Comment by olex
3 months ago
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.
IIRC when I played KSP it was necessary to point slightly down if you wanted to reach orbit in a continuous burn, rather than waiting to burn more at perigee. Is that true in general?
(was playing with a mod that models ullage, so relighting was quite finicky)
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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