Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.
NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.
ULA is pretty remarkable for it's run of new rockets not blowing up. Looking at ESA, JAXA, RosCosmos, ISRO, etc too is how I'm setting the par. A history like the Ariane 5 is pretty typical where flights 1 and 14 failed.
Exactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency.
Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".
Norm is something like 3 rescheduling within a week from launch, 3 auto-aborts or equipment NoGo, 2 wayward boats, and 0.15-0.3 kaboom per launch. The fact that SpaceX haven't been letting wayward boats/planes for a while is remarkable by itself.
The new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.
Sounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.
> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?
Not all of the rockets blow up on the pad or dance around near the launch pad [0], but lots certainly do not make it to orbit in the first try. Space is pretty hard.
I grew up on the space coast, have watched many new expensive fireworks. I expect one of the next ones to either go boom, or the less exciting hear the 2nd stage separation failed.
Why are you disagreeing like this? It would be like asking for a source if a software developer said “most software launches encounter some issues on their initial release”.
I wish the cameras used film like NASA did for Saturn V. The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film. And this is made worse with the night launches that Blue Origin are doing.
In Saturn V launches you could see see detail in the bright flame structures along with background detail.
Maybe some of the upcoming digital cameras chips will have higher dynamic range eventually. I know Nikon has a paper talking about stacked sensors that are trading off high frame rate for high dynamic range: https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2
> The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film.
Film negatives have a dynamic range of between 12 to 15 stops, but a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print (perhaps less if digitally scanned).
The Arri ALEXA Mini LF has 14.5 stops of dynamic range, and the ALEXA 35 has 17 (Table 2):
I believe it's possible to get higher than that, this work by kodak for examples shows 20!! stops on film[1]. I seem to remember reading somewhere that for example Kodak TMax 100 can be pushed up to 18 stops, maybe higher. The limitation is not usually the film itself but the development process' used I think?
Its also crucial to note at what SNR they use for their cutoff when stating their dynamic range in stops, in addition to their tone curve.
I'm only a hobbyist though, perhaps someone else can enlighten me further.
Digital is mostly limited by bits, since a 14 bit image with a linear tone curve will have at most 14 stops of info right? So we won't expect to see values pushing higher until camera manufacturers leave behind 14 bit as a standard and go higher, as in the arri cameras. They use a 16 bit sensor, and squeeze the last stop out by using a more gradual tone curve in their shadows. This means technically the shadow stops contain less information than the highlight stops, thus meaning not all stops are equal I believe (quite confusing).
[1]: "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data" in the February/March 2002 issue of the SMPTE Journal (Volume 111, No. 2, pp. 85-96).
> a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print
I’m not sure if by "optical print"[0] you mean a film developing process (like C41), but the info is not lost and stays on the film. The developer job is to fine tune the parameters to print the infos you’re seeking, and that include adjusting white and black points thresholds (range). You can also do several print if you want to extract more infos, and print it so large you see the grain shapes! If there’s is something lost it’s when the picture is taken, after that it’s up to you to exploit it the way you need.
It’s very similar to a numeric device capturing RAWs and the developer finishing the picture on a software like Camera Raw, or what some modern phone does automatically for you.
0 not English native, perhaps this is a synonym of developement?
those engineering cameras were not your regular run-of-the mill cameras neither.
NASA published a 45 min documentary of the 10-15 engineering cameras of an STS launch., with comments on the engineering aspets of the launch procedure.
Very beautiful, relaxing, has an almost meditative quality. Highly recommend it.
It could be an exposure issue. Film has a response curve with a big “shoulder” in the highest values. It makes it really hard to blow out highlights.
Digital sensors have a linear response to light, so if the highlights are a bit over a threshold, they are gone.
If you’re willing to tolerate more noise and shoot RAW, you could underexpose, perhaps by as much as 4 stops, and apply a strong curve in post. It would pretty much guarantee no blown out highlights.
Most people find luminance noise aesthetically pleasing up to a point and digital is already much cleaner than film ever was, so it’s a worthy trade off, if you ask me. But “Expose To The Left/Right” is a heated topic among photographers.
Spitballing, but a HDR digital camera could be designed with a beamsplitter similar to that of the 3CCD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-CCD_camera ) designs that projects to an assembly with only a sensor behind it, another to an assembly that has a 4 stop neutral density and sensor, and another to an assembly that has an 8 stop neutral density and and sensor.
This way it wouldn't suffer from any parallax issues and sensor images should then also line up to allow it to be reconstructed from the multiple sources.
That said... HDR images can be "bland" with it being washed out. It would probably take a bit more post processing work to get the image both high dynamic range and providing the dynamism of what those old Saturn V launches showed.
