We're really spoiled by SpaceX, RocketLab and other live streams. In comparison this was pretty unspectacular - they did have camera(s?) on the booster and on the second stage, but only showed them for a few seconds during the stream, and the picture was breaking up constantly. The stream itself, video and timeline animation, was multiple seconds delayed behind the audio callouts in the background. The animated position of the first stage was clearly wrong, it was already showing almost on the ground when the re-entry burn was called out. Lots of things to work on for future launches, if they want these streams to be as watchable as people are used to.
Although that's all details, not to detract from the feat of reaching orbit on their first attempt. That's not something that happened very often and worth significant praise.
Definitely spoiled by SpaceX's polish. I'm not sure how much of the displayed telemetry was right, as the altitude of Stage 2 was shown as decreasing down and down until suddenly they said it was in orbit. The imperial units don't help understanding either.
It's normal for altitude to decrease while the second stage builds up to orbital velocity; the Shuttle did the same thing.
Like all rockets, the second stage has a thrust/weight ratio substantially lower than 1 on ignition, and the motor points far away from the gravity vector, so there's a bit of a race between the vehicle trying to fall down, and the rocket motor trying to accelerate it to orbital velocity. The fact that the final orbit was 100 miles exactly suggests this all went according to plan.
I also was discussing this with my colleague. This looks more like an ULA stream than a SpaceX stream. Bad telemetry, imperial instead of metric units, almost no cameras and the cameras that were shown were potato quality, planned holds, almost no reactions from the presenters or any audience.
Good to have some competition in this space though. That is what truly matters. The livestream is just marketing and a bit of fun/showing off.
I imagine once Amazon Kuiper gets up and running things will improve. People forget SpaceX has the massive advantage of having multiple starlink connections on their flights, so internet access direct to the ship has become incredibly easy for them.
Meanwhile everyone else relies on a very well tuned ground connection that requires precision movements to keep the connection stable, and is impacted by cloud and atmosphere.
First attempt maybe, but they have streamed New Shepard launches many times before, so the company is not exactly a newbie at this overall. Of course, an orbital launch provides a very different level of challenges compared to a vertical hop to 100km.
I'm guessing the camera feeds weren't amazing because they don't have a starlink antenna on the rocket :P I'm guessing Kuiper isn't nearly as close to being ready
The second stage of New Glenn just reached orbit, fate of the first stage (which attempted a re-entry burn and soft landing) is unknown.
I'm curious about the thrust/weight ratio of this rocket. It seemed to really take its time clearing the tower and getting to 10,000 feet. Is it possible they're running the engines at reduced thrust for this first launch?
> Might be, but those shock diamonds are not a great sign for their nozzles despite being beautiful
Shock diamonds do not determine nozzle health/stability. The diamonds themselves are 100% part of nominal operation.
What you're looking for is flow separation from the nozzle because it's under expanded leading possible instability. Scott Manly did a great bit on it[0].
> I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.
New-Glenn has a low thrust to weight ratio vs other rockets and lower engine chamber pressure than some other engines to put less stress on the rocket and engines for greater reusability.
But the obvious cost here is less mass to orbit. But I suspect it's a given that they'll tweak up the margins once they have more flights under their belt.
That is a trajectory optimized for payload mass, with a set amount of first stage thrust. It is quite typical, historically. It just looks extra slow since the New Glenn rocket is quite enormous relative to historic rockets.
No, that's not true. Back of the envelope estimates for New Glenn's launch tonight give a thrust to weight ratio of 1.2.
For the Space Shuttle, t/w at launch was 1.5, the same is true for Falcon and Starship. Delta Heavy was around 1.3. Saturn V was 1.2. None of this has anything to do with optimizing the trajectory.
I'm always so jealous of the celebrations in these streams. Pressing deploy to update a service in production seems so much more mundane in comparison, heh. Maybe we should be better at celebrating wins in tech?
We did celebrate like this when software releases were something that happened every couple of years and with loads of press coverage, hype leading up to the release, and usually in a physical media with packaging and fancy art accompanying it
Ah, before my time. But I can certainly imagine the excitedness, not to say the nervousness, when sending the final master of some software to be burned into thousands of CD-roms. No easy way to recover if there's a bug there! I've always been impressed with how I never came across any bugs when playing nintendo/cartridge games, couldn't just ship something buggy and rely on some online update back then.
