I'm curious which one will launch first, BFR or New Glenn. My money is on the BFR, so far with 1200 s Raptor engine fire and full size cryo tank they seem to be making progress. It's good to have Blue Origin breathing down SpaceX's neck though, hopefully it will provide them with sustained motivation.
The Raptor has fired more but it is also not finalised in terms of design. The BE-4 is full sized and they don't seem to intend any more changes in the design.
Really the New Glenn competes more with Falcon Heavy then BFR. They are designing a New Armstrong rocket that will be more in the BFR class.
It will be very interesting, in 2020 we have planned New Glenn, Ariane 6, Vulcan and BFR. Falcon Heavy of course will have been flying for a while by then.
Raptor test fires have been at ~1,000kN, with a planned thrust of 1700kN, and for 100s burns. I don't think it's fair to say that BE-4 is further along in the development/testing process just from the fact that it has fired at half thrust, since it sure looks like Raptor has too.
Just imagine what things would look like if SpaceX has a serious failure again. It could drop them back six months, and Blue Origin would get that much closer.
Maybe it's a good motivator for SpaceX, but let's look at the macro picture. Blue Origin has zero commercial flights in its history. It is far behind SpaceX. But if BO displays operational expertise and can execute on its plans, it will be an exciting competitor.
Then again, if BO has some setbacks like SpaceX has had (delays, launch failures, etc) then it might not shake up the industry as much as we hope.
Tortoise and hare. Blue Origin spends more time designing and testing; SpaceX producing and selling. I tend to default to the latter strategy in most markets, but aerospace is different. The results are and will be interesting.
> You can say that about any pair of companies where one has a shipping product and the other does not
Not necessarily. Rabbits move fast and break things; tortoises plod along deliberately and slowly. This applies to Blue Origin because they’re being deliberately slow and thoughtful, versus lazy or incompetent. Theranos or Magic Leap, for instance, are not tortoises.
How is it possible for BO to spend most of their time producing and selling when they don't have a shipping product? How is it possible for SpaceX to spend most of their time designing and testing when they have a shipping product with a lot of market share?
To put it another way, there's nothing in the "most of their time" comparison that you can use to classify either company as a tortoise or a hare: they're just companies at different stages of the company lifecycle.
> they're just companies at different stages of the company lifecycle
Blue Origin is older than SpaceX. It chose to get a lot of basic engineering right before bothering with a product roadmap. They’ve spent years on a big first stage with big engines, all of which were known from the beginning to take longer to develop. Those intermediate goals, none of which are products, were pursued in the hope that they will result in a better end result.
SpaceX, instead, prioritised shortest paths to marketable products. Its intermediate goals are products. SpaceX flew (and collected orders for) its Falcon 1 a few years after being founded; Blue Origin took much longer. SpaceX tries putting paying customers everywhere it reasonably can; Blue Origin avoids the distraction.
These are distinct, deliberarely-chosen strategies. They’re not just similar companies at different points in their respective life cycles.
Why would a Falcon 9 failure set the BFR back six months? The teams working the BFR parts are probably not strongly involved and could just continue working.
It would set them back somewhat, but I don't see why it would be that long.
"Return to flight" activities appear to be a big distraction for the entire company, for example the previous 2 failures caused Falcon Heavy to slip a lot.
The major benefit is that it's possible to synthesize methane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Which is way easier let's say on Mars, than obtaining kerosene.
Wait, I'm confused... LNG is pure methane. Are there rockets that use methane that aren't storing it as a liquid? I would have to guess that any rocket using methane would pressurize it enough to be in liquid form for storage, anyway. Surely they wouldn't use methane in a gas state... It would take up far too much space to be practical.
LNG is 85-95% methane, typically, with ethane making up most of the rest. It contains small amounts of propane and butane.
I hadn't known that SpaceX was using a special grade of ~100% liquefied CH4 as nickik says above.
EDIT: shale gas is richer in ethane and higher hydrocarbons than traditional sources of natural gas. Maybe SpaceX is sticking to 100% methane just so they don't have to ponder variability of composition depending on how gas is being extracted.
Methane can be synthesized from CO2 and hydrogen. More complex hydrocarbons are way more difficult to produce. So pure methane based engine is a better method for using on other planets.