What am I missing? I can sit in my den and watch SpaceX and now Blue Origin launches, in real time see the telemetry data, see stage separation, reentry burns, etc, etc. As for Saturn V, to quote the Byrds "I was so much older then..." but I don't recall any of that. Doesn't film require taking the exposed product to a lab for after the fact processing? While the Blue Origin images this morning were not nearly as good as the SpaceX, to me the images are absolutely incredible. I am a serious amateur photographer and I do still shoot film on occasion but I see little dynamic range differences now in 2025.
This is footage hours after the event. It's no doubt been stomped on for streaming and other reasons. I wouldn't give up on something better being out there for a little while yet.
Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.
People in the internet don't enjoy rocket launch with roaring sounds unless there is laugh track over it that validates that the launch is awesome and simulates social connection.
Those are the real emotions of the people at Blue Origin watching the launch. They've been working toward this moment for 24 years. Should they censor themselves because their "excessive" emotions offend you? Or maybe they should hire newscasters to do an disinterested presentation up to your standards, instead of employees who actually worked on it?
Just a guess, but aerospace generally works with feet for altitude and knots/mph for airspeed, internationally. I’m doing a PPL in Europe and we, like everybody, use feet and knots/mph. I believe this is because the US have been on the forefront of aerospace regulation (a set of rules called the chicago convention is the basis of all air law) and aircraft manufacturing.
Who cares what units they use? Anyone who is interested in space will have some knowledge of both kinds of units, and can do conversions if they need to.
Think about it. The fruit of their hard work over all those years while enduring people pointing fingers and memes at them... and now their powerful rocket roars, rumbles and lifts... Ofcourse it is emotional. And looks like me personally enjoy it. Perhaps that is taken from spacex stream where you see people cheering on achieving significant milestones... just gives you some of it.
Perhaps that audio could have been only when showing people cheering or what, but anyways, I'm surprised BO even set up that much of a show for external viewers.
SpaceX obviously has spoiled us. Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?
As a non-USian looking in, it seemed fairly average and non-horrible to me? I find it interesting to find several comments like this one here so prominently compared to the discussion thread about SpaceX launches.
This is such a bizarre comment for me. If you strip that "momentous occasion for humanity" from its human component, then how is it a worthwhile historical document?
Why do people feel the need to add qualifiers like "I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but...". Are you so attached to some company that it was hard for you to congratulate people on an accomplishment? It seems strange.
There's such a thing as sports watching, when you're associating yourself with a team and are glad and sad together with them. I guess something like this could happen elsewhere...
It's a way to add emphasis on "They did a good job".
We could translate it as
"I'm somewhat biased against BlueOrigin, but BlueOrigin managed to overcome my personal bias with how impressive their launch was".
It's similar to saying "I normally don't like country music, but that was a good song". In that sentence the intended message isn't "I don't like country music", instead it's "I liked that song"
It was just a reflex and a sports team rivalry is a good analogy. In other forums on the inet there's definitely a team spacex vs team blueorigin feeling. Think about American college football, imagine someone at UT congratulating A&M for scoring a touchdown. That would require finesse in some crowds :)
Apropos of nothing, but I appreciate the flaunting of branding best practices, and aerospace superstition, in the naming of Blue Origin (BO) and New Glenn (NG).
BO is an acronym for body odor, something you don't typically want to associate with any brand.
NG is an acronym for No/Not Good used in various engineering contexts to refer to things that fail to meet requirements. A superstitious aerospace engineer might not want to essentially name something "failure" though in practice I think most aerospace engineers would love to call their rocket Explodey-9000.
Yes thank you billionaires, if you hadn't vacuumed the wealth of a nation this could have been a government agency success. Why should we all benefit when one man can?
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Musk and Bezos have generated insane amounts of wealth for the American economy. They're not hoarding dollar bills in some vault like Scrooge McDuck lol.
The sums spent on this are trivial to governments. California HSR costs much more than bringing a rocket to life. The annual cost of dialysis to the American government is many times what SpaceX or Blue Origin costs.
Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.
There are billionaires all over the world who haven’t built successful space companies. The key ingredient is the government funding which has made the US space industry possible, such as building the launch pads, subsidizing hundreds of companies which build specialized parts, creating the GPS network required to track launches, etc.
Can you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better.
I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.
I might say "More details & discussion here", vs. "Dupe of". For those who don't want to burn time watching video, the Ars story is an excellent summary.
Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink.
For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone.
So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.
New Glenn has a payload size that is comparable to that of starship.
Falcon Heavy can launch much heavier stuff than 9, but it uses the same fairing. If you want to launch things that can't fit into Falcon 9s fairing, then your only options are SLS, New Glenn and in a few years Starship.