There are too much and overacted already, on (other than this) barely interesting things.
This is not Hollywood or the Broadway (which actually also suffers from the mandatory celebratory pressure, justified or not [1]).
Well completed good work is a reward in itself (see bulk of old NASA reels). For releasing the desire of self celebratory acts we have LinkedIn, Youtube and other social media just for this kind of overinflated complacency.
I think there needs to be some type of open source space exploration foundation. It's nice billionaires have all these toy space rocket companies, but I think it would feel even more fun if a not for profit, where millions of people can participate somehow were involved.
Someone on HN care to explain where BO are on their journey, relative standing to SpaceX. If
SpaceX ceases to exist, how well served will we be by BO as an alternative?
They’re roughly 25 years old, they now have the largest operational orbital rocket ever built even if it’s likely SpaceX soon blows them out of the water with Starship and Super Heavy. They’ve taken a long time to get to orbit and haven’t quite cracked partial reusability but they’re now an active player and reaching orbit on their first try is impressive. The iterative error tolerant development philosophy of SpaceX has resulted in far faster innovation and Blue Origin has benefited from SpaceX being a major forcing function to move the US Space program primarily to private launch/space craft providers and proving orbital booster reuse was possible in the first place. Finally Blue Origin doesn’t have an operational orbital crew capsule or cargo spacecraft. Losing SpaceX would mean the US would at least temporarily lose its crew launch capability entirely and some of its ISS resupply capabilities, launch cadence would fall off a cliff, and overall industry innovation would suffer.
The rocket BO sent up today is bigger than SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy!? If I understood correctly, that's really impressive. It would also explain why it appeared slow to rise at the start of the launch.
Their rocket is closest to capabilities to a falcon-heavy [1], but to get to the space-x level, they need to demonstrate reusability, turn around times, and the ability to produce second stages once every 2&3 days, whilst maintaining an operational lunch tempo of 1 lunch every 2 days [2]
People can attempt to explain it, but it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
SpaceX have a much more agile approach, and Blue Origin are following a more traditional waterfall style approach, to put it in software engineering project terms. While it may seem obvious that one is better than the other, I think it’s hard to say conclusively.
The different approaches mean that while SpaceX might have more milestones under their belt, Blue Origin could leapfrog them on some aspects. The fact this first launch went as well as it did is an amazing feat, SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.
What we can say however is that the endgame of Starship will be far more capable than the endgame of New Glenn. If or when either reaches that point remains to be seen.
SpaceX is way ahead of everyone. Falcon 9 has launched 425 times (127 in 2024 alone), and landed the first stage successfully in 398 of 410 attempts (most of their flights are with reused boosters). New Glenn has higher lift capacity than Falcon 9, but much lower than SpaceX's Starship, which has reached orbital velocity (didn't yet try for actual orbit) and whose Super Heavy booster has had a partially successful landing.
If SpaceX suddenly vanished, along with all its people and knowledge, Blue Origin could catch up to SpaceX's current capabilities, but it would take many years. If SpaceX shut down but Blue Origin and RocketLab hired all their people, things would progress much faster.
Outsiders like myself were too blown away by the 'chopsticks' catch to notice imperfections. What were they? (I noticed there was fire at the bottom of the booster for some time after the catch)
They seem to be focused on different things at the moment. SpaceX has the Falcon and Falcon Heavy for Earth orbit payloads. New Glenn is meant for a similar commercial set of missions. Starship is meant for interplanetary missions and is very different. It has twice the thrust as New Glenn, can carry more than 2x the payload to LEO, and is fully reusable. New Glenn has only a reusable first stage. New Glenn is trying to land on boats, while SpaceX achieved this in 2016. In terms of payload to LEO and mission profile, the New Glenn is more like the Falcon Heavy, which had its maiden flight in 2018. So it’s probably fair to say that Blue Origin is 5-10 years behind SpaceX.
