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New Glenn’s Progress Towards Maiden Flight

70 points by _Microft 6y ago

ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
More bad news for the Blue Origin team, but at least they've got pockets deep enough to absorb the delay to revenue.
- _Microft 6y ago
  The bad news mentioned here are that New Glenn's maiden flight is delayed by approximately a year compared to earlier estimates. Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
  - icegreentea2 6y ago
    Blue Origin at least gets a bit of the pie with supplying the BE-4 for ULA. But ya, definitely challenging.
    - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
      You make a good point here, I sometimes forget BE-4 is being used on other boosters.
      - avmich 6y ago
        Planned to be used so far. BE-4 still has to prove itself.
  - Teever 6y ago
    > It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
    - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
      Considering how US space program funding is subject to the whims of presidential administrations and congressional funding, New Origin may actually come out on top of this comparison.
      - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
        How so? SpaceX is a proven launch system at this point, ULA has plenty of business, and SLS isn't going anywhere soon, so there aren't many options for new entrants.
        m4rtink 6y ago
        I won't be that sure about SLS anymore with many recent events concerning it: - it failed to do full mission length firing during during the Green Run testing - its main supporter in the Senate Shelby announced he is going to retire - Europa clipper will launch on Falcon Heavy instead of SLS - early Gateway parts have been recently announced as also launching on Falcon Heavy Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
  - Diederich 6y ago
    > I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with [SpaceX Starship]. I could be wrong, but I don't think Blue has any plans (at least in public) for full re-usability. Though New Glenn is a beast, it's not that much more powerful than Falcon Heavy, and both of those platforms still throw away the 2nd stage.
    - AJ007 6y ago
      It’s amazing that Blue Origin is older than SpaceX.
      - ptmcc 6y ago
        Granted for much of its history it was a science project. Blue was tiny for most of its history. The push to scale up and become an operational launch company has only ramped up in the past several years. They still move somewhat slowly and are fiercely private, but those early years were targeting different goals.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      I feel fairly certain that Blue Origin has plans for second stage reuse. Whether these plans have gone much past the napkin phase is another question. SpaceX mocked up a plan to reuse the second stage of Falcon 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE These plans were scrapped to concentrate on Starship. If the Falcon 9 is big enough to have enough margin to support second stage reuse, New Glenn definitely does too.
      - Diederich 6y ago
        Right; I have no doubt that Blue/people inside of Blue are having serious thoughts about 2nd stage re-use, at least to a level roughly equivalent to what you pointed out SpaceX has revealed. However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy. Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
  - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
    While I certainly agree that aggressive timelines often get modified, especially with new launch systems, initial estimates in 2016 were for first flight in 2020.[0] Then they pushed to 2021.[1] Additionally, the fact that they called out Q4 2022 (late in the year) doesn't give me a lot of confidence they'll even get it done in 2022 either. [0]: https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-origin-rocket-factory-vision-space/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-... [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-first-crew-space-2019-first-orbital-launch-2021/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-fi...
  - shazmosushi 6y ago
    New Glenn is a case of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you". The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant. Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan! We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.
- xt00 6y ago
  I hate to say it, but this slow pace feels like Blue Origin is being run by the folks next door to it from Boeing.... If people didn't already notice, you can spell Boeing from the letters in BluE OrIGiN (a bit out of order)...
dint 6y ago
Lots of interesting news this morning from Blue Origin's normally quiet press room. Also of note is a series of videos showing progress at their Cape Canaveral rocket factory & launch facility: The stage 1 simulator, and integration & test facilities: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=... "Tank Cleaning and Testing" facility: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=... Launch Complex 36: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=... It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Those are some impressive facilities. Billions of dollars for a factory and a launch complex for a rocket smaller than the massive one that SpaceX is building in tents at Boca Chica, Texas. It seems obvious that you have to build the factory before you can build a rocket but Musk has figured out how to get around that. He did it the old way at Tesla for the Model 3: built out the factory before building the car, his "alien dreadnought" highly automated factory that then went through "production hell" and was 2 weeks away from bankrupting the company. He then built a giant tent in the parking lot of his factory, and iterated on a factory design, took that design and used it to build giga-Shanghai, producing vehicles of higher quality than his American built ones. Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design?
  - vkou 6y ago
    > Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design? Anyone who's ever done manufacturing? Anyone who's ever built something with their hands? Anyone who realizes that when assembling anything from 30,000 parts, it's going to take a lot of time and iteration to get your build quality to an acceptable level? Now, this may all come as a shock to software people, but anyone who has actually built stuff out of real, physical objects, would be aware of this... And why you should never buy a version 1.0 of anything. I legitimately don't understand why software engineers think that other professionals can't understand the concept of iteration. When GM builds a car factory, they aren't doing it from zero. They are building it on top of a hundred years of manufacturing experience and iteration. When Tesla was building its first car factory, it had nearly-zero years of institutional manufacturing experience and iteration. Of course a big up-front build was going to be a disaster. It's why they still can't figure out how to align the interior panels in their cars.
Diederich 6y ago
As a pretty big SpaceX fan, the additional delay is quite disappointing. I was greatly looking forward to seeing New Glenn go up...and back down...late this year.
walrus01 6y ago
This also pushes further back the schedule for Amazon's Kuiper, unless they plan to use third party launch services.
- ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
  I feel like they have to use a third party at this point. The friction between Musk/SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the FCC makes me think that Kuiper needs to get on orbit ASAP to begin testing. Starlink is rolling out quickly, and if Amazon doesn't get moving now they are really going to be in a tough spot.
throwawayX1 6y ago
I really hope that SpaceX gets some serious competition by another partially reusable rocket. We need multiple viable launch providers in the market. I don't think this will happen, but that announcement reads a lot like delay announcements that shadow a future cancellation. ('we continue to remain committed ...', 'persuing other opportunities', 'growing market ...' (it isn't) ...) There are two aspects here: A) With the way Blue Origin operates, I highly doubt New Glenn can be competitive with Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy financially, at least without heavy discounts funded by Bezos. More so once Falcon Heavy gets the upgraded fairing they are developing for government launches. Blue might still get some business from the US government and from Starlink competitors that don't want to help fund Spacex, but the market seems very limited. We are already at a point where Falcon 9 can handle most payloads, and there are no commercial use cases for larger payloads on the horizon. Which brings me to the second point: If Musks claims for Starship regarding cost and reusability come true, no one will be remotely competitive with that rocket. It's in a whole different league with a huge payload capacity and full (1st + 2nd stage) reusability. Starship has a chance of reaching orbit maybe late this year, but more likely in 2021. The question is if Bezos will be willing to pump billions into Blue Origin for the 4+ years until they can catch up with their own second generation rocket, currently nicknamed New Armstrong. A first New Glenn launch would probably mean start of scheduled service in late 2023, at which point Starship might already be launching regularly.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Amazon's Kuiper constellation and Telesat's Lightspeed constellation are more than enough to ensure viability of New Glenn.
  - Iolaum 6y ago
    Will the end product be competitive if their launch costs are 2+ times the cost of their main competitor?
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      There are enough companies that won't launch on SpaceX because SpaceX is a competitor and enough companies that spread their launch contracts as a kind of insurance that a second vendor could stay viable. But with Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane and Roscosmos fighting for that second spot thats a small number of launches spread over quite a few vendors...
Animats 6y ago
This updated maiden flight target follows the recent Space Force decision to not select New Glenn for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Or, we don't really have a customer.
- _Microft 6y ago
  They have actual customers signed up to launch their satellites on New Glenn [0][1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Launch_service_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Launch_service_custo... [1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Geplante_Starts https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Geplante_Starts
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Both Telesat's Lightspeed and Amazon's Kuiper are planning on launching very large constellations on New Glenn, so those two alone represent a lot of launches.
- shazmosushi 6y ago
  It looks like the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Launch Services Procurement (LSP) contract that Blue Origin refer to was awarded in August 2020 (six months ago). https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/2305576/space-force-awards-national-security-space-launch-phase-2-launch-service-contra/ https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/2305576/space-force-awa...
throw4738950727 6y ago
bo is a vanity project by someone who made billions selling counterfeits and factory rejects as legitimate products to unsuspecting consumers, to produce a rocket that will be obsolete before it ever flies.
- black6 6y ago
  No, that was Stratolaunch.
mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago
I think this press release is sneaky great news as it's evidence that Bezos is shaking up Blue Origin's culture. The announced delay was already baked in, everyone watching the space believed the delay, now announced, was already real. So there's little "news" here for an industry watcher. Many expect the first orbital launch might slip until 2023. However, Blue operating in the open? Releasing announcements and working openly - that's the real news. And new! It's different and I certainly hope it's evidence that Bezos is brining Amazon's famous speed to his private space company.
- nickik 6y ago
  They had to announce something because what they announced last time had lost all credibility and was clearly not happening. If this is indication of a greater culture change is highly questionable.
devoutsalsa 6y ago
I wonder if Spacex would ever use Blue Origin to launch Starlink satellites.

