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Is New Glenn economically viable?


fredinno

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Is the New Glenn even economically viable?

I know Jeff Bezos seems to think so- the issue being that reusable payload to LEO is 50 mT- far larger than anything launching today, even when considering GTO payload (~16mT)

 

It was honestly pretty surprising to me. I guess it makes some sense, avoiding competition with ULA- but avoiding competition is pointless if there is no market.

 

Not to mention there is no 2nd stage reuse planned.

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Well they've already developed the landing technology, it needs to be scaled up. That is difficult, though....

I'm not saying they can, I'm asking if it's economically viable. I have no questions that they can build it.

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5 minutes ago, fredinno said:

I'm not saying they can, I'm asking if it's economically viable. I have no questions that they can build it.

Well the same could be asked if any rocket. The only way to find out for certain is to try. And already having the know-how of landing stages could contribute to how viable it is economically.

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3 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Well the same could be asked if any rocket. The only way to find out for certain is to try. And already having the know-how of landing stages could contribute to how viable it is economically.

Keep in mind, I'm using the same argument used to downplay the SLS (ie the 'no payloads' argument).

 

Also, the end of QE meant that a lot of rocket and satellite companies are going bankrupt or scaling down in the near future.

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Maybe New Glenn and Falcon heavy will complement each other, I mean, isn't New Glenn launching in the early 2020s? SpaceXs Falcon heavy will be doing daily flights by then (Hopefully), so there should be some competition by then.

I guess it depends on how things play out in the next few years, but it could at least launch multiple payloads, and smaller ones further out.

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6 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

Maybe New Glenn and Falcon heavy will complement each other, I mean, isn't New Glenn launching in the early 2020s? SpaceXs Falcon heavy will be doing daily flights by then (Hopefully), so there should be some competition by then.

I guess it depends on how things play out in the next few years, but it could at least launch multiple payloads, and smaller ones further out.

Complement? You mean compete?

 

Also, there's the little ninging detail that it New Glenn goes into SLS territory for very large and wide payloads, and FH is cheaper for interplanetary probes. :P

 

Reminds me of the entire situation with NASA and the Delta II and Atlas V. Delta was too close to Atlas V territory, so NASA ended up baselining Atlas V. This resulted in LCROSS, for example. and now the Delta II is dead.

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Just now, Kryten said:

What are you basing that on? There's a Blue presentation that calls the upper stages 'initially expendable'.

Oh. I'm not hugely involved in this, so I got the idea from reading articles when it was presented, and reddit. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Upper_Stage

 

basing it off the EUS stage's mass (cannot find mass estimates for 2nd stage mass for the New Glen 2nd stage), is around 15mT, and assuming the amount of fuel needed to go from GTO to the atmosphere (I'm too lazy to mess with Delta V calculations right now) is going to be around 12mT or so, rather than 15mt to GTO. Add in the extra recovery mass, and we'll say another 1mT is off the payload.

 

http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/sls0.html

 

In any case, it's off topic, but how much delta V does it take to go to Earth Polar Orbit from, say Guiana? :P

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3 hours ago, fredinno said:

In any case, it's off topic, but how much delta V does it take to go to Earth Polar Orbit from, say Guiana? :P

I would assume you have to slow down from Earth's rotation. Essentially an extra 460 meters per second from the Equator. Not much less from Guiana, I would think. Although, don't listen to me, I'm just guessing.

3 hours ago, fredinno said:

Keep in mind, I'm using the same argument used to downplay the SLS (ie the 'no payloads' argument).

 

Also, the end of QE meant that a lot of rocket and satellite companies are going bankrupt or scaling down in the near future.

There are no payloads, yes. But BO isn't just doing orbit, they're also doing sub-orbital tourism, or at least desire to do so. Although New Glenn may be used to send payloads to high energy orbits more than it is used to LEO. We should wait and see how things play out.

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15 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

I would assume you have to slow down from Earth's rotation. Essentially an extra 460 meters per second from the Equator. Not much less from Guiana, I would think. Although, don't listen to me, I'm just guessing.

There are no payloads, yes. But BO isn't just doing orbit, they're also doing sub-orbital tourism, or at least desire to do so. Although New Glenn may be used to send payloads to high energy orbits more than it is used to LEO. We should wait and see how things play out.