12 years passed between SpaceX's first orbital flight (2008) and their first orbital flight with humans aboard (2020). SpaceX will probably reach Mars orbit before 2030.
Blue Origin is likely at least a decade behind, though they haven't taken the same path and have the benefit of not being first.
Curious to see how this moves forward. Tesla (arguably) launched the first mass-appeal electric vehicles, but there are highly competitive alternatives now, despite the massive headstart Tesla had. Hopefully this will be true for rockets too.
Over Falcon Heavy? very likely. Over Starship? Probably not.
Capability advantage?
Over Falcon Heavy and Starship? As far as I know, Starship will not have an expendable fairing, nor is a larger payload door a priority and the internal reinforcement cuts into the payload shape, so if you want to launch voluminous payloads, the 7 meter diameter fairing of New Glenn fills that niche.
The live stream needed a lot of work. The first stage may have exploded but it was unclear because the video if it stopped before it even got close. The second stage apparently reached orbit, but it was a very low orbit (100 miles). Not bad for a first attempt, but still a ways to go.
Blue Origin is a rocket company, not a live streaming company. The low orbit is the target orbit, and they will attempt to boost it to medium earth orbit later in the flight.
By any standard getting to orbit on the maiden launch of a new vehicle is an incredible achievement. You have to give them a pass on the live stream.
I am not sure if they hit their target orbit, since they didn’t declare that beforehand (at least on the stream). When they announced reaching orbit on the stream, they were only at 100 miles, below where Sputnik 1 was, and technically very low earth orbit. Note that the second stage actually dropped in altitude from its peak (above 120 miles). I saw your other comment saying this is typical. I do agree 100 miles is suspiciously exact. It would be interesting to see if they had declared their goals clearly somewhere.
It took SpaceX about 1-2 years to nail landings on the drone ships, and about 3-4 to nail video feeds of that happening. There’s something kinda funny about that.
Nothing funny about it. How would you get the signal out? Plasma from re-entry is a near-perfect radio shield. We only get nice crisp images from starship now because of Starlink.
Remember all the old Apollo and even Shuttle missions where the Mission Control would be calling out "____, do you read me" during a landing attempt? This is why.
Per the linked page, the final orbit is 19,300 x 2,400 km (i.e. a medium orbit) and that should take at least a couple hours to reach, because of that raised periapsis. They haven't yet achieved that, despite the livestream ending. Low orbit is not this flight's goal.
We're really spoiled by SpaceX, RocketLab and other live streams. In comparison this was pretty unspectacular - they did have camera(s?) on the booster and on the second stage, but only showed them for a few seconds during the stream, and the picture was breaking up constantly. The stream itself, video and timeline animation, was multiple seconds delayed behind the audio callouts in the background. The animated position of the first stage was clearly wrong, it was already showing almost on the ground when the re-entry burn was called out. Lots of things to work on for future launches, if they want these streams to be as watchable as people are used to.
Although that's all details, not to detract from the feat of reaching orbit on their first attempt. That's not something that happened very often and worth significant praise.
Definitely spoiled by SpaceX's polish. I'm not sure how much of the displayed telemetry was right, as the altitude of Stage 2 was shown as decreasing down and down until suddenly they said it was in orbit. The imperial units don't help understanding either.
It's normal for altitude to decrease while the second stage builds up to orbital velocity; the Shuttle did the same thing.
Like all rockets, the second stage has a thrust/weight ratio substantially lower than 1 on ignition, and the motor points far away from the gravity vector, so there's a bit of a race between the vehicle trying to fall down, and the rocket motor trying to accelerate it to orbital velocity. The fact that the final orbit was 100 miles exactly suggests this all went according to plan.
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Imperial units helped me
I also was discussing this with my colleague. This looks more like an ULA stream than a SpaceX stream. Bad telemetry, imperial instead of metric units, almost no cameras and the cameras that were shown were potato quality, planned holds, almost no reactions from the presenters or any audience.
Good to have some competition in this space though. That is what truly matters. The livestream is just marketing and a bit of fun/showing off.
I imagine once Amazon Kuiper gets up and running things will improve. People forget SpaceX has the massive advantage of having multiple starlink connections on their flights, so internet access direct to the ship has become incredibly easy for them.
