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.
Laremere 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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..
59 minutes ago [-]
gangstead 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bryanlarsen 5 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
Veedrac 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
adgjlsfhk1 3 hours ago [-]
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.
overfeed 1 hours ago [-]
There are other constraints on how quick the vehicle should be, even when engine performance allows: you probably won't want to hit maximum dynamic pressure in too-thick air.
adgjlsfhk1 5 hours ago [-]
> New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass.
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?)
throwaway48476 5 hours ago [-]
Because the falcon boosters have to be road transportable.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
The fairings aren't constrained to the diameter of the booster, they already have a larger diameter than the booster.
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.
bryanlarsen 4 hours ago [-]
The numbers:
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.
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.
ggreer 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course
Blue Origin is matching from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3. Comparing thrust at sea level, lbf:
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)
DennisP 5 hours ago [-]
Yep, 70 tons to LEO is more than the Falcon Heavy.
testing22321 4 hours ago [-]
Thing that doesn’t exist yet will have better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!
News at 10
jmyeet 8 minutes ago [-]
I think Blue Origin's biggest problem is they don't currently have a planned or real Falcon 9 competitor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
> These enhancements will immediately benefit customers already manifested on New Glenn to fly to destinations including low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond.
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!)
irjustin 3 hours ago [-]
I REALLY wish they would stop displaying ft, mi, lbs. It actually angers me.
satiric 3 hours ago [-]
Welcome to Earth. Some countries use different unit systems. (Some even use a hodge podge of multiple systems!) Please enjoy your stay.
3 hours ago [-]
nutjob2 33 minutes ago [-]
By "some countries" you mean United States, Liberia, and Myanmar
nancyminusone 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cowsandmilk 3 hours ago [-]
Good thing they didn’t use two of those units.
sitharus 3 hours ago [-]
Wait until you find the places people use non-SI but still metric units, it's super fun.
gedy 2 hours ago [-]
Why use English instead of Esperanto?
cuckmaxxed 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
SilverElfin 6 hours ago [-]
For those who aren’t aware, the next flight is to lunar orbit, with a planned landing on the moon:
That seems like a big jump between flights. I'm used to the spend and explode fast incremental iterations of SpaceX.
proee 5 hours ago [-]
I think SpaceX is taking the re-usability part of Starship as foundation. Meaning they won't move forward until it's solved. With Falcon they added it as a bit of a secondary priority. They've spent so much resources trying to get the second stage back to earth. I think they should have just focused on getting the whole system flying to orbit, throwing away second stage for now, and using that platform to replace falcon. Eventually, they could refactor second stage to get it back to earth. But perhaps it's all too coupled that it has to be solved at one time (not later).
iknowstuff 5 hours ago [-]
Starship can fly to orbit, it's just not cheaper than a reusable falcon 9 that way
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
Starship has only flown 11 times. I suspect it's more cost effective than the Falcon 9 was when it had 11 launches, long before any reuse.
exomonk 1 hours ago [-]
Counting all those explosions as "flown" is pretty charitable.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
Seems BO is taking the NASA approach of not being so cavalier with testing. You can tell people you expect the thing to fail, but repeatedly seeing them fail is still seen as a negative.
dotnet00 3 hours ago [-]
New Glenn is manufactured with a different philosophy, so Blue can't be Starship levels of cavalier with testing. It would cost way too much to do with their current approach.
The factory tours for the two show this difference. New Glenn production is a lot more classical aerospace in terms of a high tech cleanroom factory being built from the start, versus a rocket that started out being built in tents that is slowly guiding the factory design as the tolerances are sorted out.
I think Blue's philosophy is pretty similar to the old space giants, except for being willing to invest a ton of money into improvements and new technologies without waiting around for the government to give them a blank check first.
Maybe we'll find that the thing limiting aerospace progress wasn't even that old space was afraid to test, but rather that they were simply unwilling to progress on their own initiative.
Seanambers 3 hours ago [-]
Sad part is that even though SpaceX / Elon has been very clear about expected outcomes it's still used against them.
LightBug1 2 hours ago [-]
Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes.
WorkerBee28474 5 hours ago [-]
NASA still had much smaller jumps in capability between flights. Check out the Smarter Every Day NASA talk.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, we went through Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo 1-7 before humans orbited the moon. However, we started from blank sheet of paper back then. BO has the knowledge learned from Gemini, Mercury, and all of Apollo to start.
I don't need a YT influencer to know my NASA history. I'm old enough it was taught in school while young enough to not have lived through any of it.
stevenjgarner 4 hours ago [-]
I am so old I lived through it! - 13 years old staying up all night to watch Neil take his little stroll. Genuine question, how DO they teach it in school? Do they get into the physics of any of it (orbital mechanics, rocketry etc)? Do they get into the cold war geopolitics of it? Do they teach the amazing accomplishments of the Soviet Union as well as NASA?
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
It's not like it was a class on rocket science, but more of just history of each program being a stepping stone towards the ultimate goal of landing on the moon
JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago [-]
> Check out the Smarter Every Day NASA talk
FYI, that talk was poorly received in the aerospace community.