Problem is that 2nd stage reuse is worst on high energy orbits.

 

Oh well.

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Aside from the question of whether Bezos cares about "economic viability", the issue of payload capacity is one that all aerospace vehicles face.

Consider the 747, which offered an unprecedented payload/range capability when first developed. Turns out there definitely was a market for it, even though it didn't exist until the airplane did. (If you build it, they will come.)

But as a counter-example: the A380. It now seems unlikely that the A380 will ever recover capital costs, because it seems that Boeing was correct about the market preferring long-range point-to-point city-pair travel rather than hub/spoke travel with ever-bigger airplanes.

So is there an unserved market for a launcher like the New Glenn? I guess we'll find out.

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(Also note that, in terms of payload mass, New Glenn is intermediate between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. So one would assume that if there is a market for both sizes of Falcons, there will probably be a market for payloads that are in between them.)

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12 hours ago, fredinno said:

Keep in mind, I'm using the same argument used to downplay the SLS (ie the 'no payloads' argument).

SLS is so expensive that it will certainly not attract industry to develop new types of payloads. It is fully dependent on government's projects. New Glenn will probably be at least an order of magnitude cheaper and give much more possibilities. But as many mentioned already, this is risky business and you can not get answer from net forums. If I could answer reliably this kind of questions beforehand, I would have been a billionaire long time ago.

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2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

(Also note that, in terms of payload mass, New Glenn is intermediate between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.)

New Glenn is projected at 45t to LEO and 16t to GTO reusable. It will never fly expendable.

Falcon Heavy is projected at 8t to GTO reusable. Payload to LEO reusable is speculative. To match New Glenn 16t to GTO at least the center booster need to be expended (possibility).

Falcon Heavy has the potential to beat New Glenn flying expendable, but that's not really comparing like to like.

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15 hours ago, Spaceception said:

SpaceXs Falcon heavy will be doing daily flights by then (Hopefully), so there should be some competition by then.

FH will not be making daily flights, well, ever. F9 won't be, either. That's a lot of stuff to launch that doesn't exist.

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9 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Aside from the question of whether Bezos cares about "economic viability", the issue of payload capacity is one that all aerospace vehicles face.

Consider the 747, which offered an unprecedented payload/range capability when first developed. Turns out there definitely was a market for it, even though it didn't exist until the airplane did. (If you build it, they will come.)

But as a counter-example: the A380. It now seems unlikely that the A380 will ever recover capital costs, because it seems that Boeing was correct about the market preferring long-range point-to-point city-pair travel rather than hub/spoke travel with ever-bigger airplanes.

So is there an unserved market for a launcher like the New Glenn? I guess we'll find out.

The "just so story" about the development of the 747 was that Boeing knew they could recover R&D costs (just barely, I'd assume) just on cargo routes.  Selling to airlines was effectively gravy.  I don't think they would develop the 747 for just cargo, but they almost certainly wouldn't have bet the company on hoping that the airlines would buy it in the numbers they did.

New Glenn doesn't have such a fallback mode (nor does the A380, but I guess that Euro subsidies* will work).  It looks like they are going for the "heavier than spacex" and "political friends who don't want spacex" (and can't justify ULA costs).  I can't imagine that Bezos can subsidize more than a launch or two every year, so even he needs customers (and thus cares about economic viability [within a $1,000,000,000.00/year or so mad money budget].

Oddly enough, I've been reading a history of DARPA (written ~2000).  One company interviewed, XCOR mentioned that if you want to make a lot of money, look elsewhere.  Money is tough in this industry [with the possible exception of ULA and SLS] and that this was for dreamers.  XCOR finally ground to a halt a week or so ago.

* I assume "plan C" for Boeing was a government bailout in the form of modifying the 747 into a heavy bomber to replace the B-52.  I'm sure Boeing executives were tearing their hair out that a 1950s plane was still central to the Air Force.  I'm guessing that they've since bought out nearly all the companies making parts, so keeping the old beasts in the air is more profitable.  If it wasn't we never would hear the end of just how old those things are.

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7 minutes ago, wumpus said:

The "just so story" about the development of the 747 was that Boeing knew they could recover R&D costs (just barely, I'd assume) just on cargo routes.  Selling to airlines was effectively gravy.  I don't think they would develop the 747 for just cargo, but they almost certainly wouldn't have bet the company on hoping that the airlines would buy it in the numbers they did.

