The bad news mentioned here are that New Glenn's maiden flight is delayed by approximately a year compared to earlier estimates.
Things being delayed in space-flight related activities is completely normal but it is disappointing anyways. If SpaceX manages to get Starship to orbit and back, I do not see how Blue Origin could reasonably compete with them. It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons. They actually have to compete for something sooner or later.
> It's not that they are a national space program that is supported no matter what because of national security reasons.
To be fair the whims and ego of one of the world's richest men who owns a company as vast as Amazon is a pretty close second to ensuring secured funding.
Considering how US space program funding is subject to the whims of presidential administrations and congressional funding, New Origin may actually come out on top of this comparison.
How so? SpaceX is a proven launch system at this point, ULA has plenty of business, and SLS isn't going anywhere soon, so there aren't many options for new entrants.
I won't be that sure about SLS anymore with many recent events concerning it:
- it failed to do full mission length firing during during the Green Run testing
- its main supporter in the Senate Shelby announced he is going to retire
- Europa clipper will launch on Falcon Heavy instead of SLS
- early Gateway parts have been recently announced as also launching on Falcon Heavy
Not much left for SLS to do & its cost and delays are unly getting more insane by the day.
While I certainly agree that aggressive timelines often get modified, especially with new launch systems, initial estimates in 2016 were for first flight in 2020.[0] Then they pushed to 2021.[1] Additionally, the fact that they called out Q4 2022 (late in the year) doesn't give me a lot of confidence they'll even get it done in 2022 either.
Right; I have no doubt that Blue/people inside of Blue are having serious thoughts about 2nd stage re-use, at least to a level roughly equivalent to what you pointed out SpaceX has revealed.
However, I suspect 2nd stage/full re-use is fundamentally so much harder than 'just' 1st stage re-use that it requires a full re-use design from top to bottom, a la Starship/Superheavy.
Of course, Blue has been historically far more closed than SpaceX, so it's possible that they have legit, in progress full re-use! That would be great.
The second stage of New Glenn runs on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, not on liquid oxygen and RP-1 as Falcon. It makes it much harder to reuse simply due to much bigger fuel tanks and significantly less tolerance to overheating . I doubt Blue Origin really considers that seriously.
I guess it depends on what you call a redesign. They likely need to modify the fins to counter act any new control authority on the upper stage, but other than that I see no reason why the first stage would change.
New Glenn is a case of "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you".
The Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy are being phased out in favor of ULA's Vulcan (which uses its BE-4 engines). Falcon 9 is otherwise dominant.
Despite sharing its BE-4 engines with ULA, New Glenn will eventually win a few national security payloads per year. If the economics of reusability pan out for them, they might eventually even beat the Vulcan!
We'll see if they can take their future taxpayer-funded first stages and launch commercial satellites with bargain basement internal costs, like SpaceX has achieved.
I hate to say it, but this slow pace feels like Blue Origin is being run by the folks next door to it from Boeing.... If people didn't already notice, you can spell Boeing from the letters in BluE OrIGiN (a bit out of order)...
