Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video) | Hacker News Reader

Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video)

blueorigin.com

67 pointsmkl99 comments

We're really spoiled by SpaceX, RocketLab and other live streams. In comparison this was pretty unspectacular - they did have camera(s?) on the booster and on the second stage, but only showed them for a few seconds during the stream, and the picture was breaking up constantly. The stream itself, video and timeline animation, was multiple seconds delayed behind the audio callouts in the background. The animated position of the first stage was clearly wrong, it was already showing almost on the ground when the re-entry burn was called out. Lots of things to work on for future launches, if they want these streams to be as watchable as people are used to.

Although that's all details, not to detract from the feat of reaching orbit on their first attempt. That's not something that happened very often and worth significant praise.

Definitely spoiled by SpaceX's polish. I'm not sure how much of the displayed telemetry was right, as the altitude of Stage 2 was shown as decreasing down and down until suddenly they said it was in orbit. The imperial units don't help understanding either.

It's normal for altitude to decrease while the second stage builds up to orbital velocity; the Shuttle did the same thing.

Like all rockets, the second stage has a thrust/weight ratio substantially lower than 1 on ignition, and the motor points far away from the gravity vector, so there's a bit of a race between the vehicle trying to fall down, and the rocket motor trying to accelerate it to orbital velocity. The fact that the final orbit was 100 miles exactly suggests this all went according to plan.

IIRC when I played KSP it was necessary to point slightly down if you wanted to reach orbit in a continuous burn, rather than waiting to burn more at perigee. Is that true in general?

(was playing with a mod that models ullage, so relighting was quite finicky)

There's a great Eager Space youtube video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxEy9mDeq40

Imperial units helped me

I also was discussing this with my colleague. This looks more like an ULA stream than a SpaceX stream. Bad telemetry, imperial instead of metric units, almost no cameras and the cameras that were shown were potato quality, planned holds, almost no reactions from the presenters or any audience.

Good to have some competition in this space though. That is what truly matters. The livestream is just marketing and a bit of fun/showing off.

I imagine once Amazon Kuiper gets up and running things will improve. People forget SpaceX has the massive advantage of having multiple starlink connections on their flights, so internet access direct to the ship has become incredibly easy for them.

Meanwhile everyone else relies on a very well tuned ground connection that requires precision movements to keep the connection stable, and is impacted by cloud and atmosphere.

I thought it was pretty impressive for a first attempt .

SpaceX and RocketLab had loads of practice, their early streams were not particularly impressive .

Also these days SpaceX has the benefit of Starlink so their capability is far ahead , they however ruin it all by doing through Twitter/X

First attempt maybe, but they have streamed New Shepard launches many times before, so the company is not exactly a newbie at this overall. Of course, an orbital launch provides a very different level of challenges compared to a vertical hop to 100km.

I'm guessing the camera feeds weren't amazing because they don't have a starlink antenna on the rocket :P I'm guessing Kuiper isn't nearly as close to being ready

The second stage of New Glenn just reached orbit, fate of the first stage (which attempted a re-entry burn and soft landing) is unknown.

I'm curious about the thrust/weight ratio of this rocket. It seemed to really take its time clearing the tower and getting to 10,000 feet. Is it possible they're running the engines at reduced thrust for this first launch?

Looks like they lost the booster

It will turn up.

Might be, but those shock diamonds are not a great sign for their nozzles despite being beautiful

> Might be, but those shock diamonds are not a great sign for their nozzles despite being beautiful

Shock diamonds do not determine nozzle health/stability. The diamonds themselves are 100% part of nominal operation.

What you're looking for is flow separation from the nozzle because it's under expanded leading possible instability. Scott Manly did a great bit on it[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/l5l3CHWoHSI?t=261

Shock diamonds are normal for first stages. Unless you're smarter than BO/SpaceX/ULA engineers and want to tell us more, I call BS on your post.

Could you elaborate on that? Why would the exhaust reflecting off the shock wave cause damage to the nozzle?

I don't think it implies damage, but it implies that the exhaust pressure is lower than the outside air pressure (which you would not want for perfect efficiency). That's normal though because the first stage operates in a wide range of pressure, and you can only adjust it for one exhaust pressure. So mach diamonds on liftoff should be normal.

