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Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket
- huhtenberg 2y agoWebcast of the launch @ T-20 seconds - https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859 https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859
- nabla9 2y agoEverything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track. People in the internet don't enjoy rocket launch with roaring sounds unless there is laugh track over it that validates that the launch is awesome and simulates social connection.
- huhtenberg 2y agoYou don't say. SpaceX used to have "technical" launch streams with just launch status updates, but even they no longer do that :-/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 2y agoDidnt they get caught when a launch went badly but their narrator keep reading from the script, reporting events that clearly were not happening? I would watch a technical stream, but i can read a canned script myself.
- synarchefriend 2y agoNo, that never happened.
- imglorp 2y agoThere was an F9 loss early in the program where the presenter was overcome by emotion. I would love to find an archive of all the launches including that one.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI distinctly recall that occurring. The event was 28 January 1986, and whilst I didn't watch it live, I did catch it within a few hours. Though that wasn't a SpaceX launch. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...> The launch broadcast narration continued for several seconds following the vehicle explosion reporting either telemetry or programmed flight path information before breaking script with the infamous announcement "There's obviously been a major malfunction". Various reports I've seen are that the previous commentary was based on telemetry rather than watching video.
- cybrox 2y agoUnintentional remedy: with Starlink now giving them HD video coverage for the whole flight, I doubt they would be able to do this convincingly anymore. (Assuming they ever did. I do not know about any such launch)
- fransje26 2y agoIs there a footage without the hysterical screeching?
- sfjailbird 2y agoWorst part of any SpaceX live stream.
- boringg 2y agoYeah that excessive cheering and laughing really diminished it for me. Everything apparently needs an added hype team/track. What a world we live in.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoMost news stories on tv are presented as being "Breaking News!" It's absolutely bonkers some of the things they'll push that way.
- thebigman433 2y agoIts a feed of the Blue Origin staff, who have been working towards this for years and years - makes sense that they would be pretty excited considering the level of success this was. You dont have to consider everything you dont like to be a negative on the world
- StefanBatory 2y ago"I'm unhappy, so I'll force everyone else to be unhappy too" :/
- modeless 2y agoThose are the real emotions of the people at Blue Origin watching the launch. They've been working toward this moment for 24 years. Should they censor themselves because their "excessive" emotions offend you? Or maybe they should hire newscasters to do an disinterested presentation up to your standards, instead of employees who actually worked on it?
- jakubmazanec 2y agoBut you hear no crying or shouting during e.g. Moon landing [1]. TBH I expect "disinterested" behavior from professionals in such situations. [1] https://youtu.be/xc1SzgGhMKc https://youtu.be/xc1SzgGhMKc
- modeless 2y agoThat's not a video of live broadcast TV coverage. It's a recording of the operational communcations (which you could hear in the BO livestream and it didn't have crying or shouting). Actual TV broadcasts at the time did show some actual emotions including laughter and possibly even tears, despite being from professional newscasters rather than employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMF58ZP681A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMF58ZP681A
- jakubmazanec 2y ago> from professional newscasters rather than employees Then it's not relevant.
- snakeyjake 2y ago>Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track. You may have never done anything that warrants an emotional response. Some of us have. We enjoy seeing others express the joy we ourselves have felt at the end of a long, winding, process.
- numpad0 2y agoSpaceX started it. NASA launches before it didn't have any of it.
- stackedinserter 2y agoAll of them can't shut up and just let us watch the launch without listening to their bs like "...aand lift off for Orion space mission off Cape Canaveral which is a huge leap for humanity"
- bluenose69 2y agoAs has been noted by others, the emoting is a distraction. I could only watch this for a few seconds. Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.
- Tankenstein 2y agoJust a guess, but aerospace generally works with feet for altitude and knots/mph for airspeed, internationally. I’m doing a PPL in Europe and we, like everybody, use feet and knots/mph. I believe this is because the US have been on the forefront of aerospace regulation (a set of rules called the chicago convention is the basis of all air law) and aircraft manufacturing.
- throw5959 2y agoCan confirm, all aviation worldwide deals in feet and knots. It's also because it's much easier to do calculations on the fly (literally) - in your head. Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations.
- curl-up 2y agoCan you please give some real-world example of why it's easier to do calculations? Not disputing what you say, just hard for me to imagine why it would be so.
- HPsquared 2y ago1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%. Knots are also handy for navigation as 1 nautical mile equals 1 minute of latitude. And of course a knot is 1 nautical mile per hour. So if you're doing 300 knots, that's 5 degrees of latitude per hour. The units fit together nicely as a system.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoHave to agree with others that the horrible laughing ruins what should be a monumentous occasion for the company and humanity.
- jve 2y agoThink about it. The fruit of their hard work over all those years while enduring people pointing fingers and memes at them... and now their powerful rocket roars, rumbles and lifts... Ofcourse it is emotional. And looks like me personally enjoy it. Perhaps that is taken from spacex stream where you see people cheering on achieving significant milestones... just gives you some of it. Perhaps that audio could have been only when showing people cheering or what, but anyways, I'm surprised BO even set up that much of a show for external viewers. SpaceX obviously has spoiled us. Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?
