New Glenn Update

It worked pretty well for F9.

NASA still had much smaller jumps in capability between flights. Check out the Smarter Every Day NASA talk.

Sad part is that even though SpaceX / Elon has been very clear about expected outcomes it's still used against them.

New Glenn is manufactured with a different philosophy, so Blue can't be Starship levels of cavalier with testing. It would cost way too much to do with their current approach.

The factory tours for the two show this difference. New Glenn production is a lot more classical aerospace in terms of a high tech cleanroom factory being built from the start, versus a rocket that started out being built in tents that is slowly guiding the factory design as the tolerances are sorted out.

I think Blue's philosophy is pretty similar to the old space giants, except for being willing to invest a ton of money into improvements and new technologies without waiting around for the government to give them a blank check first.

Maybe we'll find that the thing limiting aerospace progress wasn't even that old space was afraid to test, but rather that they were simply unwilling to progress on their own initiative.

I recognize a fellow Kerbal space program enthusiast by what they consider to be challenges and what is just "more of the same". :)

Starship can fly to orbit, it's just not cheaper than a reusable falcon 9 that way

That's true, but there were several prior rockets in the Saturn family which were used to test various parts of the design and mission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_(rocket_family)

And no one would be ok today with the risks taken in those launches.

Human spaceflight is more about mitigating risk than anything. Apollo was getting there first, so there was a willingness to take more risks.

Also, NASA at the time had a humongous budget compared to today, adjusted for inflation [1] and it was a lot more focused on just getting to the moon.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

I'm just comparing specs, not dissing anybody. SpaceX of course also has Starship, which may well be fully operational by then.

> Thing that doesn’t exist yet will, ideally, have 6% better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!

FYP as it's rather worse than you framed. I'm happy to see more competition in space, because I think it's the single most important domain for humanity. And Blue Origin is making some rapid improvements, but people are dramatically overstating both this and their history/role in space quite significantly.

Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, back in 2000, and only managed to send a rocket into orbit this year, 25 years later. They remain a complete nonplayer that exists only through the good fortune of endless and clearly unconditional Bezos bucks.

Now if they can keep putting out some good results, ideally start producing some hardware that can compete in terms of price and capability, and generally scaling things up - then I'll be the first to sing their praises. But we're still quite a ways away from that point for now.

Because the falcon boosters have to be road transportable.

I believe that a larger fairing and vertical integration capability for Falcon is in the works as a result of the last round of the National Security Launch Contracts that SpaceX won.

I believe Raptor 2 operates at a lower chamber pressure. According to Wikipedia, Raptor 3 is 350 bar, and its thrust to weight ratio is 183.6:1.

BE-4's chamber pressure is low for its design, but it would be very difficult to increase it to Raptor's levels. Full-flow staged combustion causes the propellants to be gasses when they enter the combustion chamber, and chemical reactions in gasses happen more quickly, allowing for efficient combustion in a smaller combustion chamber. The smaller volume makes it easier to contain higher pressures.

The really big change will be launch thrust to weight ratio. Going from ~1.2 to ~1.35 gives you 75% more thrust at launch which means you spend less time fighting gravity, less time in the thick parts of the atmosphere, and less time to get past the trans-sonic region.

Though not identical, more commonly well known are the 4x2 and 4x4 designations for vehicle drive wheel specification.

In India, decades after metric, many will only understand feet and inches for height, length etc.. Think it's the same in many Asian countries, though some have moved on.

But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..

and also by ‘some countries’ they mean about 4% of the earth’s population, or 1 in 25 people.

You’ll find imperial units in lots of Chinese products too.

After all, they’re the ones manufacturing the imperial screws, etc.

Fwiw, Myanmar has been transitioning to metric since 2013 but, well, they had other worries.

Likewise, Liberia set up a transition program in 2018.

AFAIU both still use a bunch of traditional non US units too, like the UK.

I was with the space industry in India. The aviation sector is uniform throughout the world and uses feet, ft/s (vertical rates), knots (air and ground speed) etc. But I believe ground ranges are in kilometres and fuel loads are in kilogram, though I have heard pounds used in some places. Some ex-Soviet countries used to work with SI units even for aviation. But that difference between them and the world was partially responsible for a very tragic and horrific mid-air collision over Charkhi-Dadri near New Delhi in 1996. I don't know if they changed that afterwards. Meanwhile the naval and marine sectors also use nautical miles (different from the imperial miles) and knots exclusively. I believe that it's because the naval conventions were formed before the SI system was devised. Aviation sector just borrowed from them.

Considering all these, you'd expect space sector to borrow from the aviation sector. But we use SI systems exclusively. Everything in metres, kilograms, seconds. Feet, miles, knots etc are unheard of (Well, we have heard of them. We just don't use them). SI units make calculations and our life a magnitude of order easier. I need to check up how it is with winged reentry vehicles. But they're also likely go with m/s rather than knots. The only time we face difficulty with esoteric units are when we use some rare sensors. You end up looking up the definition of 'BTU' and other similar atrocities.

There are two noteworthy exceptions to this trend though. It's when specifying engine thrust and specific impulse. Engine thrust is often specified in kilograms, (metric) tonnes etc. Of course they mean kgf and Tf (weight equivalent of that mass under 1g). Meanwhile mN, N, kN and MN are also used equally frequently. It's a perennial source of frustration and conflict, with younger generation preferring SI units and the seniors preferring kilograms and tonnes. Meanwhile, specific impulse is even weirder. If you were using SI units, you'd expect N.s/kg or m/s or something similar. Even if you were using imperial units, you'd expect something similar. But the unit everyone actually uses is seconds. For examples, a high end cryogenic engine may deliver an Isp in the range of 450s (SSME had a vacuum Isp of 452s). Sometimes, it's also expressed as 'effective velocity' of exhaust in m/s. There are logical explanations for all these weird units. But the reality is that none of them, including the SI units are strictly correct, because they all use some sort of scaling that isn't linear or an assumption that doesn't apply.

You can blame the US for all these inconsistencies in the space sector. The Americans have a habit of making up units on the spot. For example, the kT, MT yields of nukes were invented by the Manhattan project scientists. Similarly, the unit of nuclear criticality is dollars and cents - thanks to Louis Slotin. (Sadly, he passed away soon after the second criticality accident with the demon core). Anyway, the US also has shot themselves in the foot by mixing up units. The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the planet instead of entering its orbit due to the engineers mixing up the SI and imperial units. Moral of the story, if you plan to go to space, you better choose a measurement system and stick to it. Also, don't make a round scrubber for the command unit and a square scrubber for the lander. Make up your mind first!!

If one byte equals one grain of rice it would have a bandwidth of 7.47millioncups/s

OK, but is that attitude in radians or degrees?

Because SI units are part of the language of science and communicating about rockets involves the language of science.

Because it is a false dichotomy.

In my area of the US 0 farenheit is useful to know as the point when salted roads start to refreeze.

Fractional units do work much easier with 2, and 3 as common denominators, and I find metric natives are a bit less wieldy with fractional units overall, presumably because they aren't used as often. However the majority of people overall are bad with fractions anyways.