Go ahead and say it. People make fun of small companies like Relatively Space, Firefly, or Astra always countering everything good by saying "they haven't made orbit yet." The truth is that Blue Origin hasn't made orbit and honestly will be lucky if they make orbit next year. Quite possibly either late next year or into 2025.
Bezos has put a lot of his own money into the company he started 23 years ago; some estimates put it as high as $20 Billion. They have a staff of 11,000 people, in the same size class as SpaceX, but while SpaceX is closing in on 100 orbital launches this year, Blue "hasn't made orbit yet." Not one launch this year.
Ars Technica goes into an interesting, two-hour long interview Jeff Bezos did recently.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gives very few interviews, but he recently sat down with the computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman for a two-hour interview about Amazon, Blue Origin, his business practices, and more.
...
During the interview, Bezos candidly acknowledged this. "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to."
...
"We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."
The key is to make a decision and move on. Too many companies are gripped by "paralysis of analysis" and nobody wants to make a decision. The approach that SpaceX uses is the counter to that. Make a decision and move on it; if it's wrong, correct it. If the whole path is wrong and you need to fix things, do it. Part of that is the freedom to be wrong. Nobody is right 100% of the time, especially when doing things nobody has ever done before.
Think of Starship's Orbital Launch Mount in Boca Chica; Flight Test 1 wreaked havoc on that pad and blew chunks of concrete far from the OLM. SpaceX said, "oops! What were we thinking?" and fixed it faster than most businesses would even decide to do it.
A couple of weeks ago, this view of the biggest piece of a New Glenn ever seen was posted around the net implying that Blue Origin was on the verge of launching. It shows progress but isn't remotely near being ready to launch.
On Nov. 27, 2023, a New Glenn first-stage tank section was captured outside of Blue Origin’s main manufacturing facility at its Exploration Park campus. This section — referred to as the “First Stage Mid Module” by Blue Origin in the 2018 New Glenn payload users guide — is the combination of both the liquid natural gas and liquid oxygen tanks. This section is the largest and most complete part of a New Glenn booster that has been publicly seen. Image credit to Max Evans for NASA Spaceflight
Because of the orientation of the US flag, I believe the left end in this picture is the bottom end of the booster. This section is mated with an aft module which will carry seven BE-4 Engines and six landing legs. The Mid Module gets topped with the Forward Module which is the interstage adapter between the first and second stages.
While I give credit to Jeff Bezos for being honest about the situation, I have to wonder if Blue Origin has the flexibility and the drive to work the way he envisions. After years in the environment they're working, is it really capable of changing the way he wants? Bezos talks in the interview of launching two dozen New Glenn vehicles per year. Much like ULA talking about launching a similar number of Vulcan Centaurs, going from zero to two dozen isn't going to happen in a year. There's a lot of practice that has to happen before that.
I bet that isn't an actual flyable section, but a test section to allow them to make sure their infrastructure, stacking, transporting, setting up on the launch pad, yada yada, actually somewhat works before an actual flyable section shows up.
ReplyDeleteBezos and BO have been using test and mockup pieces for years as proof they're actually achieving anything.
The article from NASASpaceflight I linked in the picture caption gives the impression that's really what's going on. They emphasize the need for practicing these things.
DeleteSo, yeah, big whoop. They've had mockups of New Glenn for over 5 years now, supposedly to do launch integration and testing. But they mockups have been sitting in the manufacturing bays that hadn't been manufacturing anything for a long time.
DeleteI'll consider BO when they do two things: 1. Start serial production of BE4 engines, and get past the 2nd iteration of the engine. 2. Actually produce and deliver an actual flight-ready test New Glenn, not yet another mockup and integration model.
Until then, well, BO is full of... b.o.
Seriously, look at all the companies that started after BO and have launched multiple failures and successes. Heck, even the ChiComs have lapped BO.
If BO was publicly traded, I'd call it a scam. But it's still completely privately owned, so it's just one big giant ego project for Dr. Evil, I mean Bezos.
Dear Jeffie:
ReplyDeleteJabber ≠ Thrust.
Less shooting your mouth off, and more shooting rockets off, or else the jig is up. ;)
I have serious doubts as to whether Blue Origin will ever launch; the fact that Mr. Bezos hired Space X to launch Amazon's satellites hints that the answer is NO.
ReplyDeleteI will give him credit for one thing; he pays his engineering contractors better money than Space X, and the workload is much lower, at least from what I hear.
-- The key is to make a decision and move on. Too many companies are gripped by "paralysis of analysis" and nobody wants to make a decision. The approach that SpaceX uses is the counter to that. Make a decision and move on it; if it's wrong, correct it. If the whole path is wrong and you need to fix things, do it. Part of that is the freedom to be wrong. Nobody is right 100% of the time, especially when doing things nobody has ever done before. --
ReplyDeleteThat approach has a lot going for it. However, it must be modified once lives are visibly on the line. The Challenger disaster owed a lot to the unwillingness of any of the engineers at Morton Thiokol to say the launch should be postponed. According to reports, the political pressure on them to green-light the launch was so great that they felt they could not resist for personal reasons.
I think the record of successful crewed launches since the resumption of manned spaceflight in the US would say that the people working on these things realize the importance of being careful, but think of the Apollo 1 disaster not Challenger. That balance of needing to be careful while meeting a tough goal, regardless of how familiar it gets and how much the goal is pushed, seems to be the part that's hard to keep going. Certainly adding rules doesn't help because NASA was making the rules through Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.
DeleteTo paraphrase your point about the political pressure to green-light the launch, if the boss had said, "do you bet your life?" The answer wouldn't be yes or no, it would have been, "it's not our lives we're betting; it's the crew and everyone that worked on it." Maybe that would have emphasized what was at stake.
Grissom, Chaffee and White knew very well that if anything went really bad, they'd be the ones betting their lives, but they went.
The thing is, capsules are a magnitude simpler than a space plane. Especially a space plane that had to be rebuild pretty much after every launch.
DeleteCapsules maximize the interior useful space, too.
And the Shuttle had too many design compromises. Too many what-ifs and cost-cutting measures that ended up costing more and more.
I am looking at Dreamchaser and am reminded of one of the original plans for a shuttle. That being a personnel shuttle and critical cargo shuttle, small, about the size of... Dreamchaser (or DynaSoar) and heavy cargo being lifted separately. Since we developed docking back in Gemini and had that down pat under Apollo. But, no, had to do a one size fits all. Like using an aircraft carrier as a harbor ferry for 10 cars.
We're going to talk, and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. Because we're liberals, and reality can be changed by casting magic spells. If we talk and hold our mouth just so, the picture in our brains can be directly manifested in the physical universe by the force of our will alone.
ReplyDeleteNext, we're going to talk down inflation. Get your Whip Inflation Now logo items here.
To be fair, the originator of the Whip Inflation Now slogan was someone in the Ford administration.
DeleteThey gots 'em a purty barrel with a fancy-dancy paint job. What's YOU got, Elon?
ReplyDeleteElon: "Don't bother me right now, I'm busy launching everybody's satellites because there's nobody else to do it. That includes your, stuff, Jeffie."
*snerk*
That, and "Stainless looks so much better than your cheesy paintjob, Jeff."
DeleteAn employee is a lot more paranoid and hesitant to make a decision that could be incorrect when the result of that decision may cost their employer millions of dollars. Just human nature. Tough to find people willing to gamble millions on a decision, even if it's not their money. For every person who gambled big and won there's another person who gambled big....and lost. It's a rare person who can continue swinging for the fences when we risks are so high.
ReplyDelete