- notahacker 2y agoPersonally I like the contrast between the laugh of joy and relief and background cheers from the team that have spent the past few years building it, and the calm technical announcements coming from somebody who probably feels the same way...
- seszett 2y ago> Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly? What do you mean? Rocket launches have been filmed for ages, and without the laugh track, see that random launch of Ariane 4 in 1988 for example, that includes an on-board view (the replay does include some clapping from spectators though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_E4naQgTl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_E4naQgTl0 You could already see them on live TV at the time. The Space X launches today certainly have better quality but it's not like launches were impossible to watch in the past.
- atq2119 2y agoAs a non-USian looking in, it seemed fairly average and non-horrible to me? I find it interesting to find several comments like this one here so prominently compared to the discussion thread about SpaceX launches.
- perihelions 2y agoDupe of / More details & discussion here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 ("Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) (blueorigin.com)", 55 comments)
- bell-cot 2y agoI might say "More details & discussion here", vs. "Dupe of". For those who don't want to burn time watching video, the Ars story is an excellent summary.
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 2y ago[dead]
- seydor 2y agoI don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.
- Tepix 2y agoReaching orbit on the first try is a big deal. I think it deserves recognition and celebration. Noone has ever managed to nail the landing of an orbital class booster on the first try.
- jve 2y ago> Noone Name another company that even landed orbital class booster on whatever try. 10 years ago it was an impossible feat many were laughing at.
- cma 2y agoThe space shuttle achieved reusable booster landing in the 80s with parachutes and water. Delta clipper controlled burn relanding in the 90s but not scaled to orbital class.
- inglor_cz 2y agoSolid engine booster isn't in the same category of complexity as liquid engine booster, though.
- cma 2y agoSure, just saying it wasn't an impossible feat.
- lupusreal 2y agoNobody with any sense for how rockets work should be impressed with parachuting and refurbing SRB tubes. Landing a proper rocket stage the real way is an impressive feat of robotics and engine engineering. The shuttle SRB thing was a wasteful farce meant to pay lip service to the loftier goals set by earlier Shuttle proposals (such as real flyback boosters.) A far better example, although still not exactly the same sort of thing, would be landing the SSMEs with every orbiter landing. They obviously required refurbishment (as all Falcon 9 Merlin engines do too) and the propellant tanks were expended, but the engineering that went into the SSMEs is a much better example of precedent to Falcon 9 than dropping spent SRBs on parachutes. SLS/Artemis is actually using some of the specific SSMEs that have flown before on Shuttles. Veteran engines, but they will be discarded this time, no more refurbing. What a damn shame.
- vFunct 2y agoI wish the cameras used film like NASA did for Saturn V. The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film. And this is made worse with the night launches that Blue Origin are doing. In Saturn V launches you could see see detail in the bright flame structures along with background detail. Maybe some of the upcoming digital cameras chips will have higher dynamic range eventually. I know Nikon has a paper talking about stacked sensors that are trading off high frame rate for high dynamic range: https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2 https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2
- trhway 2y ago> talking about stacked sensors why not just stacked cameras with a range of filters? modern cameras cost and weight nothing (and that rocket puts 45 ton into LEO)
- ArnoVW 2y agothose engineering cameras were not your regular run-of-the mill cameras neither. NASA published a 45 min documentary of the 10-15 engineering cameras of an STS launch., with comments on the engineering aspets of the launch procedure. Very beautiful, relaxing, has an almost meditative quality. Highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwqZ4qAUkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwqZ4qAUkE
- philipwhiuk 2y agoYeah and Shuttle cost a fortune per launch. Views are distinctly secondary to an affordable launch program.
- sandworm101 2y agoAnd the cost of the camera program was paid back a hundred times as that footage was used to diagnose, correct and improve countless systems. Accident investigations would have taken ten times as long without that footage.
- jmyeet 2y agoJust a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was. And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole. Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink. For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone. So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole. Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyou spent 10% of your NW on a ski season pass?
- chasd00 2y agoI’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but hats off to the BlueOrigin team. Orbit on the first try is no small feat. Congrats!
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoWhy do people feel the need to add qualifiers like "I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but...". Are you so attached to some company that it was hard for you to congratulate people on an accomplishment? It seems strange.
- avmich 2y agoThere's such a thing as sports watching, when you're associating yourself with a team and are glad and sad together with them. I guess something like this could happen elsewhere...
- mousetree 2y agoIf you don't praise Elon Musk he will say bad things about you on Twitter
- kentm 2y agoStill love the car!
- mensetmanusman 2y agoBecause of the popularity of the ‘I’m no Elon fan’ preamble on HN.
- dwaltrip 2y agoLet's flip it: Why do you care? Does it really bother you that much? P.S. Wait a second, why do I care about why do you care? Oh god...
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoStop! You'll get us in an infinite feedback loop!
