Comment by purpleidea
6 days ago
I'm staying up to see Blue Origin crash their rocket into the barge, but they keep pushing back the launch so idk if it's even going to take off :/
6 days ago
I'm staying up to see Blue Origin crash their rocket into the barge, but they keep pushing back the launch so idk if it's even going to take off :/
Hold on, some engineer is doing a few last git commits to make it work. When cicd job is done, t0 in 10minutes.
I always genuinely wondered how close to the various launches someone actually runs `git commit`.
One day our ancestors will look back on this time and wonder why we all re-developed similar code over and over again, instead of sharing it with copyleft and spending our energy as a society solving real problems like disease, fundamental physics, and so on...
Future generations will be dumbfounded why didn't everyone just ask the computer to get what they need.
They have costume avionics and costume ground system. The hardware both on the rocket and the launch site is just completely different. And likely plugs into back-ends that are pretty company specific. I question how much of that code can reasonably unified.
And why only talk about software? You can make the same argument for the avionics hardware, hell you can make the argument for the whole rocket. And if you just think this far enough you can just make the socialism argument "why have 2 companies at all, only have 1 (potentially government) company (ie Design Bureau) that enough". And that argument generally doesn't work, doing the same thing multiple times to figure out what is best isn't such a bad idea.
> disease, fundamental physics, and so on
We need space and rockets to research fundamental physics. Diseases get researched in space all the time. Making access to space cheaper has lead to more companies wanting to do more with space research.
> One day our ancestors will look back on this time
"You see, capitalism was indeed a necessary and inevitable bootstrapping phase of human development. Even Marx agreed this was the case. However, by the 21st century, generations had been indoctrinated to an extent that left them assuming capitalism was an unalterable and fundamental law of nature, instead of the global existential threat it had evolved into by its late stages."
Job failed with transient error with 23 seconds to go
Not if GitHub Actions goes down again
New Glenn has the throttle range to hover and they test more than SpaceX. You will probably be disappointed.
Testing in simulations and testing in reality are radically different. I hadn't actually heard anything about this until now but I'd be surprised if they're giving themselves more than a 10% chance of success, assuming it's an orbital test. Looking things up, it turns out that the booster is named "So You're Telling Me There's a Chance", and that is probably not entirely tongue in cheek!
The chances of the rocket reaching orbit on the first attempt are not too bad. Ariane 6 did it and only failed on the third engine relight.
Nailing the landing is a lot trickier, but if they have any early problems they would ditch it in the sea. They would have to have a problem just before landing for the rocket to take out the barge. If you want to count tipping over as a crash, that would make it more likely, but still less than SpaceX because of the soft landing and more legs.
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Given their development pace, they really must succeed if they want their "slowly and carefully" model to be competitive.