Meanwhile everyone else relies on a very well tuned ground connection that requires precision movements to keep the connection stable, and is impacted by cloud and atmosphere.
I thought it was pretty impressive for a first attempt .
SpaceX and RocketLab had loads of practice, their early streams were not particularly impressive .
Also these days SpaceX has the benefit of Starlink so their capability is far ahead , they however ruin it all by doing through Twitter/X
First attempt maybe, but they have streamed New Shepard launches many times before, so the company is not exactly a newbie at this overall. Of course, an orbital launch provides a very different level of challenges compared to a vertical hop to 100km.
I'm guessing the camera feeds weren't amazing because they don't have a starlink antenna on the rocket :P I'm guessing Kuiper isn't nearly as close to being ready
The second stage of New Glenn just reached orbit, fate of the first stage (which attempted a re-entry burn and soft landing) is unknown.
I'm curious about the thrust/weight ratio of this rocket. It seemed to really take its time clearing the tower and getting to 10,000 feet. Is it possible they're running the engines at reduced thrust for this first launch?
Looks like they lost the booster
It will turn up.
Might be, but those shock diamonds are not a great sign for their nozzles despite being beautiful
> Might be, but those shock diamonds are not a great sign for their nozzles despite being beautiful
Shock diamonds do not determine nozzle health/stability. The diamonds themselves are 100% part of nominal operation.
What you're looking for is flow separation from the nozzle because it's under expanded leading possible instability. Scott Manly did a great bit on it[0].
[0] https://youtu.be/l5l3CHWoHSI?t=261
Shock diamonds are normal for first stages. Unless you're smarter than BO/SpaceX/ULA engineers and want to tell us more, I call BS on your post.
Could you elaborate on that? Why would the exhaust reflecting off the shock wave cause damage to the nozzle?
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The speed of that take off, or lack of, was wild. I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.
The methane blue looked spectacular.
> I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.
New-Glenn has a low thrust to weight ratio vs other rockets and lower engine chamber pressure than some other engines to put less stress on the rocket and engines for greater reusability.
But the obvious cost here is less mass to orbit. But I suspect it's a given that they'll tweak up the margins once they have more flights under their belt.
That is a trajectory optimized for payload mass, with a set amount of first stage thrust. It is quite typical, historically. It just looks extra slow since the New Glenn rocket is quite enormous relative to historic rockets.
An impressive first flight by any measure!
No, that's not true. Back of the envelope estimates for New Glenn's launch tonight give a thrust to weight ratio of 1.2.
For the Space Shuttle, t/w at launch was 1.5, the same is true for Falcon and Starship. Delta Heavy was around 1.3. Saturn V was 1.2. None of this has anything to do with optimizing the trajectory.
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If my KSP experience tells me something it needs more boosters
Yes, those seven blue spikes were pretty amazing.
Doesn't show the diamonds, but sure shows that blue glow.
https://xcancel.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/187979379253615860...
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Starships first flight felt similarly slow, watched in person.
Here's a mirror of the video (the thing in OP appears to have been livestream-only?)
https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859 ("New Glenn Mission NG-1 Webcast")
(linked at t-20s)
Can someone remix the audio to Swedish black metal or something better?
I'm always so jealous of the celebrations in these streams. Pressing deploy to update a service in production seems so much more mundane in comparison, heh. Maybe we should be better at celebrating wins in tech?
We did celebrate like this when software releases were something that happened every couple of years and with loads of press coverage, hype leading up to the release, and usually in a physical media with packaging and fancy art accompanying it
Ah, before my time. But I can certainly imagine the excitedness, not to say the nervousness, when sending the final master of some software to be burned into thousands of CD-roms. No easy way to recover if there's a bug there! I've always been impressed with how I never came across any bugs when playing nintendo/cartridge games, couldn't just ship something buggy and rely on some online update back then.
There are too much and overacted already, on (other than this) barely interesting things.
This is not Hollywood or the Broadway (which actually also suffers from the mandatory celebratory pressure, justified or not [1]).
Well completed good work is a reward in itself (see bulk of old NASA reels). For releasing the desire of self celebratory acts we have LinkedIn, Youtube and other social media just for this kind of overinflated complacency.