When you liquefy natural gas, ethane and methane liquefy at different times, so it's relatively easy to purify methane. I don't know the price difference, do you?
Anyone know the price to low-earth orbit using New Glenn? (perhaps can be inferred from Eutelsat or OneWeb's financial disclosures to regulators?)
With Jeff Bezos selling $1 billion worth of Amazon shares a year to fund Blue Origin, will he choose to sell below cost for significant periods of time to stay competitive with the Falcon 9 and Heavy?
It would be interesting to see how the market share affects the profits and how these two companies plan to compete in long term.
If Blue Origin and SpaceX compete in the same segment and divide the market, development and manufacturing costs per launch will increase for both. Assuming each will price the launch price so low that they get roughly 50 percent of the market they would get without the other, both lose half of the volume to the competition.
SpaceX aims for moderate 3% ($55 million) operating profit margin. Bezos has deeper pockets, so if he perceives financial weakness in Musk/SpaceX, he can decide to absorb the losses for a decade and steal launches and drain profits from SpaceX driving it to the ground.
Several buyers are uninstered in a launch monopoly developing which is likely to prevent such a strategy from working. A more likely scenario is for a major player to gain a process advantage and leverage that into higher profits for decades like Intel vs AMD etc.
But what would have happened if AMD had juicy Dell and other OEM partnerships in the desktop era? Desktops in 2000 are smartphones in 2015. Billions of dollars.
Sure. But in the 2000 era, the AMD cpu's were crap in comparison to Intel. I know I know, it's unfair, and now they are much better. But I will forever hold a grudge.
Ryzen looks great btw. I remember this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRn8ri9tKf8
A 3% profit margin isn’t modest, it’s catastrophic. With a their heavy capital requirements and massive technology lead they should be banking 30%. 3% says please shut us down first time we have a bad year.
However spacex could easily survive off 3% profit for now, as long as they still keep collecting all their used rockets. I only remember them launching one used rocket so far which was successful, and presumably they'll work out any remaining glitches and start using the others.
There isn't a space launch company on the planet who can launch anywhere near the cost of SpaceX and make a profit. That's without counting re-usablity, mind you. With re-usablity SpaceX should be able to slash prices by at least 50%, though they shouldn't until the market forces them to. Instead they should be re-investing those profits into Raptor and the BFR.
I believe those are Mach/Shock diamonds, which are common in rocket engine exhaust. It wouldn't surprise me if the propellant and the time of the test made them more visible.
That depends on who you mean by "they". BO is planning on landing the whole first stage, like SpaceX. BO has some experience doing stuff in that arena with their New Glenn rocket (there are a number of factors that make the New Glenn landings a lot easier than the Falcon 9 landings, but it's still very useful experience).
The BE-4 will also be used by ULA, on their Vulcan rocket. ULA has talked about detaching the engines from the first stage of the rocket and having them fall under parachutes (to be caught be a helicopter). It remains to be seen if they ever implement that (it kinda feels like a token nod to reuse to get people to stop asking question).
It's a new commercially viable rocket engine (not a pork-barrel jobs program) of a size suitable for serious heavy-lift applications, designed and built in America.
Obviously SpaceX is doing similar things, but Merlin, Raptor, and the BE-4 are all part of a pretty exclusive club. I don't know why SpaceX chose to go with a greater number of smaller engines for their planned heavy lifter; I imagine it might be something to do with the difficulty of building bigger engines scaling non-linearly, and the fact that modern analysis and engineering ought to give us some advantages relative to the last time someone tried to make a really big rocket with a lot of little engines (Soviet N1).
That, and it's a lot easier to shut off 90% of your engines and land at 50% thrust than it is to design an engine that will run at 5% thrust.
Oh, and if your engine is small enough, you can also use the same design on your upper stages - otherwise you need to design two engines.
Also, it may be worth pointing out that the current planned thrust for the Raptor is ~1,700kN at sea level, while the BE-4 is ~2,450 kN. They aren't actually that different - it's just BFR is massive.
The main special thing is that it runs on methane fuel, which has less sooting than kerosene engines. That makes it easier to reuse them. SpaceX is headed in the same direction with their Raptor engine, intended to power the BFR, and Europe is working on Prometheus, which might ship in the mid to late 2020s.