New Glenn doesn't have such a fallback mode (nor does the A380, but I guess that Euro subsidies* will work).  It looks like they are going for the "heavier than spacex" and "political friends who don't want spacex" (and can't justify ULA costs).  I can't imagine that Bezos can subsidize more than a launch or two every year, so even he needs customers (and thus cares about economic viability [within a $1,000,000,000.00/year or so mad money budget].

Oddly enough, I've been reading a history of DARPA (written ~2000).  One company interviewed, XCOR mentioned that if you want to make a lot of money, look elsewhere.  Money is tough in this industry [with the possible exception of ULA and SLS] and that this was for dreamers.  XCOR finally ground to a halt a week or so ago.

* I assume "plan C" for Boeing was a government bailout in the form of modifying the 747 into a heavy bomber to replace the B-52.  I'm sure Boeing executives were tearing their hair out that a 1950s plane was still central to the Air Force.  I'm guessing that they've since bought out nearly all the companies making parts, so keeping the old beasts in the air is more profitable.  If it wasn't we never would hear the end of just how old those things are.

Yes, the upper deck with cockpit was so you could load cargo from nose and all the way back. cabin behind cockpit for extra crew and moving other crews and perhaps specialists. 
380 is larger than 747 but don't have the fleet and service structure 747 has so quest its more expensive to operate, add an increased focus on smaller planes who can fly longer now and direct routes save you from an stop and this save hours in travel time. 

As for new glen, the next bit thing would be upper stage reuse. This require larger rockets to lift the heavy upper stage. falcon heavy should have this capability with falcon 9 payloads at least the smaller ones. I assume new glen will have it too and would have the benefit of just being two stages who make it easier to make ready for next flight. 

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There are immense untapped resources beyond the Earth. For example, the solar energy that passes closer than the Moon is equal to the whole world's fossil fuel reserves *every minute*. You just have to figure out a way to tap it economically, though it's quite a difficult engineering homework to do. Cheaper access to space is part of the solution. If you are going to have big industry in space, then people can and will live there.

Edited by alec33
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4 hours ago, RCgothic said:

New Glenn is projected at 45t to LEO and 16t to GTO reusable. It will never fly expendable.

Falcon Heavy is projected at 8t to GTO reusable. Payload to LEO reusable is speculative. To match New Glenn 16t to GTO at least the center booster need to be expended (possibility).

Falcon Heavy has the potential to beat New Glenn flying expendable, but that's not really comparing like to like.

http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

According to SpaceX, Falcon Heavy can carry almost 64 tonnes to LEO and almost 27 tonnes to GTO. They do say that is with a fully expendable vehicle, but is reusability so expensive that it cuts their payload to only 1/3 as much?

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23 hours ago, fredinno said:

In any case, it's off topic, but how much delta V does it take to go to Earth Polar Orbit from, say Guiana? :P

Polar orbit?  It can't be much of an advantage over Vandenburg.  You would essentially be adding right angle vectors and getting the hypotenuse.  For equitorial orbits it isn't much, but it should add up.  For GTO orbits (which typically want eventually to be exactly equatorial and not "as equatorial as you can launch") this may be justified.  Polar orbits you might as well launch anywhere.

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4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

According to SpaceX, Falcon Heavy can carry almost 64 tonnes to LEO and almost 27 tonnes to GTO. They do say that is with a fully expendable vehicle, but is reusability so expensive that it cuts their payload to only 1/3 as much?

Yes. Falcon 9 almost gets away with it because second stage does most of the work of getting to orbital velocity.

Falcon Heavy first stages lift more payload to a little faster than Falcon 9, but the 2nd stage really struggles. Half as much DV or less.

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Okay, I'll chip in on this topic...

-From what I've heard, Blue Origin is planning on reusing the second (or even third) stages at some point, but is NOT planning on returning them to Earth. Think about the implications of that for a bit...

-Jeff has repeatedly mentioned that he wants to see, and I do quote, "millions of people living and working in space". To do that, you need LOTS of upmass, which requires a really big rocket. Jeff has also mentioned that New Glenn will be the SMALLEST of the orbital launch family. So, like New Shepard, New Glenn is more of a proof-of-concept/learning experience vehicle with practical and profitable applications on the side.

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