But if your point wasn't to say that it will be obsoleted by Starship, and just to say instead it's slower development than Starship, yeah, that's true.
I suspect the head start in infrastructure spacex has is pretty valuable in developing new programs.
Space is hard. I hope Blue Origin succeeds.
I'm rooting for any and all US launch providers to succeed, but I don't think this is true. Starship at full reusability will be better than any other launcher for every single mission profile imaginable.
What does this even mean? Fully operational? Starship has three versions and they are still testing the first one which isn't supposed to reach orbit in the next flight nor is it supposed to carry any payload, not even a mass simulator. When you ask people why the booster hasn't been reflown, you get this confusing answer that the booster is "already obsolete" even though they have planned to launch three more "obsolete" boosters after the first successful catch.
Everyone is bragging how fast SpaceX is, but they are starting to drag their feet. It's like those people who build a demo that looks like the product is almost finished, but it turns out those were the easy and visible 80% that you can show off, now you're left with the hard and time consuming 20% and you're going to run into delays like everyone else.
And then there is the fact that New Glenn is going to launch on 5th of January and attempt landing on the first flight. Barring an explosion on the way to orbit, New Glenn will be flying at least half a dozen missions carrying payloads throughout 2025 including a moon landing of Blue Moon MK1.
Your comment comes across as pessimistically predicting the failure of the first launch or being ignorant that it will launch in four days.
There was nothing easy about the Raptor engine, for one. It is absolutely the best rocket engine in the world by far, and the only methane-based engine that ever reached space.
AFAIK the only "real" problem that SpaceX is now having with Starship is the heat shield vs. rapid reusability. It is an important problem, but it also means that many other complicated problems (such as precise exercise of the belly flop) are fully solved.
12 missions is their upper limit of capacity, so it’s “at most 12”.
This was certainly thrown around with Tesla, but it's not something I've personally come across with SpaceX.
Regardless, if semiconductors have taught us anything over the last decade, strong competition is essential for a healthy market. It's hard to imagine a true (haha) fan of space exploration that isn't cheering on Rocket Lab and Blue Origin (as you are), even if they're destined to forever be runners up. Even if you believe Musk will operate SpaceX entirely selflessly, he won't be in control of it forever.
The real question is if there’s going to be enough demand to justify these systems. With enough reusability it might make sense to fly these things 2/3 empty, but that’s only going to be so profitable.
0: https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_...
I doubt that a rocket has anywhere near as many sensors (have you seen pictures of the LHC’s instruments? They’re basically all sensor), and I also expect that the timescales involved in rocketry are rather longer than in high energy physics.
Here’s a slide deck about ATLAS building an ASIC that reads something at 25 picosecond precision:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/799025/contributions/3486157/at...
Unless someone at Blue Origin is trying to localize a specific part of their flame by time of flight of light, I don’t see why time resolution even close to that would be at all useful. Perhaps they’re very fancy and want to tell which part of their rocket initiated an explosion by time of flight of sound, but that’s rather less demanding.
With the caveat, of course, that LHC events don’t explosively destroy the instrumentation. If you want useful telemetry in the last milliseconds before a rocket failure, you had better seriously harden your data logger or have very low latency transmission to a remote receiver :)
This is actually extremely important to model. Early F1 engines (Saturn V, not motorsport) were exploding and the engineers pretty much got lucky with the baffle design. Having a suite of sensors and then a computer model it would have saved lots of hardware and time - and really would have pretty much assured success. They were unsure if they'd succeed right up until they did.
There's likely more data stored in the video files from the cameras that observed the test than test data itself.
But... you CAN get a lot of decent info from a low bandwidth link.
EDIT: something to add is that not ever PID was tied into the high speed DAS–only a couple-few dozen important PIDs.
So I would imagine this is generating hundreds of megabytes.
You are going to be limited by what you can transfer over radio.
Terabytes to petabytes. Much is noise. But you’re already making sensor-level keep/discard decisions due to the magnitude of the deluge.
Note that this includes cameras, of which modern telemetry includes many.
I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the shop.
Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to optimize complete functional or value chains is when something breaks.
Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar" to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the number of engineers.
I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone weird.
I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in an intense experience to check out their jobs page.
I was definitely worried when I heard KubOS (the company) was struggling. I don't know too much about Xplore, but I think I saw Tyler was working there now, so there's SOME continuity at least.
KubOS (the codebase) doesn't look like it's received any love in the last couple of years, which is sort of sad. Some really bright people poured a lot of time and effort into it. Just looking at the contributors list: Ryan, Catherine, Kyle and Tim... all very bright people and a pleasure to work with.
I overlapped with David at Amazon and had a few interactions with him and some of his direct reports. Don't know if that's good or bad; pretty sure I didn't embarrass myself there.
I would also love to see Blue Origin spend more time on building space habitation. If Starship does bring heavy lift costs right down, I want to see all the interesting things that people start putting into space