Mach diamonds are absolutely normal and expected. Not sure what GP is talking about.

Maybe he means the New Glenn should have had aerospike engines.

The speed of that take off, or lack of, was wild. I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.

The methane blue looked spectacular.

> I don't think I've ever seen a rocket build up its speed so slowly.

New-Glenn has a low thrust to weight ratio vs other rockets and lower engine chamber pressure than some other engines to put less stress on the rocket and engines for greater reusability.

But the obvious cost here is less mass to orbit. But I suspect it's a given that they'll tweak up the margins once they have more flights under their belt.

That is a trajectory optimized for payload mass, with a set amount of first stage thrust. It is quite typical, historically. It just looks extra slow since the New Glenn rocket is quite enormous relative to historic rockets.

An impressive first flight by any measure!

No, that's not true. Back of the envelope estimates for New Glenn's launch tonight give a thrust to weight ratio of 1.2.

For the Space Shuttle, t/w at launch was 1.5, the same is true for Falcon and Starship. Delta Heavy was around 1.3. Saturn V was 1.2. None of this has anything to do with optimizing the trajectory.

Historic rockets around 1.2, including Shuttle, check your numbers. Starship is not a "historic rocket". It and Falcon 9 fly a trajectory that is optimized for something else, not max payload for a set first stage thrust.

The shuttle stack weighted 4.5 million lbs at takeoff and had a total thrust of about 6.8 million lbf, giving a thrust to weight ratio of 1.5.

That is incorrect. Shuttle liftoff thrust was 5.7 million pounds, giving a ratio of 1.25.

At liftoff, each SRB produces 2.65 million pounds thrust [1]. Using Wikipedia numbers instead (2.8 million pounds for SRB thrust at liftoff [2]) gives a liftoff thrust to weight ratio of 1.33. The 3xSME produce 0.4 million pounds thrust at liftoff. The SRB thrust did increase as the burn progressed, then ramped down for max Q.

People are accustomed to SpaceX rockets rapid acceleration, since they conduct most launches these days, but historic rockets (and New Glenn) accelerated more slowly off the pad.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/reference/the-space-shuttle/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...

Your math is wrong (you left out two of the main engines):

1) SSME thrust is 418k lbf. The shuttle has three engines, so 1.25M lbf

2) SRB is 2.65 M lbf. Two boosters give 5.3M lbf.

3) That sums up to 6.6M lbf

4) Shuttle weighs 4.4 million lbs.

5) That works out to a 1.5 thrust-to-weight ratio at sea level launch.

If you still don't believe, watch a Shuttle launch and time how long it takes to clear the tower. You'll get the same answer (vertical acceleration at about 1.5g)

Oops, you're right!

So legacy launch vehicles with the exception of Shuttle lift of leisurely.

This SE answer also calculates shuttle liftoff TWR to around 1.5:

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/58800

If my KSP experience tells me something it needs more boosters

Yes, those seven blue spikes were pretty amazing.

Doesn't show the diamonds, but sure shows that blue glow.

https://xcancel.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/187979379253615860...

Here's a good view: https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6935

Starships first flight felt similarly slow, watched in person.

Here's a mirror of the video (the thing in OP appears to have been livestream-only?)

https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859 ("New Glenn Mission NG-1 Webcast")

(linked at t-20s)

Can someone remix the audio to Swedish black metal or something better?

I'm always so jealous of the celebrations in these streams. Pressing deploy to update a service in production seems so much more mundane in comparison, heh. Maybe we should be better at celebrating wins in tech?

We did celebrate like this when software releases were something that happened every couple of years and with loads of press coverage, hype leading up to the release, and usually in a physical media with packaging and fancy art accompanying it

Ah, before my time. But I can certainly imagine the excitedness, not to say the nervousness, when sending the final master of some software to be burned into thousands of CD-roms. No easy way to recover if there's a bug there! I've always been impressed with how I never came across any bugs when playing nintendo/cartridge games, couldn't just ship something buggy and rely on some online update back then.

There are too much and overacted already, on (other than this) barely interesting things.

This is not Hollywood or the Broadway (which actually also suffers from the mandatory celebratory pressure, justified or not [1]).

Well completed good work is a reward in itself (see bulk of old NASA reels). For releasing the desire of self celebratory acts we have LinkedIn, Youtube and other social media just for this kind of overinflated complacency.

