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frodosbitch t1_j0lzdkr wrote

What has Blue Origin done except take tourists on sub orbital hops?

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ausnee t1_j0n7fxe wrote

They've made the BE-4s that power ULA's new Vulcan rocket.

My thoughts is that they'll let that fly for a bit to work out the kinks then go fully in on New Glenn afterwards.

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CannaCosmonaut t1_j0pwt6q wrote

SpaceX may make it look easy, but designing and building flight-ready full-flow staged combustion cycle engines is no joke. These people need more Tim Dodd in their lives so they can fully appreciate the gravity (pun intended) of that accomplishment.

They also have New Glenn coming up, and as slow as that's going, I bet it will fly sooner or later and have it's place on the market. Orbital Reef is also really exciting, if for no other reason than the fact that a lot of young and talented engineers will get to cut their teeth on those projects and take that invaluable experience to bigger and more advanced structures.

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littlebitsofspider t1_j0mg194 wrote

Filed a bunch of legal nonsense so they'll be included. It's the "my dad will sue you" approach.

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A_Vandalay t1_j0n5fk1 wrote

As of now nothing, but They are working on a number of high profile contracts for both launch and in space operations for the government and private industry. In essence they are the closest thing to a competitor that SpaceX has (in terms of future potentate) as such they get included as the honorary second place. And to be perfectly honest I’m not even sure that’s wrong. In terms of existing completion SpaceX has ULA but they have shown little willingness to innovate from a tried and true method. The Vulcan is barley competitive with falcon 9, let alone starship. Likewise rocketlab is currently developing a rocket that might be superior to falcon in some metrics but likely won’t be competitive against starship. Relativity space has the same problem but is in a worse position as they haven’t launched once. So if you were looking to make an inclusive panel of representatives from various space launch companies who would you pick

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toodroot t1_j0ngdv6 wrote

> ULA but they have shown little willingness to innovate from a tried and true method.

ACES and on-orbit refueling is an awesome concept, too bad NASA has shown very little interest in it.

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A_Vandalay t1_j0nxed7 wrote

They have long since abandoned ACES in favor of incremental upgrades to centaur such as improved performance and on orbit lifetime. These are primarily geared towards national security payloads and don’t really offer much in the way of revolutionary change.

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vibrunazo t1_j0n87gp wrote

They won key contracts with NASA. They're already an important part of CLD and KSC. So it makes sense their input is taken into account when discussing these.

Whether they'll deliver and make good use of those is another story..

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