Destin missed that the entire point of Artemis is not to one and done the Moon again but build towards getting to Mars. And the repeated "we're going, right?" shtick was condescending in the same way Hegseth wanting generals to cheer and holler for him was.
He acted like a petulant influencer. Not a science communicator.
timschmidt 16 minutes ago [-]
Few of us like having our work critiqued by an "outsider". Especially when such critique threatens your paycheck.
Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine any kind of sustainability when each launch costs north of $2 Billion and nearly all hardware is thrown away each time. In that sense, his criticism was very valid, even if tough to hear.
brain_staple 2 hours ago [-]
That was my interpretation of that talk. It seemed like a regurgitation of opinions of an old aerospace engineer. But that's probably unfair to Dustin, I believe that he actually came to that conclusion himself. But it was a really incorrect take that SLS was somehow the "safe bet" in comparison to betting on Starship. The whole talk just seemed insane based on what I knew about both programs.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
AFAICT it's "getting to Mars" for SpaceX and their ecosystem, and "sustainable cislunar economy" for Nasa, ULA and Blue Origin and their respective ecosystem. For example, see ULA's "cislunar 1000" concept from ~10 years ago.
Either way, your criticism of Destin's presentation hits. One and done'ing the Moon is not particularly helpful in setting up a sustainable cislunar economy.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> it's "getting to Mars" for SpaceX and their ecosystem, and "sustainable cislunar economy" for Nasa, ULA and Blue Origin and their respective ecosystem
In 2017 Space Policy Directive 1 amended the national space policy to pursue "the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations" [1]. This formally established the Artemis program [2].
Destin's criticisms were apt for Constellation [3], which was closer to an Apollo reboot. They were uninformed for Artemis.
I was thinking the same thing - big leap. But maybe there’s no real difference between ending up in Earth orbit versus lunar orbit, in that the basic aspects (thrust, staging, navigation, etc) are all there already? But everything relating to the lander (releasing it, landing it) would be new.
WJW 5 hours ago [-]
I recognize a fellow Kerbal space program enthusiast by what they consider to be challenges and what is just "more of the same". :)
3 hours ago [-]
toss1 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting that "...additional vehicle upgrades include a reusable fairing..."
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).
> 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.
They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
toss1 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the updated info!
kanisae 6 hours ago [-]
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.
decimalenough 4 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> the nuances of what "An update on New Glenn" usually means in Silicon Valley
What does it mean?
righthand 4 hours ago [-]
Usually it’s how a closing down business announcement is titled in the startup world. It’s not typically used to give a real update on a project.
nakamoto_damacy 2 hours ago [-]
Jeff Bezos is not a net positive to humanity. If we ignored people like him, the world would be a better place...
Rendered at 03:43:49 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
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.
...and we'd be back to steam engine wheel formulas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whyte_notation
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blue Origin is matching from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3. Comparing thrust at sea level, lbf:
Raptor 2 | 507,000 [1]
Raptor 3 | 617,000 [1]
BE-4 | 557,143
BE-4' | 642,857
BE-3U | 160,000
BE-3U' | 200,000
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton-force#Tonne-force
News at 10
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Moon_Pathfinder_Mission_1
The factory tours for the two show this difference. New Glenn production is a lot more classical aerospace in terms of a high tech cleanroom factory being built from the start, versus a rocket that started out being built in tents that is slowly guiding the factory design as the tolerances are sorted out.
I think Blue's philosophy is pretty similar to the old space giants, except for being willing to invest a ton of money into improvements and new technologies without waiting around for the government to give them a blank check first.
Maybe we'll find that the thing limiting aerospace progress wasn't even that old space was afraid to test, but rather that they were simply unwilling to progress on their own initiative.
I don't need a YT influencer to know my NASA history. I'm old enough it was taught in school while young enough to not have lived through any of it.
FYI, that talk was poorly received in the aerospace community.
Destin missed that the entire point of Artemis is not to one and done the Moon again but build towards getting to Mars. And the repeated "we're going, right?" shtick was condescending in the same way Hegseth wanting generals to cheer and holler for him was.
He acted like a petulant influencer. Not a science communicator.
Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine any kind of sustainability when each launch costs north of $2 Billion and nearly all hardware is thrown away each time. In that sense, his criticism was very valid, even if tough to hear.
Either way, your criticism of Destin's presentation hits. One and done'ing the Moon is not particularly helpful in setting up a sustainable cislunar economy.
In 2017 Space Policy Directive 1 amended the national space policy to pursue "the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations" [1]. This formally established the Artemis program [2].
Destin's criticisms were apt for Constellation [3], which was closer to an Apollo reboot. They were uninformed for Artemis.
[1] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/pr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program
The third flight of the Saturn V took 3 astronauts in their spacecraft to lunar orbit and back.
https://appel.nasa.gov/2010/02/25/ao_1-7_f_snapshot-html/
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).
> 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.
They gave up on catching them in nets, because it turns out they're fine splashing directly into the water.
What does it mean?