[1] https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/01/09/ovation-inflati...
I wonder how you'd felt working almost a decade and never saw a fruit of your work until that one moment where you can feel the rumble in your guts.
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I think there needs to be some type of open source space exploration foundation. It's nice billionaires have all these toy space rocket companies, but I think it would feel even more fun if a not for profit, where millions of people can participate somehow were involved.
Space shouldn't be owned by 2 people.
There is a Danish amateur space program, working towards sending a human on a suborbital flight beyond the Karman line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Suborbitals
Baby steps I know, but still
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Great launch guys!
Primary objective: Orbit [y]
Sub-objectives:
1. [y] Liftoff
2. [y] Max-Q
3. [y] Main engine cut-off
4. [y] Stage separation
5. [y] Stage 2 ignition
6. [y] Space (100km)
7. [y] Fairing separation
8. [y] Booster re-entry burn
9. [X] Booster landing at sea
10. [y] Secondary engine cut-off
11. [X] HN unicode support for check mark
I would either use [y]/[n] or [x]/[ ], the current [y]/[X] is a bit confusing.
Probably can use x vs empty to make the checkboxes less confusing.
next time! :)
Someone on HN care to explain where BO are on their journey, relative standing to SpaceX. If SpaceX ceases to exist, how well served will we be by BO as an alternative?
They’re roughly 25 years old, they now have the largest operational orbital rocket ever built even if it’s likely SpaceX soon blows them out of the water with Starship and Super Heavy. They’ve taken a long time to get to orbit and haven’t quite cracked partial reusability but they’re now an active player and reaching orbit on their first try is impressive. The iterative error tolerant development philosophy of SpaceX has resulted in far faster innovation and Blue Origin has benefited from SpaceX being a major forcing function to move the US Space program primarily to private launch/space craft providers and proving orbital booster reuse was possible in the first place. Finally Blue Origin doesn’t have an operational orbital crew capsule or cargo spacecraft. Losing SpaceX would mean the US would at least temporarily lose its crew launch capability entirely and some of its ISS resupply capabilities, launch cadence would fall off a cliff, and overall industry innovation would suffer.
Falcon Heavy is operational, and bigger than New Glenn
Falcon Heavy: 65t to LEO
New Glenn: 45t to LEO
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The rocket BO sent up today is bigger than SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy!? If I understood correctly, that's really impressive. It would also explain why it appeared slow to rise at the start of the launch.
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Their rocket is closest to capabilities to a falcon-heavy [1], but to get to the space-x level, they need to demonstrate reusability, turn around times, and the ability to produce second stages once every 2&3 days, whilst maintaining an operational lunch tempo of 1 lunch every 2 days [2]
1: https://youtu.be/xKt0hn4R_uU?si=kE2bTotS1r08RYBm
2: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/spacex-is-superb-at-re...
Intermittent fasting?
People can attempt to explain it, but it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
SpaceX have a much more agile approach, and Blue Origin are following a more traditional waterfall style approach, to put it in software engineering project terms. While it may seem obvious that one is better than the other, I think it’s hard to say conclusively.
The different approaches mean that while SpaceX might have more milestones under their belt, Blue Origin could leapfrog them on some aspects. The fact this first launch went as well as it did is an amazing feat, SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.
What we can say however is that the endgame of Starship will be far more capable than the endgame of New Glenn. If or when either reaches that point remains to be seen.
> SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.
That is incorrect. Both F9 and FH have successfully launched on the first try, with full primary mission success.
F1 (20 years ago) had 3 failed flights and succeeded on the 4th flight.
Starship hasn't had an operational flight yet.
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SpaceX is way ahead of everyone. Falcon 9 has launched 425 times (127 in 2024 alone), and landed the first stage successfully in 398 of 410 attempts (most of their flights are with reused boosters). New Glenn has higher lift capacity than Falcon 9, but much lower than SpaceX's Starship, which has reached orbital velocity (didn't yet try for actual orbit) and whose Super Heavy booster has had a partially successful landing.