[1] https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/01/09/ovation-inflati...

I wonder how you'd felt working almost a decade and never saw a fruit of your work until that one moment where you can feel the rumble in your guts.

I guess like those on NASA reels. Looks more honest than cloning the faboys at yet another music festival vibe.

I think there needs to be some type of open source space exploration foundation. It's nice billionaires have all these toy space rocket companies, but I think it would feel even more fun if a not for profit, where millions of people can participate somehow were involved.

Space shouldn't be owned by 2 people.

There is a Danish amateur space program, working towards sending a human on a suborbital flight beyond the Karman line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Suborbitals

Baby steps I know, but still

Very nice, thanks.

Great launch guys!

Primary objective: Orbit [y]

Sub-objectives:

1. [y] Liftoff

2. [y] Max-Q

3. [y] Main engine cut-off

4. [y] Stage separation

5. [y] Stage 2 ignition

6. [y] Space (100km)

7. [y] Fairing separation

8. [y] Booster re-entry burn

9. [X] Booster landing at sea

10. [y] Secondary engine cut-off

11. [X] HN unicode support for check mark

I would either use [y]/[n] or [x]/[ ], the current [y]/[X] is a bit confusing.

Probably can use x vs empty to make the checkboxes less confusing.

next time! :)

Someone on HN care to explain where BO are on their journey, relative standing to SpaceX. If SpaceX ceases to exist, how well served will we be by BO as an alternative?

They’re roughly 25 years old, they now have the largest operational orbital rocket ever built even if it’s likely SpaceX soon blows them out of the water with Starship and Super Heavy. They’ve taken a long time to get to orbit and haven’t quite cracked partial reusability but they’re now an active player and reaching orbit on their first try is impressive. The iterative error tolerant development philosophy of SpaceX has resulted in far faster innovation and Blue Origin has benefited from SpaceX being a major forcing function to move the US Space program primarily to private launch/space craft providers and proving orbital booster reuse was possible in the first place. Finally Blue Origin doesn’t have an operational orbital crew capsule or cargo spacecraft. Losing SpaceX would mean the US would at least temporarily lose its crew launch capability entirely and some of its ISS resupply capabilities, launch cadence would fall off a cliff, and overall industry innovation would suffer.

Falcon Heavy is operational, and bigger than New Glenn

Falcon Heavy: 65t to LEO

New Glenn: 45t to LEO

True FH has better LEO performance but NG has better GEO/GTO performance (the main difference coming from the more powerful LH2 upper stage). The difference in fuel in the NG will probably mean a higher cost for NG (amongst a host of other reasons), but the question is by how much. FH also has to fully discard all the Stage 0/1 boosters to achieve 65t LEO. SpaceX on the other hand get much better economies of scale as they launch far more frequently.

Okay, but you forgot to mention these caveats:

- 65t is the fully expendable configuration

- 57t is the core-expendable, side-booster only reuse configuration

- 28t is the all booster reuse configuration

- the payload adapter is the same as falcon 9 and therefore can only carry 18 tons

- there are no plans to build payload adapters to launch payloads heavier than 18 tons

And on the Blue Origin side:

- Blue Origin intends to reuse the booster on every flight

- Future payloads need the full 45 ton payload capacity

The rocket BO sent up today is bigger than SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy!? If I understood correctly, that's really impressive. It would also explain why it appeared slow to rise at the start of the launch.

No, it's much smaller (though still a huge rocket). It appears to rise slowly because it accelerates more slowly than Starship (~1.2g vs ~1.5g when clearing the launch tower).

People are saying things about Starship not yet being an orbital rocket because of technicalities. The reality is we have two huge rockets, made by American companies, that can now reach orbit, and that's pretty amazing.

Starship is an orbital rocket, and will achieve actual orbit in few months, but I don’t think they are ready for a customer anytime soon, particularly an external one.

That is entirely by choice, they want to focus their attention on iteration now, which is sensible as falcon 9 and heavy are more than enough to compete today.

For a buyer in next two years it is either falcon heavy or new glen if they want heavy lift today.

No, starship/superheavy is bigger. But it hasn’t technically reached orbit yet.

