Well done everyone.

If I remember rightly, SpaceX had a few tries before they refined the issues - so yes New Glenn - great start, and good luck. It can only good that Musk and Bezos are investing and competing in the future with regards to space exploration and beyond. Shame Zuckerberg and the rest haven't got the same vision for the future for humanity.

Zuckerberg is only interested in his island retreat.

As far as he's concerned, Humanity can die as long as his hidey-hole keeps him alive.

I almost wish his dream comes true and he lives the rest of his life alone. But that wouldn't bother a Borg, now would it.

"As far as he's concerned, Humanity can die as long as his hidey-hole keeps him alive."

The problem with that idea - hiding away on an Island - is the number of specialists needed to keep you going indefinitely. You need plumbers, electricians, engineers, medics (oncologist, dentists, physiotherapists, radiologists, NMR scanner people, surgeons of all types). Not to mention farmers, cooks, veterinarians, weavers, spinners, knitters, cobblers, carpenters, stonemasons, brewers, meteorologists, and administrators to manage everything, oh, and some way to stop whoever has the most guns from taking over and having it as their private feudal domain with you as their serf.

All in all, I reckon the best way to survive the next few decades is to use what influence you have to prevent society collapsing in the first place. (Just my opinion, of course.)

(Ironic / sarcastic icon.)

Agreed that it's a great start technically but I'm not sure having competing private launchers is an efficient use of US government money. I'm sure there will be a swift examination of the justification and a recommendation on where to award future contracts by the relevant department.

LOL. Do you remember the prices ULA charged BEFORE there were competing private launchers?

SpaceX undercut them so hard they were forced to abandon the expensive Delta and develop Vulcan.

Anyone wanting to watch a replay of the stream don’t bother with BBC IPlayer. The IPlayer live feed superimposed a screen wide thick red strap line, helpfully informing us “Bezos’ Blue Origin Launch”, obscuring the live telemetry timeline.

An impressive show from Blue Origin nonetheless, the shock patterns in the plumes from the 7 motors were very pretty.

Can I add that anyone wanting to watch a replay should also avoid the NSF coverage - their incessant wittering ("it's so blue, but it's blue, it's blue, look at that blue in the clouds....") drove me to watch the BO direct feed. Ah... the bliss of a working timeline, calm announcements and far fewer idiots.

I get that a launch is exciting guys, but presenting the stream like its a Minecraft video 1 (shouty, breathless and high pitched) and repeating your fanboi chants over the top of the official channel sound track isn't helpful.

1 Crotch goblins watch them, that's how I know.

Upvoted for "crotch goblins". Made my morning!

You can get an ointment for that.

I'l get my coat, its the one with a prescription in the pocket.

"...drove me to watch the BO direct feed. Ah... the bliss of a working timeline, calm announcements and far fewer idiots."

Even that was fairly... American.... I did enjoy that at one point a room full of presumably highly intelligent and accomplished professionals were reduced to a group chant of 'MECO MECO MECO'.

Great there is more competition.

But using fuel & engines for recovery & reuse is a two-fold fail:

1) Extra CO2, pollution etc

2) Limits lift capacity.

Some people have watched too many Thunderbirds episodes.

1) I'm sure the CO2 is more than offset by the emissions cause building a new rocket.

2) Yes, but this thing has a pretty good capacity, even with booster re-use. I'm sure, for a price, they'll happily expend the landing fuel and lose the booster for a bit more mass to orbit. Just like SpaceX sometimes do.

But using fuel & engines for recovery & reuse is a two-fold fail:

Mage,

It does take fuel to recover a used rocket. But I'm willing to bet that it takes a damned site more CO2 to build a whole rocket and set of engines than the small amount of extra fuel you're buring in order to get them back.

Around 10 years ago Musk said it only took about $300,000 of fuel to get a Falcon 9 to orbit. That was at a time when a launch was costing about $60m and remember you're using less than 5% of the fuel to land the first stage - and the first stage probably only contains around half the total fuel. So you're using maybe $10-$15k of fuel in order to get tens of millions of dollars worth of rocket back.

