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Blue Origin Thread (merged)

Aethon

By Aethon
in Science & Spaceflight

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DerekL1963

DerekL1963

Posted
Posted
31 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

So the faint red glow I'm seeing in the image corresponds to about 500-550 degrees C.

Presuming you're seeing the color correctly, to me it appears much brighter and more orange.  (Hence my question about reflecting the light from the exhaust - you can also see the lower body of the vehicle glowing...  evaluating this is not as simple as it appears at first blush)  And we're also presuming the camera captured the relative brightness correctly.  (As a photographer, not something I'd bet the rent money on.)

There's a reason why blacksmiths practice and practice and practice - and when judging the temperature is critical, they do it in a darkened room if at all possible. :)

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monophonic

monophonic

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, Steel said:

It looks orange to me! Unfortunately with computer monitors it's not really possible to tell exactly what colour either of us are seeing though, but my on my screen it looks orange! :P

Where was this shot taken? It does not seem to be from the time of most heating as the view angle is so far off the booster. So the fins would have had time to cool off significantly.

You are also correct about the computer monitors. We do not have an unbroken chain of color profiles from the camera to our monitors, so we cannot say with any certainty what was the wavelength of the light hitting the camera sensor. Things like automatic white balancing can do wicked things to colors, as you may have seen if you have taken photos in areas mostly lit by those nasty orange sodium lights.

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Hannu2

Hannu2

Posted
Posted
16 hours ago, BadMunky said:

Four more launches of the same booster and they will have caught up to Blue Origin.

In some sense maybe. But if you calculate lifted tons to orbit or earned money to company, you may get different results.

As some already told, there are no good reasons to compare these companies. They have different ways to achieve their objectives and there will certainly be works to do and achievements to get for both companies in rocket launch markets on coming decades. But you can not deny that SpaceX has couple of years lead at current time. It has been years on commercial launch market and lifted tens of payloads to orbit, whereas Blue Origin is still at prototyping phase.

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sevenperforce

sevenperforce

Posted
Posted (edited)
30 minutes ago, DarthVader said:

http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities 64 Metric tons to LEO!

Mother-Of-God.jpg

And they have no intention of pursuing crossfeed at this time.

Wow.

EDIT: I noticed that the SpaceX pages still show black landing legs, even though the legs have been white ever since they were first installed. I wonder why. Think this is somehow part of the planned Block 5 upgrade that has been in the works forever?

2 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

As some already told, there are no good reasons to compare these companies. They have different ways to achieve their objectives and there will certainly be works to do and achievements to get for both companies in rocket launch markets on coming decades. But you can not deny that SpaceX has couple of years lead at current time. It has been years on commercial launch market and lifted tens of payloads to orbit, whereas Blue Origin is still at prototyping phase.

As an example, consider Elon's favorite analogy, the airplane thing. "If you threw away an airplane every time you flew, airline tickets would be astronomical." This analogy doesn't work at all for Blue Origin, because they haven't been selling "tickets" this entire time. It's a completely different world.

Edited by sevenperforce
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Kryten

Kryten

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

Here's something I have found on reddit:

Most of the numbers are dodgy. According to that Soyuz FG can't lift the Soyuz spacecraft, and Ariane can't lift ATV.

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sevenperforce

sevenperforce

Posted
Posted
10 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

Here's something I have found on reddit:

(snip)

Cool table, but it's not quite right. Falcon 9 with reuse can only manage about 15 tonnes to LEO. And the $62M launch price assumes that SpaceX reserves propellant for recovery. Expendable launches will cost more than the standard $62M sticker price, going forward. I feel like Echostar-23 was probably expendable at the standard price as a courtesy to Echostar due to launch delays but that's not going to always be the case. The $44M estimated launch price is the estimated previously-flown booster discount, which isn't the same as the difference between an expendable and a reusable launch.