Also, crucially, this was an operational test by BO whereas Starship and Super Heavy are still in developmental testing. New Glenn will now start launching commercial payloads assuming the outcome doesn’t reveal any problems with the overall launch.

I'm not sure that's a crucial difference. SpaceX doesn't operate the way the rest of the launch industry does. They could keep launching any of the last few iterations if they wanted, and it would be perfectly capable of reaching orbit and carrying a payload. Unclear what size payload from the info we have.

Is it actually capable of carrying a payload? Have they confirmed that? The fuel graphs they show during launcheshave always shown the ship being full on launch, empty by the end, it's not clear to me how they would carry cargo in addition to what they're showing now.

All those reentry tiles, reentry & burn back fuel, and header tanks add up to a lot of launch weight that wouldn't be needed in an expendable mission profile.

Sure, but that's not what this is about. The quoted capacity of Starship is supposed to be for a fully rapidly reusable Starship

So the question remains: is the current Starship design capable of carrying a commercial payload to at least LEO, and then come back safely down as they demonstrated?

I don't see how that is relevant? Surely you'd be comparing against other launch vehicles, which are all expendable.

Not just that, they would have launched RocketLab's ESCAPADE on their first flight, if they hadn't missed the launch window.

Thanks for clarifying.

Bigger than Falcon 9, smaller than Falcon Heavy. Smaller than Starship/Super Heavy.

I'm comparing here on payload capacity to LEO

Their rocket is closest to capabilities to a falcon-heavy [1], but to get to the space-x level, they need to demonstrate reusability, turn around times, and the ability to produce second stages once every 2&3 days, whilst maintaining an operational lunch tempo of 1 lunch every 2 days [2]

1: https://youtu.be/xKt0hn4R_uU?si=kE2bTotS1r08RYBm

2: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/spacex-is-superb-at-re...

Intermittent fasting?

People can attempt to explain it, but it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

SpaceX have a much more agile approach, and Blue Origin are following a more traditional waterfall style approach, to put it in software engineering project terms. While it may seem obvious that one is better than the other, I think it’s hard to say conclusively.

The different approaches mean that while SpaceX might have more milestones under their belt, Blue Origin could leapfrog them on some aspects. The fact this first launch went as well as it did is an amazing feat, SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.

What we can say however is that the endgame of Starship will be far more capable than the endgame of New Glenn. If or when either reaches that point remains to be seen.

> SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.

That is incorrect. Both F9 and FH have successfully launched on the first try, with full primary mission success.

F1 (20 years ago) had 3 failed flights and succeeded on the 4th flight.

Starship hasn't had an operational flight yet.

I see your point but disagree in the conclusion. F1 and F9 are a clear lineage, same engines, scaled up somewhat. It's fairly clear that their experience with F1's failures directly contributed to F9's early successes.

FH is again part of that same lineage. So much of that was a known quantity already. I know that it took way longer to build because it turned out to be way harder than expected, but it was still so much closer than SpaceX's other vehicles.

Also, where F9 built on F1's failures, it also built on its own failures to land, and took a very iterative approach to re-use.

Starship hasn't had an operational flight, no, but neither has New Glenn, and yet NG jumped straight to a flight somewhat equivalent to Starship's flight test 4?

My gut feeling is that SpaceX are far ahead of Blue Origin, but it's hard to compare because of the radically different approaches.

If Falcon 1 is to be thrown into the ring for consideration due to engine similarity, then we'd have to figure out where Vulcan fits. It already flew the same kind of engines that powered New Glenn.

Just a thought.

Very fair point. In some ways that would make NG a more iterative approach, but Vulcan is another example of, at least mostly, a waterfall approach.

SpaceX is way ahead of everyone. Falcon 9 has launched 425 times (127 in 2024 alone), and landed the first stage successfully in 398 of 410 attempts (most of their flights are with reused boosters). New Glenn has higher lift capacity than Falcon 9, but much lower than SpaceX's Starship, which has reached orbital velocity (didn't yet try for actual orbit) and whose Super Heavy booster has had a partially successful landing.

If SpaceX suddenly vanished, along with all its people and knowledge, Blue Origin could catch up to SpaceX's current capabilities, but it would take many years. If SpaceX shut down but Blue Origin and RocketLab hired all their people, things would progress much faster.

