Sure wish they'd launch during waking hours. I want to watch, but my sleep is more important.
Sometimes I would agree but... It is nice to wake up and know whether it is worth spending the time to watch or not (in the case of a scrub). Launches in the middle of the day can take up lots of time that I would be doing something else. In the modern era of internet video I can just watch it when I can enjoy it.
There's just something about watching it live, though. The uncertainty and excitement after a buildup. If you watch it later, you already know the outcome.
Looking forward to this! SpaceX needs to feel domestic competition.
I agree, though I do think it says a lot that some variation of this comment gets posted every time the subject of Blue Origin comes up, to the point where it's almost a cliche.
It's a little unfortunate that New Glenn is merely "competition for SpaceX"; not innovative enough to stand on its own as a marked improvement to private spaceflight capabilities the way something like Starship (or even Stoke Space's Nova, if it comes to fruition) will be.
But everyone has to start somewhere. New Glenn should be a great competitor to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy at least, and SpaceX does indeed desperately need competition right now (lest they risk becoming a monopoly).
As of right now, New Glenn is not a bottleneck for any short term endeavours that Blue Origin is planning.
The only real bottleneck is the cislunar transporter by Lockheed Martin. Once they have the Cislunar Transporter, their bottleneck will be the cost of the refueling flights, not the cost of upper stage expending flights that deliver payloads. That's when they are going to need to start replacing the GS2 refueler with something reusable.
Can Stoke Space deliver 135 tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen to the Cislunar Transporter? Can Rocket Lab do that? Starship might, but it uses a different fuel, so who knows.
> will be
It's a big if. I personally don't believe starship will ever get as far as carrying humans.
Even if Starship never carries humans (something I would debate you on) it would still qualify as a "marked improvement to private spaceflight capabilities". It may well clear that bar in a few months in fact, after they demonstrate orbital refueling in March[1] (or a bit later). All the other important parts (engines, heat shield, landing) have already been demonstrated as viable, and humans are a tiny percentage of all launches.
I disagree :) But I don't want to argue. Time will tell! I hope I'm wrong, it'll be incredible to see it all come together.
Can you expand a little bit why you think that?
New Glenn is competing with Falcon Heavy much more than with Starship, and also looks a lot closer to operational readiness than Starship will be in 2025.
Will be an interesting week.
how is it a lot closer to readiness if it has never had a successful launch?
Different development processes. New Glenn is ready to deploy a payload on its first flight. Starship as it is can’t deploy anything. It has the “pez dispenser” that is designed to release Starlink satellites one at a time, but it’s not ready.
I would feel even better with zero-margin, state-owned competition so we aren't all bled dry to enrich billionaires
Hasn’t Spacex driven down the launch price for the government? A zero-margin government program isn’t necessarily cheaper for society. Much evidence shows that state owned competitions are significantly less efficient than the free market.
> Much evidence shows that state owned competitions are significantly less efficient than the free market.
How is this possible? Profit, by definition, inefficient. Privatizing the production of rockets just penalizes american citizens with no benefit. Privatization necessarily makes less efficient markets, especially compared with a zero-margin competitor.
> How is this possible?
Private companies, minus special government favors, have to deliver a product that customers want for a price that customers are willing to pay. If they are too inefficient at either identifying what those products are or at what price they should charge (both examples of inefficiency) there is no profit and eventually the funds run out and the business fails. Insofar as they can identify the right product and deliver it at a cost less than the price, they are efficient. In some ways, the profit is a measure of the efficiency of the enterprise.
A state owned enterprise however has no such penalty against inefficiency. A government can redirect resources from more efficient and productive parts of the economy to projects that would otherwise fail under private enterprise. That redirection does not depend on the will (whim?) of consumers/customer: taxation and money minting allow for bypassing the typical constraints of voluntary consumer/customer wants, needs, and value-for-value trade. One can read this to mean that efficiency, under a system of state owned enterprises, is nice-to-have rather than a matter of survival.
Both government and private can be efficient or inefficient, it depends on the motive, I don't know why people insist on pretending one is always superior.
In the case of SpaceX they are more efficient because NASA is intentionally hamstrung relative to them, this is done by congress because they treat NASA as a jobs program, it is intended to provide employment in as many states as possible, not produce efficient and affordable rockets. Congress dictates which rockets they are allowed to build, where they will build them, who will build them, and overrides them, forcing them to build nonsense rockets such as SLS.
> Both government and private can be efficient or inefficient
That's true. The difference is that inefficient private organizations go out of business, while inefficient government organizations tell congress it's because they "don't have enough funding" and get their budget increased.
> In the case of SpaceX they are more efficient because NASA is intentionally hamstrung relative to them, this is done by congress because they treat NASA as a jobs program
NASA is a jobs program in order to hamstring it relatively to SpaceX? Can you cite some evidence?
> How is this possible? Profit, by definition, inefficient
Profit offloads risk from taxpayers by attracting private investment, rather than state investment. This means investors can lose all their money and taxpayers are totally insulated.
Profit also means bad ideas are discarded. The space shuttle costing $1.5bn per flight in 2010 dollars[0] must surely at least give you some inkling that profit is not the only inefficiency, and definitely isn't the biggest one.
People won't make a profit on things that are just boring and everything's been sufficiently worked out. This will be a race to the bottom regardless of whether something is privately owned or publically owned. However we want people to be able to be successful on things that benefit us and have a decent chance of going wrong. Otherwise you just lumber everyone with debt that needs paying back via taxes over a couple of generations, or you never try at all.
[0] https://www.space.com/11358-nasa-space-shuttle-program-cost-...
The only group bleeding customers dry _are_ the government competition. Have you any idea the launch costs of NASA/ESA versus SpaceX?
Artemis/SLS is a complete boondoggle disaster. No redeeming factors at all when you look at the costs, the goals and the potential results.
> Have you any idea the launch costs of NASA/ESA versus SpaceX?
This seems to be the result of intentional incompetency by our own politicians and refusal to fund the program in any comparable way than a serious sign of inability to compete with Space X. They've been trying to get private spaceflight going for like four decades now and sitting on their hands the entire time.
> They've been trying to get private spaceflight going for like four decades now and sitting on their hands the entire time
I'll take "borderline inevitable situations resulting from thinking the government will somehow do a better job, when in fact they get free money and are not motivated to accomplish things" for 500 points, Alex.
If the government is so inept at developing space stuff how come they were able to accomplish the apollo program?
There was something a bit like private sector competition involved: competition with the USSR. You can't just blame taxes being too low and over run for years if you have competition. Same with the private sector (other than needing to earn value rather than forcing it out via taxes/inflation) - competition does wonders.
Regardless of who you want to assign "fault" to, the fact remains.
> fund the program in any comparable way
OIG has predicted the program will spend practically $100 billion dollars with only a single launch so far and a cost of $4 billion/launch thereafter. Don't tell me the program "isnt funded".
https://oig.nasa.gov/office-of-inspector-general-oig/ig-22-0...