Especially Space Station Parts and Spy satellites can be quite huge. So there is an established and growing market for larger payloads
The extended Falcon fairing was spotted recently on one of the Falcon launches at the Cape. They are designing that for DoD payloads I think but it's advertised as available for payloads. It's not any wider but it is 18.7 m tall instead of 13.2m. Source: [Falcon User Guide](https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf)
There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches (as I said in my comment) in the almost 6 years since the first flight (February 2018), roughly 2 per year. There were almost 150 Falcon 9 launches in 2024 alone.
What else would you call this than "not a lot of demand"?
Didn't BO have a change in leadership in 2023 precisely because they were slow compared to SpaceX?
Edit: New Glenn was announced in 2016, compared to Starship's 2019, and they're approaching the finish line at around the same time. And I would say Starship was a far more ambitious project.
Does anyone have a good sense for the actual purpose of reusing rockets?
Call me skeptical of the actual cost savings. You now need systems in place to catch them, the rockets need more components and fuel and such to control descent, the rocket then need to be refurbished back to launch-ready after going through hellacious stress. It seems like it’d be cheaper, lighter, and simpler on the whole to just make a new one. But I would love to learn more.
For the booster I think it’s fairly well established that it’s cheaper to reuse it. It’s not that hard on a booster to come down again, and it doesn’t seem like it’s that much work for SpaceX to refurbish their boosters.
For the upper stage it still remains to be seen. Having the upper stage return from orbit is a lot harder, as we’re seeing with the Starship. You need a lot of thermal protection. Maybe flaps depending on the design.
Jeff Bezos mentioned in a recent interview that for the upper stage they’re working on a reusable and a cost reduced version of the upper stage in parallell. They can’t determine yet which will end up being cheaper. That tells you something about how hard it is to do second stage reuse.
Rocket Lab has shown with the Neutron rocket what’s possible if you’re really innovative with optimising for cost on the second stage. Their second stage will probably be cheaper than the satellites they send to orbit
Rocket engines are very complex machinery that's difficult and expensive to make. Reusing the rocket allows you to reuse the engine.
SpaceX has also managed to show that reused hardware can be more reliable than brand new hardware. You run the hardware through a number of tests before launch, but there is no better test than an actual launch. Satellites still cost a lot more than rockets, so reliability is a big deal
I do wonder if there's a way to reuse engines without reusing whole rockets, that could wind up cheaper. Pop the engine out of the rocket with some small fuel tanks, spin round and do a retro burn, then ... somehow land. I have not worked out all the details.
A NASA planetary probe or a NRO spysat cost more than an order of magnitude more than launch but your run of the mill comm sat is only a bit more expensive than a SpaceX launch.
This was the argument a decade ago when SpaceX was the only one seriously talking about reuse. Given SpaceX is now responsible for the vast majoriy of mass to orbit it is hard to argue with the results, and now everyone serious is investing in reuse.
this is survivorship bias. SpaceX made a choice, and it succeeded; but SpaceX also made a million other design choices. Reusability could well be sub-optimal.
It's true that in principle, you need a stronger rocket (the whole rocket, not just the motor) and a bunch of extra infrastructure to be able to reuse.
However, without being able to recover a rocket, it's actually quite difficult to figure out just how much corners you can cut, while remaining reliable. Since blowing up revenue payload is an awful way to optimize this, I think this means that disposal rockets will be inefficient in a different way - there will be excess safety margin in the wrong areas.
Reliable re-use also changes the operating model of the company. Since each rocket in stock represents many customers over time, you don't need to be nearly as stressed about exactly matching your manufacturing pipeline to predicted demand. This likely also enables generally faster turn around time (as in from cheque signed to launch).
Finally, as it turns out, it's not unreasonable to expect a rocket to be reused like 20+ times. I think you're point would be reasonable if it turned out that reusing a rocket more than ~3-5 times was difficult. But like... it's REALLY hard to do disposal anything better than something that can be reused 20+ times.
Rocket engines are very expensive, and the whole rocket is fairly expensive in traditional construction methods. The cost of the rocket engines dominates the others.
I don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.
SpaceX have had much worse recent failures on launches of their new generation rocket.
Blue Origin have moved glacially slow by comparison, but they achieved their primary goal with this launch (get to orbit) and failed a secondary goal (land the booster).
If this were a SpaceX launch of a brand new rocket we'd be calling this a success and noting how they'd almost certainly achieve the secondary goal soon.
I think the question is how well and quickly Blue Origin can iterate to achieve first stage reuse. It took SpaceX quite a long time with a lot of lessons learned to reach the maturity they have now with Falcon 9 landings and re-launches.
