
Blue Origin releases details of its monster orbital rocket - netinstructions
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/blue-origin-releases-details-of-its-monster-orbital-rocket/
======
avmich
> Everytime I read news like this it just furthers the impression in my mind
> that Congress's SLS (and that rocket program is truly owned by Congress, not
> NASA) is an incredible waste of money that makes your average military
> recruitment contract red-faced with embarrassment.

Welcome to alt-space point of view of a few decades. Looking at NASA contracts
- and Congress mandates for them - you can easily guess that the goal of them
isn't space related, but something else - maybe politics related, when you
have a fell-good agency, lots of work contracts distributed across many states
and producing jobs for same old ways of doing things. If one would care about
space exploration, one should definitely use modern opportunities for faster,
better and cheaper technology. And even if, as in case of SpaceX, you have
more mission failures for unmanned missions, you still have net savings and
tremendous advantage in the speed of development.

~~~
sand500
SLS exists to bring jobs to certain congressional districts.

------
cornholio
It's great that we are seeing competition and the video is nice and all. But I
wonder how will BE leapfrog the development steps to produce a vehicle almost
as capable as Falcon Heavy (45t vs. 50t to LEO) with no prior experience with
orbital vehicles ?

Development of Falcon 1 started more than a decade ago, SpaceX went through
multiple design iterations, test vehicles (Grasshopper) and expensive failures
and FH is still maybe a year away, despite being essentially a bundle of
Falcons 9 (itself, a very smart strategy to move forward by leveraging their
proven capabilities and minimize risk).

A large innovative rocket like Glenn might cost a billion dollars to design,
build and launch. A billion dollars for an experiment that might fail on the
first go. I want to believe Glenn will fly before 2030, but what I would like
to see from Bezos is less ego and more roadmap details, a firm monetary
commitment from himself or other financiers, etc.

------
justaguyonline
Everytime I read news like this it just furthers the impression in my mind
that Congress's SLS (and that rocket program is truly owned by Congress, not
NASA) is an incredible waste of money that makes your average military
recruitment contract red-faced with embarrassment.

The US needs to create a heavy lift variant of the commercial orbital
transportation services contract (COTS) [1] and/or the Commercial Crew
Development program (CCDev) [2] and scrap the SLS program or at least release
it from it's stupid congressional requirement to use grandfathered space
shuttle contractors.

Estimates for the true cost of each space shuttle launch, which NASA and
Congress were always cagey about, range from 700 million to over one billion
dollars ( $196B/133 flights [3] ). The cost of the entire COTS program that
created "two new U.S. medium-class launch vehicles and two automated cargo
spacecraft"[4] as a replacement for the shuttle's cargo services was _$800
million_ , less than or equal to the cost of a _single_ shuttle flight.

In light of that it's always frustrating that I see the US dinking around with
the $10+ billion dollar Orion program [5] or talk about throwing good money
after bad by adding astronauts to the EM-1 mission. I mean, come on! How tied
to corporate kickback interests and tiny amounts of local jobs can you get?
Can Congress really not see the big picture here and the idea that we could
have more people and mass in space (and probably job on the ground too) for a
fraction of the current program costs?

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-
servi...](https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-services-
cots)

[2] [https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-crew-program-the-
ess...](https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-crew-program-the-essentials/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program)

[4] [https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-releases-cots-final-
report](https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-releases-cots-final-report)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_\(spacecraft\))

~~~
tlb
You can have more results for less cost, by orders of magnitude, by doing the
right things. But you can't have more jobs for less cost. Cost ∝ jobs, with
only small variances for differences in pay scale and corporate profits.

~~~
justaguyonline
New jobs are created when you create more demand by dropping prices, or build
new markets for products that didn't have the opportunity to exist before
because of cost. Capitalism isn't a zero sum game.

For example, reduced launch costs lower the barrier for smaller customers, who
in turn need cheaper satellites that do smaller tasks, thus the recent growth
of the nanosat sector of the space industry and companies like Planet [1].

Or, the recently planned satellite constellations by OneWeb and SpaceX. Both
of these constellations are planned to involve 1000's of individual
satellites, the launch of which would of been prohibitive with higher launch
prices. I would definitely say more jobs would be created in the US by cheap,
global internet than the 1000 or so that might be lost by the transformation
of the US launch industry.