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Streetwind

Streetwind

Posted
Posted

Dodgy indeed - beware of overzealous fans, they can get the facts wrong too :wink: These prices are not comparable between the various launchers. Some of them fail to include the cost of the launch campaign (Falcon 9), some of them are actually cheaper to the customer because the government subsidizes it (Ariane 5), and most of them have wrong payload numbers (generally too low, except for the F9, which is too high).

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Wjolcz

Wjolcz

Posted
Posted

Yeah, I had a feeling it couldn't have been 100% correct. Seeing as some people on reddit don't even know who Musk is I tend to take information taken from r/space with a pinch of salt.

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CatastrophicFailure

CatastrophicFailure

Posted
Posted
16 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

It doesn't look manned.

Perhaps it's been deemed too dangerous, so they've genetically engineered a race of short, photosynthetic humanoids who literally work for peanuts (and other snacks) while also reaping the benefits of lower mass to the surface?

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tater

tater

Posted
Posted
27 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

It doesn't look manned.

It's not supposed to be. This is the "Blue Moon" cargo delivery lander they proposed a few weeks ago that would be LV agnostic, to be logistical support for lunar missions (5MT cargo to lunar surface).

 

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mikegarrison

mikegarrison

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, tater said:

It's not supposed to be. This is the "Blue Moon" cargo delivery lander they proposed a few weeks ago that would be LV agnostic, to be logistical support for lunar missions (5MT cargo to lunar surface).

 

Apparently they have been running it past the Trump team since early January, trying to drum up some interest in using their lander with either NASA's launch system or their own to send robotic exploration drones to the Shackleton crater, where they hope to find water ice.

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sevenperforce

sevenperforce

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

Dodgy indeed - beware of overzealous fans, they can get the facts wrong too :wink: These prices are not comparable between the various launchers. Some of them fail to include the cost of the launch campaign (Falcon 9), some of them are actually cheaper to the customer because the government subsidizes it (Ariane 5), and most of them have wrong payload numbers (generally too low, except for the F9, which is too high).

Yeah, it gets complicated. In cases where the government subsidizes the launch, that subsidy isn't available to every potential customer. For example, I doubt a US-based comsat company with a 3.5 tonne LEO bird would be able to get the $15M price for a Polar Satellite launch.

And things are different based on what sort of payload you're delivering and where you're delivering it to:

  • Price/kg, pressurized cargo to LEO
  • Price/kg, hardened cargo to LEO
  • Price/kg, comsat to LEO
  • Price/person, passengers to LEO (short-term shuttle)
  • Price/person, passengers to LEO (long-duration)
  • Price/kg, comsat to GTO

If you want to launch a comsat to GTO, you don't care about price/kg for comsats to LEO, and you certainly don't care about price/kg for hardened cargo runs or for passenger flights.

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Kryten

Kryten

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Yeah, it gets complicated. In cases where the government subsidizes the launch, that subsidy isn't available to every potential customer. For example, I doubt a US-based comsat company with a 3.5 tonne LEO bird would be able to get the $15M price for a Polar Satellite launch.

That's not how launch subsidies generally work. Usually it's a subsidy that applies to all launches (to get increased launch rate) or to the pad work and maintenance; which means all customers benefit, commercial or otherwise. This was the case with Delta II, and is the case for Ariane.

PSLV in particular doesn't have subsidies, it just has at-cost launches for gov. customers and for-profit launches for commercial ones. ISRO cost and pricing has come up repeatedly in Indian parliament Q and A, which has ended up with it being the most open pricing of any current launch provider; the figures have been collated here.

 

NB: that $15 million is either made up or very old, it's below cost for even the cheapest PSLV variant.

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DerekL1963

DerekL1963

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, Kryten said:

Most of the numbers are dodgy. According to that Soyuz FG can't lift the Soyuz spacecraft, and Ariane can't lift ATV.

Indeed.  While it quotes costs per pound...  it fails to compare capabilities.  Raw cost-to-orbit isn't everything.

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