Comment by nyokodo
2 days ago
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
True FH has better LEO performance but NG has better GEO/GTO performance (the main difference coming from the more powerful LH2 upper stage). The difference in fuel in the NG will probably mean a higher cost for NG (amongst a host of other reasons), but the question is by how much. FH also has to fully discard all the Stage 0/1 boosters to achieve 65t LEO. SpaceX on the other hand get much better economies of scale as they launch far more frequently.
Okay, but you forgot to mention these caveats:
- 65t is the fully expendable configuration
- 57t is the core-expendable, side-booster only reuse configuration
- 28t is the all booster reuse configuration
- the payload adapter is the same as falcon 9 and therefore can only carry 18 tons
- there are no plans to build payload adapters to launch payloads heavier than 18 tons
And on the Blue Origin side:
- Blue Origin intends to reuse the booster on every flight
- Future payloads need the full 45 ton payload capacity
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.
No, it's much smaller (though still a huge rocket). It appears to rise slowly because it accelerates more slowly than Starship (~1.2g vs ~1.5g when clearing the launch tower).
People are saying things about Starship not yet being an orbital rocket because of technicalities. The reality is we have two huge rockets, made by American companies, that can now reach orbit, and that's pretty amazing.
Starship is an orbital rocket, and will achieve actual orbit in few months, but I don’t think they are ready for a customer anytime soon, particularly an external one.
That is entirely by choice, they want to focus their attention on iteration now, which is sensible as falcon 9 and heavy are more than enough to compete today.
For a buyer in next two years it is either falcon heavy or new glen if they want heavy lift today.
No, starship/superheavy is bigger. But it hasn’t technically reached orbit yet.
Also, crucially, this was an operational test by BO whereas Starship and Super Heavy are still in developmental testing. New Glenn will now start launching commercial payloads assuming the outcome doesn’t reveal any problems with the overall launch.
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Thanks for clarifying.
Bigger than Falcon 9, smaller than Falcon Heavy. Smaller than Starship/Super Heavy.
I'm comparing here on payload capacity to LEO