Blue Origin thread.

[darthgently]

29 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Let's hope they've also succeeded in building a rocket!

They did build that mock up awhile back.  So probably almost done, right?

[Meecrob]

On 8/13/2024 at 1:24 PM, cubinator said:

Let's hope they've also succeeded in building a rocket!

$5 says this is what we get shown

Fake Edit: I hope they do have something cool to see. I don't like Jeff Bezos as a person, but I love all things rocketry.

Edited August 14 by Meecrob

[tater]

 

 

[tater]

Be-4 I_sp is 340 (I assume vacuum I_sp for SL engine).

Be-3U is 445

Edited August 15 by tater

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, tater said:

 

 

That was a welcome watch.  One thing I came away with is that this isn't just a whim for Bezos to flex wealth as is implied by many.   I've never thought this seemed like an informed view, but really didn't know one way or the other.  His enthusiasm is authentic to my eye anyway.  The other major thing is the fact that they do have an assembly line going.  Nice. 

 

Edited August 15 by darthgently

[tater]

13 minutes ago, darthgently said:

That was a welcome watch.  One thing I came away with is that this isn't just a whim for Bezos to flex wealth as is implied by many.   I've never thought this seemed like an informed view, but really didn't know one way or the other.  His enthusiasm is authentic to my eye anyway.  The other major thing is the fact that they do have an assembly line going.  Nice. 

He's always been into it since college, actually. I've never doubted his sincerity, he just was not as personally involved, and it got back-burnered, I think.

[AckSed]

Straight off the bat, we have some details of how New Shepard works: has to be aerodynamically stable going up and going down, so the top ring fin used for descent is exposed by the capsule being ejected. There are also extra fins that pop out and drag brakes to improve the ballistic coefficient. The ascent uses inertial navigation to compensate for and measure wind blowing off-course, remembers the path it took, then inverts that to return to the launch pad.

They have the umbilical of the X-33 SSTO in the lobby. With the exception of the engine, I'd thought it was just a paper rocket! Legend on the display: "LH2 Ground and Flight panel assembly intended for NASA's Advanced Technology Demonstrator reusable spaceplane."

All the main stuff like regenerative cooling was invented back in the Sixties, so "Our job today is not to do better at spaceflight, it's to make it more affordable."

More cool artefacts in their Kent headquarters.

Talks about retrieving the Apollo 11 F1 engine. "This is going to be the easiest thing I've ever done." The Google search of where it landed was the only easy thing about it. Too many objects discovered. 30-mile corridor was NASA's graveyard. ROVs gathered what they thought it'd be. Incredibly difficult, but also fun. Took the family, stayed out for 28 days. Also pulled up an Apollo 13 engine that's on display in the Air and Space Museum in Seattle.

(Side note: saw a notice for a blood drive beside the door to the factory. There was also station for a broom and dustpan to be clipped. Not important, but interesting)

Shows us stage one New Glenn (GS1) LNG tank and isogrid stiffening. Graphic shows it's located beneath the fins on the booster. Has common dome with LOx tank; is about to be friction stir-welded on to LOx tank. (No indication of materials, but FSW might mean aluminium-lithium. Might. (Confirmed later.)) Automated FSW rig. Good part about reusability is you get to reuse all those high-performance parts.

"Highly-engineered objects always end up beautiful."

Orthogrid vs. isogrid: orthogrid (rectangular) can be bump-formed, as it may be done with the panels before they're welded into tanks. Isogrid needs 5-axis milling.

Spun-formed domes with added gore panels of what looks like insulation. Use stickers and machine vision to check against CAD model.

Stage two hydrolox with helium pressurisation bottles inside. LH2 tank almost as big as Saturn V S-IVB.

Had to get suited up in clean-room suit to poke head inside top of tank. (not flight article, we see that later.)

Beautifully-engineered.

Will be slosh baffles, but orthogrid/isogrid "does a lot of that job for you". (Dual-use, I approve.) Baffles are more important on the LOx side because the LOx is so much denser. Do have to worry about slosh at the sump when using the last bit of LH2.

Shows lower section of GS1 and interstage. Tan fabric covering on both is thermal insulation developed in-house and tested on New Shepard. Booster comes in for landing at Mach 6. "Highly reusable" thermal protection system that doesn't need to be touched up.

Vehicle designed to be turned around in 16 days, and designed to last for minimum of 25 missions. Like to get to at least a hundred.

