Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time(arstechnica.com) |
Blue Origin has hot fired its BE-4 rocket engine for the first time(arstechnica.com) |
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.
It would set them back somewhat, but I don't see why it would be that long.
The future is exciting.
See:
Edit: Will New Glenn also not use a third gas for pressurisation? Like BFR?
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?
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.
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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.
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.