- thehappypm 2y agoDoes anyone have a good sense for the actual purpose of reusing rockets? Call me skeptical of the actual cost savings. You now need systems in place to catch them, the rockets need more components and fuel and such to control descent, the rocket then need to be refurbished back to launch-ready after going through hellacious stress. It seems like it’d be cheaper, lighter, and simpler on the whole to just make a new one. But I would love to learn more.
- wongarsu 2y agoRocket engines are very complex machinery that's difficult and expensive to make. Reusing the rocket allows you to reuse the engine. SpaceX has also managed to show that reused hardware can be more reliable than brand new hardware. You run the hardware through a number of tests before launch, but there is no better test than an actual launch. Satellites still cost a lot more than rockets, so reliability is a big deal
- Symmetry 2y agoA NASA planetary probe or a NRO spysat cost more than an order of magnitude more than launch but your run of the mill comm sat is only a bit more expensive than a SpaceX launch.
- twic 2y agoI do wonder if there's a way to reuse engines without reusing whole rockets, that could wind up cheaper. Pop the engine out of the rocket with some small fuel tanks, spin round and do a retro burn, then ... somehow land. I have not worked out all the details.
- stetrain 2y agoULA calls this "SMART reuse" but has not yet successfully achieved it with their Vulcan rocket. https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_2400x1350_crop_center-center_82_line/20150413_ula-smart-system.jpg.webp https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/web/assets/pictures/_2400... In some ways this is simpler, but in others it is more complex since you need a way to catch the engines before they dunk in the salt water. A rocket booster that is already set up with avionics, engines, and fuel can guide and land itself without needing a precise helicopter catch etc.
- Symmetry 2y agoPretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do. The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try. NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.
- lupusreal 2y agoThe new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.
- trothamel 2y agoIt also helps that they fairly routinely land boosters (with New Shepard), which means they've likely worked out the 'landing' part. Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.
- bpodgursky 2y agoSounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.
- BurningFrog 2y agoImportant naming rule: Never call your version 2 "New Foo"! Because the name will remain long after it was new. The naming scheme also crashes at version 3. The New Glenn name is from 2016.
- Ajedi32 2y agoNew Glenn isn't a "version 2". The name is a reference to John Glenn, the first American to orbit earth. Think "New York" not "New iPhone".
- BurningFrog 2y agoThanks! Still a weird naming scheme though. A rocket is not a new astronaut. Am I missing something clever?
- placardloop 2y agoRockets aren’t birds either, and yet: Falcon 9 (the Falcon 9 also is the second iteration of the Falcon rockets, not the ninth, so…) Rockets also aren’t planets, and yet: Saturn V Rockets also aren’t mythological horse/man creatures, and yet: Vulcan Centaur You’re overthinking it.
- 0xffff2 2y ago>(the Falcon 9 also is the second iteration of the Falcon rockets, not the ninth, so…) Falcon 9 has nine first stage engines, Falcon 1 had a single engine. It's not a version number. Edit: I had to look it up because Saturn 1 is not a single engine vehicle. It turns out that the Saturn V is design C-5 of the Saturn family of rockets, with A, B and C1-4 designs preceding it (not all designs where built), so the "V" in Saturn V is basically a version number, despite the Saturn V first stage having 5 engines
- placardloop 2y agoYes, it not being a version number is the entire point of this thread.
- hersko 2y agoThank goodness for billionaires. There's a good case to be made that if it weren't for the likes of Musk and Bezos we'd still be stuck with the likes of ULA. They are literally pulling us into the future and i'm all for it.
- settsu 2y agoTotally worth the exploitation, amirite?? /s (You do realize we did this before without them, right?)
- mensetmanusman 2y agoNo nation has a done what spacex has.
- hersko 2y agoCan you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better. I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.
- Tryk 2y agoI guess it would presuppose some solidarity with the workers at Amazon At a glance: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-seriously-hurt-at-twice-rate-of-other-warehouses.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-serious... https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhaustion-rampant-among-amazon-warehouse-workers-study-says https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhau...
- hersko 2y agoIt sounds like a bad job so they should work elsewhere. These are not slave labor camps.
- 2y ago
- quesera 2y agoApropos of nothing, but I appreciate the flaunting of branding best practices, and aerospace superstition, in the naming of Blue Origin (BO) and New Glenn (NG).
- carabiner 2y agoWhat are branding best practices and aerospace superstition? - Someone who was an aerospace engineer for 8 years and knows many people in the industry, including BO, SpaceX, Boeing
- jjk166 2y agoBO is an acronym for body odor, something you don't typically want to associate with any brand. NG is an acronym for No/Not Good used in various engineering contexts to refer to things that fail to meet requirements. A superstitious aerospace engineer might not want to essentially name something "failure" though in practice I think most aerospace engineers would love to call their rocket Explodey-9000.
- sp527 2y agoFlouting?
- quesera 2y agoErr yes, exactly. Or perhaps flaunting a disregard for. :)