All of the raw materials in that rocket have had to be mined, moved, refined, moved, machined/forged/cast/some combination, moved around, added to other components shipped around a bit more - until the finally assembled compenents reach the rocket factory. There's an awful lot of exquisitely manufactured bits in them rockets - and they all have to be made on incredibly expensive machine tools - in factories using lots of electricity.

For a quick example, I had a quick look online for the first decent looking analysis I could find. Ballpark accuracy being all I wanted. About 25% of an ICE car's CO2 emissions come just from building it. the rest from the fuel it burns + a bit from maintenance. And that's from a car driving every day for about 10-15 years. Admittedly a much larger percentage of a rocket is made up of fuel - but then they don't fly as often - and we're only using a few percent of that fuel to get the rest of it back for re-use.

Small launch can be bought for about $7.5M so the costs related to licensing, clearing the range and operating the rocket must be less. The base price of a Vulcan is $110M. The profit margin must be thin to compete against a Falcon 9 for $70M. According to Tory Bruno, a new rocket costs about $2B to develop including $1B for the engines. ULA buy in engines and US tax payers have generously contributed $1.2B leaving minus $200M R&D to be recovered over the life time of the rocket. Vulcan has a backlog of DoD payloads plus 38 Kuiper launches to do before August 2026. That should divide the overheads down to something reasonable. Falcon 9 fairings are about $6M each so budget about $12M for ULA dropping them in the sea. However you cut into that $110M with other expenses manufacturing will be the lions share and massively out-weigh propellant costs of well under $1M.

For back of the envelope calculations the costs for bending metal correspond to the energy required to do it, which you could get by burning propellant. In real life US energy is only 83% fossil fuel so a small chunk of the manufacturing cost was not spent on dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

I reckon I’m safe in assuming that the minds behinds the engineering in these modern rockets have done a bit more careful thinking than watching Thunderbirds.

Or did they perhaps make a grave error in not checking comments on The Register for advice before going ahead with their reuse strategy?

The technology has clearly moved on since Thunderbirds. Now you can barely see the strings at all.

1) Not if you do the maths right.

2) Not if they do the maths right.

I mean, yes it limits lift capacity, but any rocket has a limited lift capacity, it's just that these rockets can potentially lift many more times that capacity over their lifetimes (the current F9 fleet leader is on 25 flights so far - that's 25 times 95% of the lift capacity, which is alot more than 1 shot of 100%)

If they're using the standard LOX + LH2 fuel, what's creating CO2?

The first is using the "new standard" of LOX and CH4.

LH2 is not particularly standard:

SLS: SRBs+LH2

Vulcan: SRBs+methane for stage 1, LH2 for stage 2

Falcon 9: RP1 (kerosene)

New Glenn: Methane for stage 1, LH2 for stage 2

Starship: Methane

SRBs use powdered aluminium bound with hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene. That second one is a long chain of carbon atoms. The aluminium comes from electrolysis and the electricity (as I recently looked up) is 83% from fossil fuels. Liquid hydrogen does not grow on trees. The cheapest source is reforming natural gas (burning just the carbon in methane). In theory hydrogen can come from electrolysis of water but the electricity to do it is expensive (and 83% from fossil fuels).

Well done to Blue for 1st time to orbit

But

They got a lot of practice in with New Shepperd first.

It's a bit disappointing they didn't manage a first stage recovery given the considerable Isp gain of LO2/LH2

SX showed once you can recover the first stage (and reuse it) after a cost effective refurb (that last bit was what f**ked the Shuttle) your profit skyrockets

However that is (in principle) the easy part.

If y ou run the numbers the orbital stage (per unit mass) has about 11x the Kinetic and Potential energies of the first stage (using the F9 stg1 altitude and velocity information. I'm guessing NG has more of the 50/50 velocity spit of conventional ELV's, but I could be wrong).

Time will tell if they become effective competitors to SX.