- Congrats to the Blue Origin team! That's a heck of a milestone (landing it on the second attempt). It will compete more with Falcon Heavy than Starship[1] but it certainly could handle all of the current GEO satellite designs. I'm sure that the NRO will appreciate the larger payload volume as well. Really super glad to see they have hardware that has successfully done all the things. The first step to making it as reliable as other launch platforms. And having a choice for launch services is always a good thing for people buying said launch services.
Notably, from a US policy standpoint, if they successfully become 'lift capability #2' then it's going to be difficult to ULA to continue on.
[1] Although if Starship's lift capacity keeps getting knocked back that might change.
by syncsynchalt
2 subcomments
- Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
- Video of the launch if anyone was looking for it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheyXgtG7EI&t=14220s
- Insane that it took a decade for another company to do it, but better late than never. Great to see. Next up: China.
by pipsterwo
2 subcomments
- Did anyone else notice the pyrotechnics in the landing feet after touchdown? I'm going to assume that they harpooned the deck surface to secure the booster.
Im pretty impressed at how simple that idea is compared to SpaceX's solution which is to have a robot drive underneath and grab the booster
by sbuttgereit
1 subcomments
- Beautiful launch and landing.
I still can't stand the public relation heavy official stream... but even with all that static the rocket itself cut through.
- Competition is good. SpaceX is de-facto Amazon of space logistics.
by ricardobeat
0 subcomment
- Full launch video and images of the landing: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
- Go Limp Go!
For all the engineers that say management doesn't matter, I give you David Limp.
Management doesn't matter until it does.
- Landing (the booster) on their second launch is nice...but I'm more impressed by them being (probably...) 2-for-2 on their very first couple orbital launch attempts.
(Yes, SpaceX's Falcon reached that milestone back in 2010.)
- I struggled to find a good video of the landing. This is a clip from their live stream: https://youtu.be/xHlPwTE-FOo
It seems like multiple video feeds glitch out right as it's about to land. There's even a black screen saying "buffering..." encoded into the video.
Still early days though, and I'm sure they're working to improve, but they're missing a huge opportunity here by not having high-quality footage like SpaceX. For comparison, here's a great clip of SpaceX's Starship landing: https://youtu.be/Hkq3F5SaunM
- Anyone know more about the explosive landing feet anchors at T+9:55?
- Headline misses that this is a mars mission, on its way to the red planet. Awesome achievement.
- "on second try" sounds like the rocket did a go-around :-) (the current techcrunch title is "Blue Origin sticks first New Glenn rocket landing and launches NASA spacecraft" and doesn't mention the previous failure until the first paragraph.)
by yubblegum
1 subcomments
- I was just admiring the beautiful design of this rocket. This looks like something Apple/Jobs would send to space. It's quite an elegant machine.
by roman_soldier
2 subcomments
- Congrats but it's kinda like a company, releasing in 2030, an LLM equivalent to the first version of chatGPT. SpaceX did this 10 years ago.
by BoxedEmpathy
0 subcomment
- Fantastic news! I hope to live long enough to see LEO become more accessible to everybody.
- How big/small is it compared to Falcon 9?
by lateforwork
1 subcomments
- Same accomplishment as SpaceX but with a lot less hullabaloo. This is Jeff Bezos's style.
by throwaway132448
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by throwaway132448
2 subcomments
- [flagged]
by throwaway132448
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- Blue Origin beats SpaceX to Mars.
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