If this is claimed only because of the engine then I doubt it -- the defense industry uses solid-fuel rocket engines in almost all cases except large missiles like IBCMs. Although, anyone who manages to mass-produce cheap, reliable, high-performance solid-fuel engines may indeed gain a huge defense market.
HN is for very serious discussion, there is no room for humor or irreverence here. And to those seeking enlightening discourse on highly complex technical topics, I say to you . . . it's not exactly brain surgery, is it?
Really the New Glenn competes more with Falcon Heavy then BFR. They are designing a New Armstrong rocket that will be more in the BFR class.
It will be very interesting, in 2020 we have planned New Glenn, Ariane 6, Vulcan and BFR. Falcon Heavy of course will have been flying for a while by then.
Must be a really good motivator for SpaceX.
Then again, if BO has some setbacks like SpaceX has had (delays, launch failures, etc) then it might not shake up the industry as much as we hope.
Not necessarily. Rabbits move fast and break things; tortoises plod along deliberately and slowly. This applies to Blue Origin because they’re being deliberately slow and thoughtful, versus lazy or incompetent. Theranos or Magic Leap, for instance, are not tortoises.
To put it another way, there's nothing in the "most of their time" comparison that you can use to classify either company as a tortoise or a hare: they're just companies at different stages of the company lifecycle.
Blue Origin is older than SpaceX. It chose to get a lot of basic engineering right before bothering with a product roadmap. They’ve spent years on a big first stage with big engines, all of which were known from the beginning to take longer to develop. Those intermediate goals, none of which are products, were pursued in the hope that they will result in a better end result.
SpaceX, instead, prioritised shortest paths to marketable products. Its intermediate goals are products. SpaceX flew (and collected orders for) its Falcon 1 a few years after being founded; Blue Origin took much longer. SpaceX tries putting paying customers everywhere it reasonably can; Blue Origin avoids the distraction.
These are distinct, deliberarely-chosen strategies. They’re not just similar companies at different points in their respective life cycles.
It would set them back somewhat, but I don't see why it would be that long.
The future is exciting.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
http://www.co2club.it/agenda/abstracts/19_Barbarossa.pdf
Edit: Will New Glenn also not use a third gas for pressurisation? Like BFR?
I hadn't known that SpaceX was using a special grade of ~100% liquefied CH4 as nickik says above.
EDIT: shale gas is richer in ethane and higher hydrocarbons than traditional sources of natural gas. Maybe SpaceX is sticking to 100% methane just so they don't have to ponder variability of composition depending on how gas is being extracted.
With Jeff Bezos selling $1 billion worth of Amazon shares a year to fund Blue Origin, will he choose to sell below cost for significant periods of time to stay competitive with the Falcon 9 and Heavy?
If Blue Origin and SpaceX compete in the same segment and divide the market, development and manufacturing costs per launch will increase for both. Assuming each will price the launch price so low that they get roughly 50 percent of the market they would get without the other, both lose half of the volume to the competition.
SpaceX aims for moderate 3% ($55 million) operating profit margin. Bezos has deeper pockets, so if he perceives financial weakness in Musk/SpaceX, he can decide to absorb the losses for a decade and steal launches and drain profits from SpaceX driving it to the ground.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/05/how-profitable-is-...
It looks like there's some sort of harmonic wave in the blast. Does anyone have any insights on why the design would result in that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_diamond
The BE-4 will also be used by ULA, on their Vulcan rocket. ULA has talked about detaching the engines from the first stage of the rocket and having them fall under parachutes (to be caught be a helicopter). It remains to be seen if they ever implement that (it kinda feels like a token nod to reuse to get people to stop asking question).
Obviously SpaceX is doing similar things, but Merlin, Raptor, and the BE-4 are all part of a pretty exclusive club. I don't know why SpaceX chose to go with a greater number of smaller engines for their planned heavy lifter; I imagine it might be something to do with the difficulty of building bigger engines scaling non-linearly, and the fact that modern analysis and engineering ought to give us some advantages relative to the last time someone tried to make a really big rocket with a lot of little engines (Soviet N1).
Oh, and if your engine is small enough, you can also use the same design on your upper stages - otherwise you need to design two engines.
Also, it may be worth pointing out that the current planned thrust for the Raptor is ~1,700kN at sea level, while the BE-4 is ~2,450 kN. They aren't actually that different - it's just BFR is massive.