If SpaceX suddenly vanished, along with all its people and knowledge, Blue Origin could catch up to SpaceX's current capabilities, but it would take many years. If SpaceX shut down but Blue Origin and RocketLab hired all their people, things would progress much faster.
> partially successful landing
Outsiders like myself were too blown away by the 'chopsticks' catch to notice imperfections. What were they? (I noticed there was fire at the bottom of the booster for some time after the catch)
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They seem to be focused on different things at the moment. SpaceX has the Falcon and Falcon Heavy for Earth orbit payloads. New Glenn is meant for a similar commercial set of missions. Starship is meant for interplanetary missions and is very different. It has twice the thrust as New Glenn, can carry more than 2x the payload to LEO, and is fully reusable. New Glenn has only a reusable first stage. New Glenn is trying to land on boats, while SpaceX achieved this in 2016. In terms of payload to LEO and mission profile, the New Glenn is more like the Falcon Heavy, which had its maiden flight in 2018. So it’s probably fair to say that Blue Origin is 5-10 years behind SpaceX.
12 years passed between SpaceX's first orbital flight (2008) and their first orbital flight with humans aboard (2020). SpaceX will probably reach Mars orbit before 2030.
Blue Origin is likely at least a decade behind, though they haven't taken the same path and have the benefit of not being first.
Curious to see how this moves forward. Tesla (arguably) launched the first mass-appeal electric vehicles, but there are highly competitive alternatives now, despite the massive headstart Tesla had. Hopefully this will be true for rockets too.
I’d also be interested to understand what Blue Origin’s proposition is?
Does it have a capability advantage over SpaceX? A cost advantage?
A cost advantage?
Over Falcon Heavy? very likely. Over Starship? Probably not.
Capability advantage?
Over Falcon Heavy and Starship? As far as I know, Starship will not have an expendable fairing, nor is a larger payload door a priority and the internal reinforcement cuts into the payload shape, so if you want to launch voluminous payloads, the 7 meter diameter fairing of New Glenn fills that niche.
Seems to be some debris falling from the ship at 1h 58m 16s of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXysNxbGdCg&t=1h58m16s
Hopefully nothing critical. EDIT: it was right before separation, so perhaps related to that.
That's probably ice. It's always ice.
The live stream needed a lot of work. The first stage may have exploded but it was unclear because the video if it stopped before it even got close. The second stage apparently reached orbit, but it was a very low orbit (100 miles). Not bad for a first attempt, but still a ways to go.
Blue Origin is a rocket company, not a live streaming company. The low orbit is the target orbit, and they will attempt to boost it to medium earth orbit later in the flight.
By any standard getting to orbit on the maiden launch of a new vehicle is an incredible achievement. You have to give them a pass on the live stream.
I am not sure if they hit their target orbit, since they didn’t declare that beforehand (at least on the stream). When they announced reaching orbit on the stream, they were only at 100 miles, below where Sputnik 1 was, and technically very low earth orbit. Note that the second stage actually dropped in altitude from its peak (above 120 miles). I saw your other comment saying this is typical. I do agree 100 miles is suspiciously exact. It would be interesting to see if they had declared their goals clearly somewhere.
It took SpaceX about 1-2 years to nail landings on the drone ships, and about 3-4 to nail video feeds of that happening. There’s something kinda funny about that.
Nothing funny about it. How would you get the signal out? Plasma from re-entry is a near-perfect radio shield. We only get nice crisp images from starship now because of Starlink.
Remember all the old Apollo and even Shuttle missions where the Mission Control would be calling out "____, do you read me" during a landing attempt? This is why.
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And now they use Starlink for their video feeds.
Per the linked page, the final orbit is 19,300 x 2,400 km (i.e. a medium orbit) and that should take at least a couple hours to reach, because of that raised periapsis. They haven't yet achieved that, despite the livestream ending. Low orbit is not this flight's goal.
Video player not working for me.
The broadcast is over. perihelions linked a YouTube version that lets you replay: https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859
Related discussion on this mission (148 points, 3 days ago, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42680510
Edit: Which as you point out was delayed, as it continues to be.
That was the first attempt, which was scrubbed. This is the second attempt (which has just been delayed from T-11 minutes to T-34 minutes).
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