I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
> ... they even fubared the thrust:weight ration a bit ...
Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.
I don't understand why you're drawing attention to their failure, it doesn't mean anything. Failure by anyone on the first time of anything is understandable.
But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.
This. I used to be very skeptical of anything Blue Origin. But after the CEO change they appear to have changed their attitude for the better.
They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.
Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.
NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.
?
Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?
ULA is pretty remarkable for it's run of new rockets not blowing up. Looking at ESA, JAXA, RosCosmos, ISRO, etc too is how I'm setting the par. A history like the Ariane 5 is pretty typical where flights 1 and 14 failed.
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Exactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency.
Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".
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Firefly, Rocket Lab and Astra spring to mind as having failed to reach orbit on their first attempt.
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Space shuttle had some harrowing early missions too, just didn’t explode.
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Norm is something like 3 rescheduling within a week from launch, 3 auto-aborts or equipment NoGo, 2 wayward boats, and 0.15-0.3 kaboom per launch. The fact that SpaceX haven't been letting wayward boats/planes for a while is remarkable by itself.
IMO, there are too few entrants to meaningfully draw any conclusions about "the norm" in this industry.
My perception is that SpaceX do in fact move fast, curious why you feel the need to put that in inverted commas?
The new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.
Only in the last couple years has blue had a similar headcount https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6851212...
It also helps that they fairly routinely land boosters (with New Shepard), which means they've likely worked out the 'landing' part.
Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.
Sounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.
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> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?
Firefly and Astra both come to mind.
Not all of the rockets blow up on the pad or dance around near the launch pad [0], but lots certainly do not make it to orbit in the first try. Space is pretty hard.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PS6z9P9nqs
I grew up on the space coast, have watched many new expensive fireworks. I expect one of the next ones to either go boom, or the less exciting hear the 2nd stage separation failed.
Why are you disagreeing like this? It would be like asking for a source if a software developer said “most software launches encounter some issues on their initial release”.
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Competition here is great
I wish the cameras used film like NASA did for Saturn V. The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film. And this is made worse with the night launches that Blue Origin are doing.
In Saturn V launches you could see see detail in the bright flame structures along with background detail.
Maybe some of the upcoming digital cameras chips will have higher dynamic range eventually. I know Nikon has a paper talking about stacked sensors that are trading off high frame rate for high dynamic range: https://youtu.be/jcc1CvqCTeU?si=DuIu4BK48iZTlyB2
> The digital cameras used on these launches basically show a white blob with no detail due to digital cameras having such low dynamic range compared to film.
Film negatives have a dynamic range of between 12 to 15 stops, but a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print (perhaps less if digitally scanned).
The Arri ALEXA Mini LF has 14.5 stops of dynamic range, and the ALEXA 35 has 17 (Table 2):
* https://www.arri.com/resource/blob/295460/e10ff8a5b3abf26c33...
I believe it's possible to get higher than that, this work by kodak for examples shows 20!! stops on film[1]. I seem to remember reading somewhere that for example Kodak TMax 100 can be pushed up to 18 stops, maybe higher. The limitation is not usually the film itself but the development process' used I think?
Its also crucial to note at what SNR they use for their cutoff when stating their dynamic range in stops, in addition to their tone curve.
I'm only a hobbyist though, perhaps someone else can enlighten me further.
Digital is mostly limited by bits, since a 14 bit image with a linear tone curve will have at most 14 stops of info right? So we won't expect to see values pushing higher until camera manufacturers leave behind 14 bit as a standard and go higher, as in the arri cameras. They use a 16 bit sensor, and squeeze the last stop out by using a more gradual tone curve in their shadows. This means technically the shadow stops contain less information than the highlight stops, thus meaning not all stops are equal I believe (quite confusing).
[1]: "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data" in the February/March 2002 issue of the SMPTE Journal (Volume 111, No. 2, pp. 85-96).
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> a whole bunch can be lost when transferred to optical print
I’m not sure if by "optical print"[0] you mean a film developing process (like C41), but the info is not lost and stays on the film. The developer job is to fine tune the parameters to print the infos you’re seeking, and that include adjusting white and black points thresholds (range). You can also do several print if you want to extract more infos, and print it so large you see the grain shapes! If there’s is something lost it’s when the picture is taken, after that it’s up to you to exploit it the way you need.
It’s very similar to a numeric device capturing RAWs and the developer finishing the picture on a software like Camera Raw, or what some modern phone does automatically for you.
0 not English native, perhaps this is a synonym of developement?
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those engineering cameras were not your regular run-of-the mill cameras neither.
NASA published a 45 min documentary of the 10-15 engineering cameras of an STS launch., with comments on the engineering aspets of the launch procedure.
