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.
Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?
"Chinese rocket static-fire test results in unintended launch and huge explosion" (30 June 2024)
<https://spacenews.com/chinese-rocket-static-fire-test-result...>
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=IlQkeKa4IKg> (Shakeycam video)
My point exactly.
Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".
The seats were only installed in Enterprise (the prototype, used only for suborbital tests) and Columbia (only enabled for STS-1 through STS-4 test flights, disabled for STS-5 the first operational flight)
The seats would only work at low altitude and speed (I've seen differing numbers cited). For the Challenger disaster they would've theoretically been useful (ignoring all the other factors), but they would've been useless for Columbia due to speed.
And it's not clear ejection would have actually been successful with the SRBs still active and right there.
The ejection seats were essentially the same as those used in the SR-71, so they were survivable at shockingly high speeds and altitudes.
Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.
Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?
Not all of the rockets blow up on the pad or dance around near the launch pad [0], but lots certainly do not make it to orbit in the first try. Space is pretty hard.
All I did was ask for the data used to come to that conclusion. I was only aware of SpaceX as a new space company. I was curious as to what other companies were included in her/his model.
How did you possible take offense to someone trying to learn?
And how did you possibly manage to find any ill will in the question?
> Why are you disagreeing like this?
I never once disagreed with the OP. Again, how did you get to this wild of a take from what i wrote?
If you say that was not your intent, then you might want to consider your approach.
A common hostile debate tactic is to ask the other person to "bring the receipts", and then pick through them for something to object to. It is akin to saying "prove it", and puts all of the burden on the other person with minimal effort.
In a world where the internet is often combative and full of bad faith actors, you may want to be more specific to distinguish yourself from them. If you have a specific question, ask it directly instead of asking them to provide more and sorting it yourself. You may also want to be clear about intent eg "what other companies are you considering".
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
Film negatives have a dynamic range of between 12 to 15 stops, but a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print (perhaps less if digitally scanned).
The Arri ALEXA Mini LF has 14.5 stops of dynamic range, and the ALEXA 35 has 17 (Table 2):
* https://www.arri.com/resource/blob/295460/e10ff8a5b3abf26c33...
Its also crucial to note at what SNR they use for their cutoff when stating their dynamic range in stops, in addition to their tone curve.
I'm only a hobbyist though, perhaps someone else can enlighten me further.
Digital is mostly limited by bits, since a 14 bit image with a linear tone curve will have at most 14 stops of info right? So we won't expect to see values pushing higher until camera manufacturers leave behind 14 bit as a standard and go higher, as in the arri cameras. They use a 16 bit sensor, and squeeze the last stop out by using a more gradual tone curve in their shadows. This means technically the shadow stops contain less information than the highlight stops, thus meaning not all stops are equal I believe (quite confusing).
[1]: "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data" in the February/March 2002 issue of the SMPTE Journal (Volume 111, No. 2, pp. 85-96).
The well size itself is usually a function of the pixel size. A larger pixel means a larger diode that can store more electrons, and hence a larger range of light that can be measured - dynamic range.
In reality there are limits imposed by manufacturing. At the extreme, we have wafer-scale sensors used in, eg, night-time wildlife videography - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11497922/ . Anything larger than that is typically a not-perfectly-contiguous array of smaller chips.
You can also cryocool the camera, at the expense of weight, versatility, and complexity. Most astrophotography is collected with cryocooled CCD or cryocooled CMOS sensors. This helps much more with long exposures than it does with video, but it does help.
Bit depth ≠ dynamic range.
The dynaic range is about the highest and lowest value that can be measure ("stops" are a ratio per log_2, db are a ratio per log_10):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range#Human_perception
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range#Photography
The bits are about the gradation with-in that range. You can have 12-stop image recorded using a 10-bit, 12-bit, 14-bit, or 16-bit format.
And at least when it comes to film, it is not a linear curve, at least when you get to the darkest and lightest parts. That's why there's an old saying "expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights"
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnt5yFArWo
I respectfully doubt that, development process is a combinaison of techniques that lets you do many thinks with your row data and the line between that and special effects is quite blurry (joke intended).
One way to make HDR-like with films and cheap-not-advanced material is to do a several development of the same film to the same paper, with different exposures parameters. That way you combine different ranges of the image (eg stop 1-4 + stop 4-10 + stop 10-18) to produce you final image. This is a great craft workship.
The only limit is the chemistry of the films used (giving grains at almost nano scale), multiplied by the size of the film.
Side note: development is basically a picture of a picture (usually) done with different chemicals and photographic setup.
I’m not sure if by "optical print"[0] you mean a film developing process (like C41), but the info is not lost and stays on the film. The developer job is to fine tune the parameters to print the infos you’re seeking, and that include adjusting white and black points thresholds (range). You can also do several print if you want to extract more infos, and print it so large you see the grain shapes! If there’s is something lost it’s when the picture is taken, after that it’s up to you to exploit it the way you need.
It’s very similar to a numeric device capturing RAWs and the developer finishing the picture on a software like Camera Raw, or what some modern phone does automatically for you.
0 not English native, perhaps this is a synonym of developement?