> partially successful landing

Outsiders like myself were too blown away by the 'chopsticks' catch to notice imperfections. What were they? (I noticed there was fire at the bottom of the booster for some time after the catch)

The booster was too damaged to fly again. The chopstick catch was amazing though.

They seem to be focused on different things at the moment. SpaceX has the Falcon and Falcon Heavy for Earth orbit payloads. New Glenn is meant for a similar commercial set of missions. Starship is meant for interplanetary missions and is very different. It has twice the thrust as New Glenn, can carry more than 2x the payload to LEO, and is fully reusable. New Glenn has only a reusable first stage. New Glenn is trying to land on boats, while SpaceX achieved this in 2016. In terms of payload to LEO and mission profile, the New Glenn is more like the Falcon Heavy, which had its maiden flight in 2018. So it’s probably fair to say that Blue Origin is 5-10 years behind SpaceX.

12 years passed between SpaceX's first orbital flight (2008) and their first orbital flight with humans aboard (2020). SpaceX will probably reach Mars orbit before 2030.

Blue Origin is likely at least a decade behind, though they haven't taken the same path and have the benefit of not being first.

Curious to see how this moves forward. Tesla (arguably) launched the first mass-appeal electric vehicles, but there are highly competitive alternatives now, despite the massive headstart Tesla had. Hopefully this will be true for rockets too.

I’d also be interested to understand what Blue Origin’s proposition is?

Does it have a capability advantage over SpaceX? A cost advantage?

A cost advantage?

Over Falcon Heavy? very likely. Over Starship? Probably not.

Capability advantage?

Over Falcon Heavy and Starship? As far as I know, Starship will not have an expendable fairing, nor is a larger payload door a priority and the internal reinforcement cuts into the payload shape, so if you want to launch voluminous payloads, the 7 meter diameter fairing of New Glenn fills that niche.

Seems to be some debris falling from the ship at 1h 58m 16s of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXysNxbGdCg&t=1h58m16s

Hopefully nothing critical. EDIT: it was right before separation, so perhaps related to that.

That's probably ice. It's always ice.

The live stream needed a lot of work. The first stage may have exploded but it was unclear because the video if it stopped before it even got close. The second stage apparently reached orbit, but it was a very low orbit (100 miles). Not bad for a first attempt, but still a ways to go.

Blue Origin is a rocket company, not a live streaming company. The low orbit is the target orbit, and they will attempt to boost it to medium earth orbit later in the flight.

By any standard getting to orbit on the maiden launch of a new vehicle is an incredible achievement. You have to give them a pass on the live stream.

I am not sure if they hit their target orbit, since they didn’t declare that beforehand (at least on the stream). When they announced reaching orbit on the stream, they were only at 100 miles, below where Sputnik 1 was, and technically very low earth orbit. Note that the second stage actually dropped in altitude from its peak (above 120 miles). I saw your other comment saying this is typical. I do agree 100 miles is suspiciously exact. It would be interesting to see if they had declared their goals clearly somewhere.

It took SpaceX about 1-2 years to nail landings on the drone ships, and about 3-4 to nail video feeds of that happening. There’s something kinda funny about that.

Nothing funny about it. How would you get the signal out? Plasma from re-entry is a near-perfect radio shield. We only get nice crisp images from starship now because of Starlink.

Remember all the old Apollo and even Shuttle missions where the Mission Control would be calling out "____, do you read me" during a landing attempt? This is why.

I know why, but it's funny because connectivity is essentially a solved issue in the modern world (most people don't sit under landing rockets), whereas rocket science is... well, ... rocket science.

And now they use Starlink for their video feeds.

Per the linked page, the final orbit is 19,300 x 2,400 km (i.e. a medium orbit) and that should take at least a couple hours to reach, because of that raised periapsis. They haven't yet achieved that, despite the livestream ending. Low orbit is not this flight's goal.

Video player not working for me.

The broadcast is over. perihelions linked a YouTube version that lets you replay: https://youtu.be/KXysNxbGdCg?t=6859

Related discussion on this mission (148 points, 3 days ago, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42680510

Edit: Which as you point out was delayed, as it continues to be.

That was the first attempt, which was scrubbed. This is the second attempt (which has just been delayed from T-11 minutes to T-34 minutes).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com