Very beautiful, relaxing, has an almost meditative quality. Highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwqZ4qAUkE
Yeah and Shuttle cost a fortune per launch.
Views are distinctly secondary to an affordable launch program.
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It could be an exposure issue. Film has a response curve with a big “shoulder” in the highest values. It makes it really hard to blow out highlights.
Digital sensors have a linear response to light, so if the highlights are a bit over a threshold, they are gone.
If you’re willing to tolerate more noise and shoot RAW, you could underexpose, perhaps by as much as 4 stops, and apply a strong curve in post. It would pretty much guarantee no blown out highlights.
Most people find luminance noise aesthetically pleasing up to a point and digital is already much cleaner than film ever was, so it’s a worthy trade off, if you ask me. But “Expose To The Left/Right” is a heated topic among photographers.
Spitballing, but a HDR digital camera could be designed with a beamsplitter similar to that of the 3CCD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-CCD_camera ) designs that projects to an assembly with only a sensor behind it, another to an assembly that has a 4 stop neutral density and sensor, and another to an assembly that has an 8 stop neutral density and and sensor.
This way it wouldn't suffer from any parallax issues and sensor images should then also line up to allow it to be reconstructed from the multiple sources.
That said... HDR images can be "bland" with it being washed out. It would probably take a bit more post processing work to get the image both high dynamic range and providing the dynamism of what those old Saturn V launches showed.
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Even on film, if you expose for the rocket you don't get any flame detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#/media/File:Apollo_11...
What am I missing? I can sit in my den and watch SpaceX and now Blue Origin launches, in real time see the telemetry data, see stage separation, reentry burns, etc, etc. As for Saturn V, to quote the Byrds "I was so much older then..." but I don't recall any of that. Doesn't film require taking the exposed product to a lab for after the fact processing? While the Blue Origin images this morning were not nearly as good as the SpaceX, to me the images are absolutely incredible. I am a serious amateur photographer and I do still shoot film on occasion but I see little dynamic range differences now in 2025.
This is footage hours after the event. It's no doubt been stomped on for streaming and other reasons. I wouldn't give up on something better being out there for a little while yet.
> talking about stacked sensors
why not just stacked cameras with a range of filters? modern cameras cost and weight nothing (and that rocket puts 45 ton into LEO)
You should check out the Artemis I engineering footage.
I don't think it's a technical issue, they probably just don't care, we lost a bit of the magic and ideals we had back then
I think the last thing you could probably say about the teams involved in this is that they don’t care.
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Webcast of the launch @ T-20 seconds - https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859
Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.
People in the internet don't enjoy rocket launch with roaring sounds unless there is laugh track over it that validates that the launch is awesome and simulates social connection.
Those are the real emotions of the people at Blue Origin watching the launch. They've been working toward this moment for 24 years. Should they censor themselves because their "excessive" emotions offend you? Or maybe they should hire newscasters to do an disinterested presentation up to your standards, instead of employees who actually worked on it?
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You don't say. SpaceX used to have "technical" launch streams with just launch status updates, but even they no longer do that :-/
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Worst part of any SpaceX live stream.
Is there a footage without the hysterical screeching?
SpaceX started it. NASA launches before it didn't have any of it.
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>Everything nowadays comes packaged with excessive emote track.
You may have never done anything that warrants an emotional response.
Some of us have.
We enjoy seeing others express the joy we ourselves have felt at the end of a long, winding, process.
Yeah that excessive cheering and laughing really diminished it for me. Everything apparently needs an added hype team/track. What a world we live in.
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As has been noted by others, the emoting is a distraction. I could only watch this for a few seconds.
Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.
Just a guess, but aerospace generally works with feet for altitude and knots/mph for airspeed, internationally. I’m doing a PPL in Europe and we, like everybody, use feet and knots/mph. I believe this is because the US have been on the forefront of aerospace regulation (a set of rules called the chicago convention is the basis of all air law) and aircraft manufacturing.
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Glad to hear it wasn't just me being grumpy, I also found it immensely annoying and distracting.
Who cares what units they use? Anyone who is interested in space will have some knowledge of both kinds of units, and can do conversions if they need to.
Definitely should be football fields or school buses to make it comprehensible for the average viewer. Or “2 times the speed of a bullet”
> Another thing: why are they reporting speed in miles per hour, and altitude in feet? Surely anybody interested in space is familiar with SI units.
The audience that matters most to them is Americans, and they're happy to accommodate even those who are less interested in space.
Perhaps it's considered more patriotic to reject scientific units?
I don't understand why they reserve 6 digits for the speed in mph either. Are they expecting it to go beyond 99,999 mph?