You have a negative, which you develop.
For photos you then have to transfer that to paper. For cinema you want to distribute it, so you have to take the originally captured image(s) and make copies to distribute.
In both cases, because it's an analog process, and so things will degrade.
Of course if you scan the negative then further copies after are easy to duplicate.
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.
Views are distinctly secondary to an affordable launch program.
Modern rockets have the ability to stream a great deal more data, including live camera streams, than the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo or Space Shuttle could. This increased real-time data bandwidth is probably much more valuable than high-dynamic-range cameras were.
What they release to the public is a separate issue.
Digital sensors have a linear response to light, so if the highlights are a bit over a threshold, they are gone.
If you’re willing to tolerate more noise and shoot RAW, you could underexpose, perhaps by as much as 4 stops, and apply a strong curve in post. It would pretty much guarantee no blown out highlights.
Most people find luminance noise aesthetically pleasing up to a point and digital is already much cleaner than film ever was, so it’s a worthy trade off, if you ask me. But “Expose To The Left/Right” is a heated topic among photographers.
This way it wouldn't suffer from any parallax issues and sensor images should then also line up to allow it to be reconstructed from the multiple sources.
That said... HDR images can be "bland" with it being washed out. It would probably take a bit more post processing work to get the image both high dynamic range and providing the dynamism of what those old Saturn V launches showed.
Alas, it didn’t work out in the market, people weren’t willing to trade half their resolution for more DR, turns out. Also, regular sensors got much wider latitude.
Aside with the dichotic filter... there was a neat trick that was lost (and refound) with a sodium 589nm dichromic (notch) prism. https://youtu.be/UQuIVsNzqDk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#/media/File:Apollo_11...
why not just stacked cameras with a range of filters? modern cameras cost and weight nothing (and that rocket puts 45 ton into LEO)
Like, what the fuck is this ? https://imgur.com/6sVSXGd Did they strap an iphone 12 on the launchpad and leave it on auto settings ? The flood light is aimed straight at the lens too...
This is an amateur shot from 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/coppj8/a_dramatic_cl...
I'm telling you, they didn't care one bit about that video, it looks like absolute ass
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.
Then it's not relevant.
Though that wasn't a SpaceX launch.
<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.
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.
You dont have to consider everything you dont like to be a negative on the world
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.
And knots are not mph, they're "nautical miles per hour" which are a different measure (1nm is 1.8km, not 1.6km as the regular mile")
I didn’t imply knots are mph, I used the slash to signify “or”. They are completely different units, but both are used. Sometimes the airspeed indicator even has two scales, one for kt and one for mph.
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.
"1 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%."
You are right. It's an easy calculation. But I would say its easy because its historically based on imperial units. Its easy to think about easy calculations like this in metric units like:
A 5% slope means descending 1 meter vertically for every 20 meters horizontally.
Glide slope of 3.6% would fit nicely though. Then, 100 km/h ground speed goes with vertical speed 1 m/s.
Metric navigation would use the fact 90 degrees of latitude is 10,000 km.
Another example: The feet is cleanly divisible in thirds, quarters, and twelfths, which is greatly appreciated in industry and particularly construction.
Also to be bluntly mundane, almost everyone can just look down and have a rough measure of a foot which is good enough for daily use.
Also, the "sterility" of metric doesn't do it any sentimental favours. Japan loves measuring size/volume in Tokyo Domes, for example.
If you can see a 1x1m tile from the cockpit, you're dead.
Jokes(...?) aside though, your absolute deference to precision is an example of why metric flies over people's heads. Feets, Tokyo Domes, arguably even nautical miles and so on are relatable at a human level unlike metric which is too nice and clean.
EDIT: numbers in those languages are the same way as in English, the "ones" are at the right. Kinda strange!
That fully depends on your cultural background. Feet, miles etc. are so foreign to me that I would be unable to calculate with them under stress.
But I am not a pilot nor a navigator, so...
The audience that matters most to them is Americans, and they're happy to accommodate even those who are less interested in space.
I don't understand why they reserve 6 digits for the speed in mph either. Are they expecting it to go beyond 99,999 mph?
Edit: as an Amazon product it would probably use Amazon(tm) cardboard box unit as the length metric and standardized warehouse drone toilet break as duration.
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?
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
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.
"I'm somewhat biased against BlueOrigin, but BlueOrigin managed to overcome my personal bias with how impressive their launch was".
It's similar to saying "I normally don't like country music, but that was a good song". In that sentence the intended message isn't "I don't like country music", instead it's "I liked that song"
Whenever it's used, it applies to the comment using it as well as the comment it's referring to.
P.S. Wait a second, why do I care about why do you care? Oh god...
- Someone who was an aerospace engineer for 8 years and knows many people in the industry, including BO, SpaceX, Boeing
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.
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.
"The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report today." Jan 16, 2023 [1]
[0] https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/11/23829868/elon-musk-is-ev... [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...
This is not a problem for me.
However, due to political decisions most if not all of that wealth is shared among people at the upper levels of the hierarchy, and third party investors.