Landing gear deploys 14 seconds from landing, taking 8 seconds to deploy. Landing gravity-assisted because it's decelerating. Landing gear is parasitic mass. Learned a lot from New Shepard. (Sides of landing-gear wells smaller orthogrids. Extensive hydraulic lines.)

In-between four and six landing gear your mass-trade is about even. When you have more landing gear your splay can be smaller for the same [resistance to] tip-over. Like six because geometrically it fits really well with a seven-engine configuration - you have a landing gear between every engine. It just packages well.

BE-4 engines fit inside, there's a heat-shield and each engine has its own eyeball seal. Stage can hover, engines can throttle down to 40%. Three gimballing engines in a line, four fixed engines. Light three gimballing engines for return and land on single engine which is throttled down to thrust-to-weight equalling 1:1 for constant deceleration.

Dry mass of the whole vehicle "only a few hundred thousand pounds".

Always landing downrange - initially. Bezos acknowledges it may be a smart thing to do RTLS if you don't need the performance and it makes economic sense.

Do small exoatmospheric burn, then landing burn. Tradeoff between the strakes and weight of fuel until you reach an optima. Don't quite know where that is yet, erring on the conservative side of the exo-burn.

BO close to understanding - want to do whatever we can do through simulations and testing on the ground first - but some things you only learn in flight. Much better simulations nowadays.

Operating range of fins 60 degrees. Need large hydraulic actuators - 5x bigger than the Shuttle SRB actuators.

Next section is blurred.

Everything "one-fault operative" on New Glenn.

Flight computers, four large actuators and nitrogen pressurant bottles (RCS) in fin section.

Interstage mostly empty space to fit BE-3U vacuum nozzles. Stage separation pushrods thick as a person's neck, in pairs. (24 altogether, at a guess.)

Some advantages to big rockets: parasitic mass doesn't matter as much, rotating objects can be big, easier to balance a broomstick than a pencil or toothpick on the end of your finger, because of inertia slowing everything down. Lots of RCS control authority on top.

No wind gusts on the moon, so in some ways it's easier.

[AckSed]

Umbilical door also on interstage. Closes at t-0.

Whiteboard with "Recognition, Safety, Quality, People" diagrams all filled-in in red and green alongside "Action Plan" and separate whiteboard 2/3rds filled with pink and eggshell post-its.

Machine-shop had screen with "OLS Structural component Production" graphs but tragically any numbers are washed-out.

Orthogrid milled from stacks of AlLi plate, then bump-formed into curved tank walls. Skim a thin layer off the raw plates before milling to relieve strain from manufacturing process. Remove 90% of the material.

Looking to remove the orthogrid and go to monocoque in GS2 because they found enough performance in other places. B3U engine went from target 160,000lb to 172000lb (78019.2 kilograms, 765094N) thrust. Mass penalty not huge, cost savings for expendable justified.

Going to see if can make expendable GS2 so cheap that reusability never makes sense, and try out reusable GS2 that's so operable expendability never makes sense. Going to let it be a "horse race" as on paper the trade isn't obvious. For 1st stage reusability is "blindingly obvious".

Have a design for reusable GS2, doing lots of work on thermal protection systems. Trade between AlLi and stainless [steel] is better because of its thermal properties, but aluminium is lighter if you can sort the thermal protection.

Most of these trades you cannot decide at the conceptual level; much more "fine-grained". Smaller practical issues dominate - refurbishment and such.

Engine factory is in Huntsville. Won't be seeing that today [in this video]. Next year will be building a BE-4 every 3 days. [May 30th], engines for 2 Vulcans are [were] sitting there and a 3rd about to be delivered, and the Glenn engines were all in assembly then.

Carbon-fibre composite-laying machine comparable to the 787.

Random worker pulled Bezos aside to say he worked for Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies for 36 years, about 10 years each, and BO is the best company he ever worked for. It's still going to be his last job, and he doesn't want to work any more.

Fairings and payload adaptor carbon composite. (Payload adaptor looked bigger than the Apollo capsule.)

Cured in Large Composite Cure Oven or LCCO. It was indeed large. Lady walking next to it looked like a matchstick in comparison.

Composite for fairing half laid down by massive robot in what looks like the world's largest Easter egg mould. Tape is in pods and can exchange them, so it can keep running. Can design laying pattern for carbon-fibre tape so that it's not homogenous and designed for the loads you have. It has A structure under the CF, but Bezos didn't share what. Very repeatable process. Which is what you want when it comes to production. They have non-destructive testing with ultrasound and repair methodologies, but they don't need to repair very often.