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Have to agree with others that the horrible laughing ruins what should be a monumentous occasion for the company and humanity.
Think about it. The fruit of their hard work over all those years while enduring people pointing fingers and memes at them... and now their powerful rocket roars, rumbles and lifts... Ofcourse it is emotional. And looks like me personally enjoy it. Perhaps that is taken from spacex stream where you see people cheering on achieving significant milestones... just gives you some of it.
Perhaps that audio could have been only when showing people cheering or what, but anyways, I'm surprised BO even set up that much of a show for external viewers.
SpaceX obviously has spoiled us. Just think of what we could see before SX. Some visualization on how rocket fly?
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Don't make fun of the way someone laughs. It'll sour someone's spontaneous joy, to think that every time they laugh, someone finds it annoying.
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As a non-USian looking in, it seemed fairly average and non-horrible to me? I find it interesting to find several comments like this one here so prominently compared to the discussion thread about SpaceX launches.
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This is such a bizarre comment for me. If you strip that "momentous occasion for humanity" from its human component, then how is it a worthwhile historical document?
I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but hats off to the BlueOrigin team. Orbit on the first try is no small feat. Congrats!
Why do people feel the need to add qualifiers like "I’m a pretty hardcore SpaceX fan but...". Are you so attached to some company that it was hard for you to congratulate people on an accomplishment? It seems strange.
There's such a thing as sports watching, when you're associating yourself with a team and are glad and sad together with them. I guess something like this could happen elsewhere...
It's a way to add emphasis on "They did a good job". We could translate it as
"I'm somewhat biased against BlueOrigin, but BlueOrigin managed to overcome my personal bias with how impressive their launch was".
It's similar to saying "I normally don't like country music, but that was a good song". In that sentence the intended message isn't "I don't like country music", instead it's "I liked that song"
> Why do people feel the need to
Whenever it's used, it applies to the comment using it as well as the comment it's referring to.
It was just a reflex and a sports team rivalry is a good analogy. In other forums on the inet there's definitely a team spacex vs team blueorigin feeling. Think about American college football, imagine someone at UT congratulating A&M for scoring a touchdown. That would require finesse in some crowds :)
Let's flip it: Why do you care? Does it really bother you that much?
P.S. Wait a second, why do I care about why do you care? Oh god...
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If you don't praise Elon Musk he will say bad things about you on Twitter
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Because of the popularity of the ‘I’m no Elon fan’ preamble on HN.
Apropos of nothing, but I appreciate the flaunting of branding best practices, and aerospace superstition, in the naming of Blue Origin (BO) and New Glenn (NG).
What are branding best practices and aerospace superstition?
- Someone who was an aerospace engineer for 8 years and knows many people in the industry, including BO, SpaceX, Boeing
BO is an acronym for body odor, something you don't typically want to associate with any brand.
NG is an acronym for No/Not Good used in various engineering contexts to refer to things that fail to meet requirements. A superstitious aerospace engineer might not want to essentially name something "failure" though in practice I think most aerospace engineers would love to call their rocket Explodey-9000.
Flouting?
Err yes, exactly.
Or perhaps flaunting a disregard for. :)
Important naming rule: Never call your version 2 "New Foo"!
Because the name will remain long after it was new. The naming scheme also crashes at version 3.
The New Glenn name is from 2016.
New Glenn isn't a "version 2". The name is a reference to John Glenn, the first American to orbit earth. Think "New York" not "New iPhone".
Thanks!
Still a weird naming scheme though. A rocket is not a new astronaut. Am I missing something clever?
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New York is from 1624
The best one I know is the New Forest in England, which is from 1079.
Thank goodness for billionaires.
There's a good case to be made that if it weren't for the likes of Musk and Bezos we'd still be stuck with the likes of ULA.
They are literally pulling us into the future and i'm all for it.
It actually is a feature of capitalism. Envy can blind though.
Yes thank you billionaires, if you hadn't vacuumed the wealth of a nation this could have been a government agency success. Why should we all benefit when one man can?
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Musk and Bezos have generated insane amounts of wealth for the American economy. They're not hoarding dollar bills in some vault like Scrooge McDuck lol.
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The sums spent on this are trivial to governments. California HSR costs much more than bringing a rocket to life. The annual cost of dialysis to the American government is many times what SpaceX or Blue Origin costs.
Any number of nations' governments could do this in a wealth perspective. And none have.
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There are billionaires all over the world who haven’t built successful space companies. The key ingredient is the government funding which has made the US space industry possible, such as building the launch pads, subsidizing hundreds of companies which build specialized parts, creating the GPS network required to track launches, etc.
Maybe thank the taxpayers instead?