70 points by _Microft 6y ago

ThisIsTheWay 6y ago

More bad news for the Blue Origin team, but at least they've got pockets deep enough to absorb the delay to revenue.

_Microft 6y ago
The bad news mentioned here are that New Glenn's maiden flight is delayed by approximately a year compared to earlier estimates. Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
- icegreentea2 6y ago
  Blue Origin at least gets a bit of the pie with supplying the BE-4 for ULA. But ya, definitely challenging.
  - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
    You make a good point here, I sometimes forget BE-4 is being used on other boosters.
    - avmich 6y ago
      Planned to be used so far. BE-4 still has to prove itself.
- Teever 6y ago
  > It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
  - FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
    Considering how US space program funding is subject to the whims of presidential administrations and congressional funding, New Origin may actually come out on top of this comparison.
    - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
      How so? SpaceX is a proven launch system at this point, ULA has plenty of business, and SLS isn't going anywhere soon, so there aren't many options for new entrants.
      - m4rtink 6y ago
        I won't be that sure about SLS anymore with many recent events concerning it: - it failed to do full mission length firing during during the Green Run testing - its main supporter in the Senate Shelby announced he is going to retire - Europa clipper will launch on Falcon Heavy instead of SLS - early Gateway parts have been recently announced as also launching on Falcon Heavy Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
- Diederich 6y ago
  > I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with [SpaceX Starship]. I could be wrong, but I don't think Blue has any plans (at least in public) for full re-usability. Though New Glenn is a beast, it's not that much more powerful than Falcon Heavy, and both of those platforms still throw away the 2nd stage.
  - AJ007 6y ago
    It’s amazing that Blue Origin is older than SpaceX.
    - ptmcc 6y ago
      Granted for much of its history it was a science project. Blue was tiny for most of its history. The push to scale up and become an operational launch company has only ramped up in the past several years. They still move somewhat slowly and are fiercely private, but those early years were targeting different goals.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    I feel fairly certain that Blue Origin has plans for second stage reuse. Whether these plans have gone much past the napkin phase is another question. SpaceX mocked up a plan to reuse the second stage of Falcon 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE These plans were scrapped to concentrate on Starship. If the Falcon 9 is big enough to have enough margin to support second stage reuse, New Glenn definitely does too.
    - Diederich 6y ago
      Right; I have no doubt that Blue/people inside of Blue are having serious thoughts about 2nd stage re-use, at least to a level roughly equivalent to what you pointed out SpaceX has revealed. However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy. Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
- ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
  While I certainly agree that aggressive timelines often get modified, especially with new launch systems, initial estimates in 2016 were for first flight in 2020.[0] Then they pushed to 2021.[1] Additionally, the fact that they called out Q4 2022 (late in the year) doesn't give me a lot of confidence they'll even get it done in 2022 either. [0]: https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-origin-rocket-factory-vision-space/ https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-lifts-curtain-blue-... [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-first-crew-space-2019-first-orbital-launch-2021/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-resets-schedule-fi...
- shazmosushi 6y ago
  New Glenn is a case of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you". The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant. Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan! We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.
xt00 6y ago
I hate to say it, but this slow pace feels like Blue Origin is being run by the folks next door to it from Boeing.... If people didn't already notice, you can spell Boeing from the letters in BluE OrIGiN (a bit out of order)...

dint 6y ago

Lots of interesting news this morning from Blue Origin's normally quiet press room. Also of note is a series of videos showing progress at their Cape Canaveral rocket factory & launch facility: The stage 1 simulator, and integration & test facilities: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968313047162880?s=... "Tank Cleaning and Testing" facility: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364968720364429317?s=... Launch Complex 36: https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=20 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1364969291746074628?s=... It's exciting to see BO making progress on their campaign to catch SpaceX in the commercial launch space. I'm curious whether the slow, deliberative approach they show here will pay off in reliability, ability to scale, etc once they start putting kgs in orbit.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
Those are some impressive facilities. Billions of dollars for a factory and a launch complex for a rocket smaller than the massive one that SpaceX is building in tents at Boca Chica, Texas. It seems obvious that you have to build the factory before you can build a rocket but Musk has figured out how to get around that. He did it the old way at Tesla for the Model 3: built out the factory before building the car, his "alien dreadnought" highly automated factory that then went through "production hell" and was 2 weeks away from bankrupting the company. He then built a giant tent in the parking lot of his factory, and iterated on a factory design, took that design and used it to build giga-Shanghai, producing vehicles of higher quality than his American built ones. Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design?
- vkou 6y ago
  > Who knew that a factory design doesn't have to be "big design up front" and can instead be more software style iterative design? Anyone who's ever done manufacturing? Anyone who's ever built something with their hands? Anyone who realizes that when assembling anything from 30,000 parts, it's going to take a lot of time and iteration to get your build quality to an acceptable level? Now, this may all come as a shock to software people, but anyone who has actually built stuff out of real, physical objects, would be aware of this... And why you should never buy a version 1.0 of anything. I legitimately don't understand why software engineers think that other professionals can't understand the concept of iteration. When GM builds a car factory, they aren't doing it from zero. They are building it on top of a hundred years of manufacturing experience and iteration. When Tesla was building its first car factory, it had nearly-zero years of institutional manufacturing experience and iteration. Of course a big up-front build was going to be a disaster. It's why they still can't figure out how to align the interior panels in their cars.

