd put SpaceX as far ahead for this reason alone, but it's definitely not an order of magnitude more difficult, probably just around twice as difficult. And nowhere close to two orders of magnitude!

[vkou]

My point is that scaling up from sub-orbital to orbital is extremely hard. It's not that far removed from going from airplane to rocket, in terms of complexity.

You're going from having a top speed of Mach 3 to a speed of Mach 27 (Stage separation and max Q at Mach 6 and 5). You're shaving every conceivable weight-adder. You're dealing with a rocket the size of a skyscraper, which crumples in on itself when not filled with fuel.

This isn't AWS, where you scale your app by spinning up a couple new nodes. The difference from a suborbital hop to orbit is increasing your delta-v budget nine-fold.

[greglindahl]

Wait, Blue Origin has already built all the necessary control systems for flight regimes that their existing rocket can't reach? Hypersonic retroburns are not much like ballistic trajectories that barely touch the edge of space.

[Klathmon]

Yes, but an airplane is fundamentally different. This is a VTVL system. Aside from an obvious size and complexity difference, the launching and landing parts are very similar in suborbital and orbital land (for the most liberal use of the words "very similar"). Hell, if you want to argue semantics, Falcon-9's Stage-1 never gets to orbital velocities. So it's really just that "turning around" part that is the major difference (obviously a massive part, and again, i'm not trying to imply that ANY of this is easy in any way!)

Nobody is saying that they will make a bigger New Shepard with no changes and call it a day. But the knowledge they are learning through the suborbital rockets is going to be useful going forward. And they have a lot of time to learn and experiment here, they are looking at a first launch in the next 4 years (no mention of landing), and they have been developing the engine for this new rocket for a few years already.

[mhandley]

They've been developing the BE-4 engine for five years already, and the current plan is for that to be the first stage engine on the next ULA launcher. By the time they get round to launching the New Glenn, the BE-4 that it will use on the first stage will have already been tested courtesy of ULA. If I understand correctly, the second stage engines will be a development of what they're currently using on New Shepherd. This means they'll have already done much of the testing and development in other launch systems, so perhaps the step to a heavy-lift launcher is not quite so outrageous as it might first seem. Still, a lot can go wrong that isn't related to the engines, as SpaceX has discovered.

[anovikov]

They are doing it 10 years later, so probably computer simulations are going to simplify the job more for them than they did for SpaceX.

Also Bezos has more cash and less dependent on external funding or public opinion - if several of his rockets blow up in a row it won't stop him, and he can proceed quicker.

Also, New Shepard uses hydrolox. That is harder than Falcon's kerolox. Not to say New Shepard is more comples than Falcon 1 - they are very different vehicles hard to directly compare - but it's definitely not a toy.

[_lbaq]

New Shepard is a sub-orbital vehicle that has been tooted as a space tourism thing ala Virgin Galactic SpaceShip One/Two

I suspect however its also worked like a testbed for engine, plumbing and electronics trials for the bigger plans brewing behind closed doors.

[stcredzero]

touted