Totally worth the exploitation, amirite?? /s
(You do realize we did this before without them, right?)
No nation has a done what spacex has.
Can you explain how i am exploited? I use Amazon products daily (as do you), why shouldn't i be thankful to Bezos? He has made my life tangibly better.
I really don't care how many shares of Amazon he has and what the current share price is.
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Dupe of / More details & discussion here,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721882 ("Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) (blueorigin.com)", 55 comments)
I might say "More details & discussion here", vs. "Dupe of". For those who don't want to burn time watching video, the Ars story is an excellent summary.
Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And it's hard to find out how much money Blue Origin has burnt but it seems to be largely supported by Bezos who years ago pledged to fund it to the tune of $1 billion a year. Allegedly BO has >11K employees and payroll alone is estimated to exceed $2B a year with little revenue to pay for it. Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Now consider the market for the New Glenn. It seems to have a payload capacity around 3x that of Falcon 9 and 2/3 that of Falcon Heavy. As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy, there having been 11 launches (compared to 439 for Falcon 9). SpaceX also has created demand through Starlink.
For anyone launching a satellite, the Falcon 9 has an impressive track record. It's unclear how much SpaceX saves by reusing first stage boosters but it certainly increases their potential launch cadence and there were close to 150 launches in 2024 alone.
So I'm happy to see competition in this field but it's unclear to me what market there is for New Glenn (or even Starship for that matter, but that's a separate story) but Falcon 9 seems to have saturated the launch market. It's really the Boeing 747 of launch vehicles. For those unfamiliar, the 747 was such a competitive advantage and cash cow for Boeing for quite literally decades. That's how dominant the Falcon 9 is.
It's going to replace ULA as the secondary option for DoD launches. That's a multi-billion dollar contract.
It'll put price pressure on SpaceX who have been able to charge increasingly large amounts without the competition from ULA recently.
SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin will all three be on Space Force's National Security Space Launch Phase III Lane 2 IDIQ.
Blue Origin won't replace ULA on that contract, but will compete head to head with SpaceX and ULA to win launch task orders.
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New Glenn has a payload size that is comparable to that of starship.
Falcon Heavy can launch much heavier stuff than 9, but it uses the same fairing. If you want to launch things that can't fit into Falcon 9s fairing, then your only options are SLS, New Glenn and in a few years Starship.
Especially Space Station Parts and Spy satellites can be quite huge. So there is an established and growing market for larger payloads
The extended Falcon fairing was spotted recently on one of the Falcon launches at the Cape. They are designing that for DoD payloads I think but it's advertised as available for payloads. It's not any wider but it is 18.7 m tall instead of 13.2m. Source: [Falcon User Guide](https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf)
> Bezos may well be $10-20B+ in the hole.
Which puts it about the level of my ski season pass in his budget. A hobby scale expenditure.
you spent 10% of your NW on a ski season pass?
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In a fair market this'd be bad news for SpaceX, but from next week he'll have nothing to worry about for at least the next 4 years/until donnie dies.
> As we know, there's not a lot of demand for Falcon Heavy
Citation needed
There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches (as I said in my comment) in the almost 6 years since the first flight (February 2018), roughly 2 per year. There were almost 150 Falcon 9 launches in 2024 alone.
What else would you call this than "not a lot of demand"?
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> Just a reminder that Blue Origin was founded almost 24 years ago, nearly 2 years before SpaceX was.
And Ford Motor Companies was founded in 1903 and still hasn't gotten above the Karman line. Wow, they're a massive failure as a company.
Blue wasn't aiming for an orbital rocket for years.
Didn't BO have a change in leadership in 2023 precisely because they were slow compared to SpaceX?
Edit: New Glenn was announced in 2016, compared to Starship's 2019, and they're approaching the finish line at around the same time. And I would say Starship was a far more ambitious project.
So what they were aiming for in the last 24 years if not to get into space?
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Does anyone have a good sense for the actual purpose of reusing rockets?
Call me skeptical of the actual cost savings. You now need systems in place to catch them, the rockets need more components and fuel and such to control descent, the rocket then need to be refurbished back to launch-ready after going through hellacious stress. It seems like it’d be cheaper, lighter, and simpler on the whole to just make a new one. But I would love to learn more.
For the booster I think it’s fairly well established that it’s cheaper to reuse it. It’s not that hard on a booster to come down again, and it doesn’t seem like it’s that much work for SpaceX to refurbish their boosters.
For the upper stage it still remains to be seen. Having the upper stage return from orbit is a lot harder, as we’re seeing with the Starship. You need a lot of thermal protection. Maybe flaps depending on the design.