Diederich 6y ago

As a pretty big SpaceX fan, the additional delay is quite disappointing. I was greatly looking forward to seeing New Glenn go up...and back down...late this year.

walrus01 6y ago

This also pushes further back the schedule for Amazon's Kuiper, unless they plan to use third party launch services.

ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
I feel like they have to use a third party at this point. The friction between Musk/SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the FCC makes me think that Kuiper needs to get on orbit ASAP to begin testing. Starlink is rolling out quickly, and if Amazon doesn't get moving now they are really going to be in a tough spot.

throwawayX1 6y ago

I really hope that SpaceX gets some serious competition by another partially reusable rocket. We need multiple viable launch providers in the market. I don't think this will happen, but that announcement reads a lot like delay announcements that shadow a future cancellation. ('we continue to remain committed ...', 'persuing other opportunities', 'growing market ...' (it isn't) ...) There are two aspects here: A) With the way Blue Origin operates, I highly doubt New Glenn can be competitive with Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy financially, at least without heavy discounts funded by Bezos. More so once Falcon Heavy gets the upgraded fairing they are developing for government launches. Blue might still get some business from the US government and from Starlink competitors that don't want to help fund Spacex, but the market seems very limited. We are already at a point where Falcon 9 can handle most payloads, and there are no commercial use cases for larger payloads on the horizon. Which brings me to the second point: If Musks claims for Starship regarding cost and reusability come true, no one will be remotely competitive with that rocket. It's in a whole different league with a huge payload capacity and full (1st + 2nd stage) reusability. Starship has a chance of reaching orbit maybe late this year, but more likely in 2021. The question is if Bezos will be willing to pump billions into Blue Origin for the 4+ years until they can catch up with their own second generation rocket, currently nicknamed New Armstrong. A first New Glenn launch would probably mean start of scheduled service in late 2023, at which point Starship might already be launching regularly.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
Amazon's Kuiper constellation and Telesat's Lightspeed constellation are more than enough to ensure viability of New Glenn.
- Iolaum 6y ago
  Will the end product be competitive if their launch costs are 2+ times the cost of their main competitor?
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    There are enough companies that won't launch on SpaceX because SpaceX is a competitor and enough companies that spread their launch contracts as a kind of insurance that a second vendor could stay viable. But with Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane and Roscosmos fighting for that second spot thats a small number of launches spread over quite a few vendors...

Animats 6y ago

This updated maiden flight target follows the recent Space Force decision to not select New Glenn for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Or, we don't really have a customer.

_Microft 6y ago
They have actual customers signed up to launch their satellites on New Glenn [0][1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Launch_service_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Launch_service_custo... [1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Geplante_Starts https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn#Geplante_Starts
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Both Telesat's Lightspeed and Amazon's Kuiper are planning on launching very large constellations on New Glenn, so those two alone represent a lot of launches.
shazmosushi 6y ago
It looks like the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Launch Services Procurement (LSP) contract that Blue Origin refer to was awarded in August 2020 (six months ago). https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/2305576/space-force-awards-national-security-space-launch-phase-2-launch-service-contra/ https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article/2305576/space-force-awa...

throw4738950727 6y ago

bo is a vanity project by someone who made billions selling counterfeits and factory rejects as legitimate products to unsuspecting consumers, to produce a rocket that will be obsolete before it ever flies.

black6 6y ago
No, that was Stratolaunch.

mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago

I think this press release is sneaky great news as it's evidence that Bezos is shaking up Blue Origin's culture. The announced delay was already baked in, everyone watching the space believed the delay, now announced, was already real. So there's little "news" here for an industry watcher. Many expect the first orbital launch might slip until 2023. However, Blue operating in the open? Releasing announcements and working openly - that's the real news. And new! It's different and I certainly hope it's evidence that Bezos is brining Amazon's famous speed to his private space company.

nickik 6y ago
They had to announce something because what they announced last time had lost all credibility and was clearly not happening. If this is indication of a greater culture change is highly questionable.

devoutsalsa 6y ago

I wonder if Spacex would ever use Blue Origin to launch Starlink satellites.