It might not feel as a problem to you, but increasing inequality has negative consequences for society as a whole. It is well documented that more unequal societies have a higher prevalence of violence and theft, which might have direct consequences for you or your environment.
Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.
Maybe thank the taxpayers instead?
(You do realize we did this before without them, right?)
I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.
At a glance: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/study-amazon-workers-serious...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-25/pain-exhau...
But as I said, I think the argument requires some basic empathy/solidarity to follow.
Do you think they wouldn't if they had viable options??
This isn't even controversial.
Many simply choose to think it's acceptable, even preferable, through whatever twisted justifications.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 ("Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) (blueorigin.com)", 55 comments)
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.
Still a weird naming scheme though. A rocket is not a new astronaut. Am I missing something clever?
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.
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
"Falcon" was almost certainly chosen so the BFR could be pronounced "Big Fucking Rocket", perhaps also influenced by the BFG in Doom/Quake.
Also note how "SpaceX" is pronounced.
The suborbital rocket New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard who was the first American astronaut and whose flight was a suborbital arc.
New Glenn is named after John Glenn whose first flight was the first orbital flight.
There was also talk of a New Armstrong rocket, although Neil Armstrong wasn’t the first American to "reach" the Moon. But then together with Buzz he was the first to land and the first to walk. I don’t know if New Armstrong's still getting developed.
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.
It'll put price pressure on SpaceX who have been able to charge increasingly large amounts without the competition from ULA recently.
Blue Origin won't replace ULA on that contract, but will compete head to head with SpaceX and ULA to win launch task orders.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/investing-in-space-how-banke...
Here is a deeper history/analysis of ULA and how they were propped up by maintenance fees to retain launch capacity even when there were no payloads.
Falcon Heavy can launch much heavier stuff than 9, but it uses the same fairing. If you want to launch things that can't fit into Falcon 9s fairing, then your only options are SLS, New Glenn and in a few years Starship.
Especially Space Station Parts and Spy satellites can be quite huge. So there is an established and growing market for larger payloads
Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.
Citation needed
What else would you call this than "not a lot of demand"?
Falcon Heavy is in R&D mode, which is why there have been fewer launches. That has no bearing on the demand for it.
It’s been launching operational payloads for 6 years now.
SpaceX might be pricing Heavy launches high enough to dampen demand until they can support more launches.
(Are you sure that you are talking about Falcon Heavy? The heavy launcher which is basically 3 Falcon 9 boosters bungee corded together[1]. First launched in 2018. And not Starship which first launched successfully in 2024?)
1: Not really. Just a joke. Before someone nitpicks
And Ford Motor Companies was founded in 1903 and still hasn't gotten above the Karman line. Wow, they're a massive failure as a company.
Blue wasn't aiming for an orbital rocket for years.
Edit: New Glenn was announced in 2016, compared to Starship's 2019, and they're approaching the finish line at around the same time. And I would say Starship was a far more ambitious project.
Only after 5 years did they transition to becoming a rocket company, having decided that lowering the cost of access to space was the most important first step to realizing O'Neill's vision.
And they were right, it's just that SpaceX realized the same thing at about the same time and were much more successful at it.
Going from 0 to a large oxygen rich staged combustion engine and a heavy class rocket in 19 years is actually pretty good by industry standards. SpaceX is the exception, not Blue Origin.
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.
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
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.
However, without being able to recover a rocket, it's actually quite difficult to figure out just how much corners you can cut, while remaining reliable. Since blowing up revenue payload is an awful way to optimize this, I think this means that disposal rockets will be inefficient in a different way - there will be excess safety margin in the wrong areas.
Reliable re-use also changes the operating model of the company. Since each rocket in stock represents many customers over time, you don't need to be nearly as stressed about exactly matching your manufacturing pipeline to predicted demand. This likely also enables generally faster turn around time (as in from cheque signed to launch).
Finally, as it turns out, it's not unreasonable to expect a rocket to be reused like 20+ times. I think you're point would be reasonable if it turned out that reusing a rocket more than ~3-5 times was difficult. But like... it's REALLY hard to do disposal anything better than something that can be reused 20+ times.
Reusing seems like the obvious and biggest design decision that led to their success
Reason 2: Enables increased launch cadence.
Noone has ever managed to nail the landing of an orbital class booster on the first try.
Name another company that even landed orbital class booster on whatever try.
10 years ago it was an impossible feat many were laughing at.
Delta clipper controlled burn relanding in the 90s but not scaled to orbital class.
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.
Blue Origin have moved glacially slow by comparison, but they achieved their primary goal with this launch (get to orbit) and failed a secondary goal (land the booster).
If this were a SpaceX launch of a brand new rocket we'd be calling this a success and noting how they'd almost certainly achieve the secondary goal soon.
I think the question is how well and quickly Blue Origin can iterate to achieve first stage reuse. It took SpaceX quite a long time with a lot of lessons learned to reach the maturity they have now with Falcon 9 landings and re-launches.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.
But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.
New Glenn, Vulcan and Falcon Heavy/Starship.
There'll be a Chinese option shortly for those that are truly launcher-agnostic.
They may have failures during flights, but they aren't a failure as a company.
They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.
