These two entrepreneurs have changed so much.. Musk and Bezos... To think that at one point USA had to rely on Russian engines!
This is also good news for SpaceX. Satellite and payload designers generally design to common fairing sizes so they have a choice in launch providers. The 8.7m 9x4 fairing is similar to the 9m Starship fairing so more designers will now be designing payloads that use the full Starship capacity.
I agree, though I think the real winner here is the customers. The New Glenn 9x4 has a higher targeted payload capacity that an expended Falcon Heavy. Mission design takes years, and payload mass is the most important constraining factor. So it'd now be fairly reasonable approach to start building now for 9x4's constraints, and then fly on it or Starship depending on readiness and price. If customers start doing this now, that also means a quicker pickup on using the increased launch capability.<p>On a funnier note, the 9 in Falcon 9 is the number of engines. So blue origin is somewhat picking up on their naming scheme. Or, by BO's scheme, it'd be the Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.
Such standardization will set a design envelope for the Golden Dome weapons..
Launch cost was already a single digit percentage of total cost when using Falcon-9s. Reduction in launch cost doesn't really change anything at that point.<p>Ignoring that weaponizing space would backfire badly (you want hundreds of nukes in orbit? yeah actually let's just not do that) and thus no one considering it either.
Indeed, exciting times! What looked like science fiction in Reagan's era (brilliant pebbles)? now seems almost too banal and simple to even build.
I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
I split my time between Europe and the US, and I am totally not convinced that metric is better.<p>Some things are ridiculously better in the imperial system - like temperature: In Fahrenheit, 0 is roughly the coldest mean day in inhabited countries, and 100 is the hottest. In Metric, 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level in ambient temperatures and with a low barometer reading, 100 is boiling in the same conditions.<p>Since I measure weather much more frequently than I measure water temps, I am driven cukoo by the silly Centigrade system.<p>Also, The splitting into 12 that is done by the foot is more useful, in my experience, than the twelve of the metric. In fact, I strongly decry that we teach our kids to use base 10 instead of the much more efficient and easier to divde into fractions of base 12. (You can teach kids to count joints on your fingers [using the thumb as a pointer] to get to 12x12, and give the kids a headstart on fractions, multiplication and division, but I digress..)<p>However, having both an Imperial Gallon and a US Gallon, etc, where the same word is used for different amounts, now THAT is insane.
Good lord, find something else to be angry about. Decades of metric vs imperial threads should have you convinced by now that no matter how hated they are, these units aren't going away any time soon.
If I wouldn't know better, I'd assume using the metric system is actually a disadvantage when building SOTA rockets.
Wait until you find the places people use non-SI but still metric units, it's super fun.
Welcome to Earth. Some countries use different unit systems. (Some even use a hodge podge of multiple systems!) Please enjoy your stay.
I don't think that's the OP's issue, it's just in this context.<p>Can someone from the industry confirm whether they use metric internally and the stream uses imperial just for the patriotic show or whether imperial units are used because some countries use different unit systems and this is normal?<p>On a related note, I don't think anyone is bothered buying screens (monitor/phone/...) labeled in inches, but orbital elevations and speeds? Weird.
By "some countries" you mean United States, Liberia, and Myanmar
In India, decades after metric, many will only understand feet and inches for height, length etc.. Think it's the same in many Asian countries, though some have moved on.<p>But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..
You’ll find imperial units in lots of Chinese products too.<p>After all, they’re the ones manufacturing the imperial screws, etc.
Fwiw, Myanmar has been transitioning to metric since 2013 but, well, they had other worries.<p>Likewise, Liberia set up a transition program in 2018.<p>AFAIU both still use a bunch of traditional non US units too, like the UK.
and also by ‘some countries’ they mean about 4% of the earth’s population, or 1 in 25 people.
Good thing they didn’t use two of those units.
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Why use English instead of Esperanto?
I don't understand why this is being downvoted. I would love if metric were used universally, but I don't really see any difference between that and wanting a single language to be used universally. In fact, the cost of different languages is certainly much higher than different systems of units. Converting between systems of units is just trivial arithmetic after all.
If you feel that strongly, maybe the rest of the world can use the metric system for their reusable rocket programs.
The incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course. The exciting thing in this announcement is the new 9x4 configuration (9 and 4 engines in the first and second stages vs the current 7x2). They don't mention whether the tanks will get stretched to allow for more fuel, or if this just burns the fuel faster. Starship generations keep getting both more engines and longer.
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.<p>Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.<p>New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also just barely a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.
Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9.<p>Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I don't know a simpler way to estimate this than to run a simulation, and I don't have one with numbers I can toggle.
The really big change will be launch thrust to weight ratio. Going from ~1.2 to ~1.35 gives you 75% more thrust at launch which means you spend less time fighting gravity, less time in the thick parts of the atmosphere, and less time to get past the trans-sonic region.
> New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass.<p>To be fair, the Falcon Heavy has way too little fairing volume for it's lift capacity (and apparently it is in the process of getting an extra 50% or so?)
I believe that a larger fairing and vertical integration capability for Falcon is in the works as a result of the last round of the National Security Launch Contracts that SpaceX won.
Because the falcon boosters have to be road transportable.
The fairings aren't constrained to the diameter of the booster, they already have a larger diameter than the booster.<p>The small size of the Falcon Heavy fairing is probably due to the fact that they are the same size as the Falcon fairing, and it was designed when Falcon could throw < 1/2 the mass it can currently throw, let alone the Falcon Heavy.
The numbers:<p>BE-4 is 140 bar chamber pressure vs SpaceX Raptor 2 at 350 bar. Thrust to weight of BE-4 is 80:1 vs Raptor2 at 140:1.<p>I don't think the capabilities are as different as those numbers imply. I believe that it's due to the conservativeness of Blue Origin and SpaceX's willingness to blow up hundreds of engines on the test stand to iteratively push the margins.
I believe Raptor 2 operates at a lower chamber pressure. According to Wikipedia, Raptor 3 is 350 bar, and its thrust to weight ratio is 183.6:1.<p>BE-4's chamber pressure is low for its design, but it would be very difficult to increase it to Raptor's levels. Full-flow staged combustion causes the propellants to be gasses when they enter the combustion chamber, and chemical reactions in gasses happen more quickly, allowing for efficient combustion in a smaller combustion chamber. The smaller volume makes it easier to contain higher pressures.
> <i>incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course</i><p>Blue Origin is matching from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3. Comparing thrust at sea level, lbf:<p>Raptor 2 | 507,000 [1]<p>Raptor 3 | 617,000 [1]<p>BE-4 | 557,143<p>BE-4' | 642,857<p>BE-3U | 160,000<p>BE-3U' | 200,000<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton-force#Tonne-force" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton-force#Tonne-force</a>
Based on the photo posted by the Blue Origin CEO the tanks are definitely getting stretched (also looks like a slightly different fin, landing leg, and fairing config)
Yep, 70 tons to LEO is more than the Falcon Heavy.
> <i>These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond.</i><p>It sounds as if they already have a long line of customers which have booked flights to all these destinations. (If they actually do, splendid!)
For those who aren’t aware, the next flight is to lunar orbit, with a planned landing on the moon:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1</a>
I think Blue Origin's biggest problem is they don't currently have a planned or real Falcon 9 competitor.<p>These expected and incremental updates (to a years late system that still needs to be proven) are putting the payload capacity in the Falcon Heavy range and there's roughly 1 Falcon Heavy launch per year.<p>There are over 100 Falcon 9 launches per year. Yes a bunch are Starlink so you can exclude those when estimating demand from external customers but the point remains that there isn't currently a commercial demand for bigger payloads and/or higher orbits than what Falcon 9 can do.<p>SpaceX has the same problem: Starship is a superheavy lifter where Falcon Heavy has little demand and Starship is even bigger. At least SpaceX has Starlink as induced demand. Blue Origin doesn't.<p>Defenders will argue the greater volume and payload weights will create new possibilities because payloads can only be designed for available launch systems but satellites don't really seem to be getting any bigger and there are only so many geosynchronous military payloadcs and interplanetary probes that need to be launched.
Interesting that "...additional vehicle upgrades include a reusable fairing..."<p>I wonder how they'll be implementing that since SpaceX gave up on recapturing fairings (seemingly too soon, but only from the POV of someone with no internal info).
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_fairing_recovery_program" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_fairing_recovery_progra...</a><p>> SpaceX performs some amount of cleaning and refurbishing before using the previously flown fairings on a subsequent flight. SpaceX has reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with one being reflown for 34 times.<p>They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
They still recover the fairings. They gave up on trying to catch them out of the air and now just let them land in the water and pick them up.
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Presumably this was written by somebody from aerospace, who's unaware of the nuances of what "An update on New Glenn" usually means in Silicon Valley.
Jeff Bezos is not a net positive to humanity. If we ignored people like him, the world would be a better place...