Stopped to show four GS1 in construction. Just going to start producing vehicles at rate. (This may be able to replicate the Starlink effect: if they have spare launch capacity, they can sell themselves a space at cost to launch Project Kuiper, taking advantage of the learning function and rapidly building out their constellation into profitability while, as Perun said, beating their cost to death with the scale bat. Folks, we may be about to see combined launch capabilities and frequencies that would boggle von Braun.)

Flight BE3U engines! Nozzle-less when filmed, but seem to have a common-shaft turbopump. Hot-fired without vacuum nozzle once attached, then nozzle put on before flight. Engineers signed the names on engine as well as Bezos'.

Disregard that, it has a two-shaft, in-line open expander cycle: LH2 is split: most goes to injectors, smaller amount of the high-pressure LH2 regen-cools the thrust chamber, its heat and expansion powers the LH2 turbopump, and then the exhaust from the turbine goes on to the oxidiser turbine that powers the LOx turbopump. Which rotates in the other direction from the GH2 turbine to extract the small amount of rotational energy from the exhaust. Finally, the exhaust from that is flowed into the vacuum nozzle to cool the skirt. Ingenious. And efficient: 445 seconds of specific impulse, because the excess H2 contributes.

BE-4 dev engine next, with rat's nest of Development Flight Instrumentation. Compares it to the RD-180 and F-1, but is going for a medium-performing variant of high-performing ox-rich staged combustion cycle to take stress off everything for longevity and reusability. 140 bar chamber pressure, and you have so much mass flow with all the oxygen going through the turbine gas doesn't have to be very hot. If you go to very high chamber pressures, you start to lose some of that advantage. Still have 340 sec.s specific impulse.

High ISP on the second stage, high reusability on the first stage.

[magnemoe]

Well thus was impressive. 

[tater]

 

hehe

[tater]

 

[magnemoe]

8 hours ago, tater said:

 

hehe

Give the poor things an kick stage  
Hint an new Sheppard fits inside the fairing. (Yes i know it would obviously pass way to fast past mars to slow down but the new superheavy and cheap launchers let you do far more kerbal mission profiles. 

[tater]

16 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Give the poor things an kick stage  
Hint an new Sheppard fits inside the fairing. (Yes i know it would obviously pass way to fast past mars to slow down but the new superheavy and cheap launchers let you do far more kerbal mission profiles. 

It has a kick stage. Rocket Lab built the spacecraft based on their Photon upper stage.

[Kerwood Floyd]

Has anyone else heard anything about this?

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2024/08/21/bezos-blue-origin-suffers-fiery-setback-building-new-rocket/

 

[AckSed]

It's a little tamer than advertised (there was no fire- bad form on Bloomberg's part), but still not great. Relevant quote from article:

Quote

In the first of the recent cases, factory workers moved a huge section [upper tank] of New Glenn, destined for the rocket’s second flight, out of the Florida humidity and into an air-conditioned storage hangar. But they didn’t properly monitor the hardware or have pressure-release valves and it chilled down to the point where it crumpled into itself, like a crushed Coke can.

In the second instance, a portion of rocket meant for New Glenn’s third flight failed during stress testing and exploded in the building it was in.

Build it right... and you still get operator error and teething troubles. Rockets, everybody!

[tater]

 

[darthgently]

27 minutes ago, tater said:

 

ESCAPADE is such a whimsical name.  Putting the interplanetary payload on a maiden flight of a company's first orbital design is somehow fitting the spirit of the word, I suppose.  Just do it

[GuessingEveryDay]

As for the information about ESCAPADE, the Wikipedia article's pretty interesting. It would have flown on Psyche, as the trajectory (before the launch was delayed) would have gone by Mars, so the 2 satellites could just hitch a ride then slow down at Mars.

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

[tater]

 

[tater]

 

 

[Minmus Taster]

 

[tater]

 

 

[GuessingEveryDay]

Strange, I don't remember them announcing what was the plan for the first launch for landing on the barge. However it does seem very risky to try a landing on the first try, no?

[tater]

 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

Strange, I don't remember them announcing what was the plan for the first launch for landing on the barge. However it does seem very risky to try a landing on the first try, no?

Probably not as risky as it sounds, if they have any issues they miss it, yes they can get issues in the final burn but at works they destroy some of the superstructure with equipment who they can repair before next attempt. 

Look at the walkways on them, they are not containers but multi story structures.