Jeff Bezos mentioned in a recent interview that for the upper stage they’re working on a reusable and a cost reduced version of the upper stage in parallell. They can’t determine yet which will end up being cheaper. That tells you something about how hard it is to do second stage reuse.
Rocket Lab has shown with the Neutron rocket what’s possible if you’re really innovative with optimising for cost on the second stage. Their second stage will probably be cheaper than the satellites they send to orbit
Rocket engines are very complex machinery that's difficult and expensive to make. Reusing the rocket allows you to reuse the engine.
SpaceX has also managed to show that reused hardware can be more reliable than brand new hardware. You run the hardware through a number of tests before launch, but there is no better test than an actual launch. Satellites still cost a lot more than rockets, so reliability is a big deal
I do wonder if there's a way to reuse engines without reusing whole rockets, that could wind up cheaper. Pop the engine out of the rocket with some small fuel tanks, spin round and do a retro burn, then ... somehow land. I have not worked out all the details.
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A NASA planetary probe or a NRO spysat cost more than an order of magnitude more than launch but your run of the mill comm sat is only a bit more expensive than a SpaceX launch.
This was the argument a decade ago when SpaceX was the only one seriously talking about reuse. Given SpaceX is now responsible for the vast majoriy of mass to orbit it is hard to argue with the results, and now everyone serious is investing in reuse.
this is survivorship bias. SpaceX made a choice, and it succeeded; but SpaceX also made a million other design choices. Reusability could well be sub-optimal.
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It's true that in principle, you need a stronger rocket (the whole rocket, not just the motor) and a bunch of extra infrastructure to be able to reuse.
However, without being able to recover a rocket, it's actually quite difficult to figure out just how much corners you can cut, while remaining reliable. Since blowing up revenue payload is an awful way to optimize this, I think this means that disposal rockets will be inefficient in a different way - there will be excess safety margin in the wrong areas.
Reliable re-use also changes the operating model of the company. Since each rocket in stock represents many customers over time, you don't need to be nearly as stressed about exactly matching your manufacturing pipeline to predicted demand. This likely also enables generally faster turn around time (as in from cheque signed to launch).
Finally, as it turns out, it's not unreasonable to expect a rocket to be reused like 20+ times. I think you're point would be reasonable if it turned out that reusing a rocket more than ~3-5 times was difficult. But like... it's REALLY hard to do disposal anything better than something that can be reused 20+ times.
By that logic there should be launchers of similar capabilities cheaper than F9... which there aren't.
Reason 2: Enables increased launch cadence.
There is an older (2015) discussion on this at https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=37390.0
Rocket engines are very expensive, and the whole rocket is fairly expensive in traditional construction methods. The cost of the rocket engines dominates the others.
I don't understand why making excuses for their failure, 10 years after spaceX started reusing their rockets. There are so many competitors now and china is doing quite well, that we don't need participation trophies.
Reaching orbit on the first try is a big deal. I think it deserves recognition and celebration.
Noone has ever managed to nail the landing of an orbital class booster on the first try.
> Noone
Name another company that even landed orbital class booster on whatever try.
10 years ago it was an impossible feat many were laughing at.
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SpaceX have had much worse recent failures on launches of their new generation rocket.
Blue Origin have moved glacially slow by comparison, but they achieved their primary goal with this launch (get to orbit) and failed a secondary goal (land the booster).
If this were a SpaceX launch of a brand new rocket we'd be calling this a success and noting how they'd almost certainly achieve the secondary goal soon.
I think the question is how well and quickly Blue Origin can iterate to achieve first stage reuse. It took SpaceX quite a long time with a lot of lessons learned to reach the maturity they have now with Falcon 9 landings and re-launches.
I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
> ... they even fubared the thrust:weight ration a bit ...
Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.
I don't understand why you're drawing attention to their failure, it doesn't mean anything. Failure by anyone on the first time of anything is understandable.
But I'm interested to know what the extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of, especially reusable ones with a low cost. SpaceX of course, but Boeing is out to lunch.
> extensive competition for domestic heavy lift rockets consists of
New Glenn, Vulcan and Falcon Heavy/Starship.
There'll be a Chinese option shortly for those that are truly launcher-agnostic.
Didn't we laude SpaceX for failing fast and moving forward?
Blue Origin changed CEOs two years ago and since then it started to pull forward.
They may have failures during flights, but they aren't a failure as a company.
This. I used to be very skeptical of anything Blue Origin. But after the CEO change they appear to have changed their attitude for the better.
They are not on SpaceX level, but they are growing recently and I think this test, even with the many problems or things I didn't like (SpaceX spoiled us), it was positive.
”Many” competitors? I thought that in this vehicle category (large&affordable) Space X was the only competitor?