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Who would win in a bar fight, BE-4 or Raptor? And if an SSME walked in on the fight, whose side would it take?
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Feb 23, 2021 04:00
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 17:41 |
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poisonpill posted:Is this all vanity projects? What’s the hope for profit here? Satellite launch is a pretty big business. Historically, it's been a hard business to break into because of the enormous costs involved, and so it was the province of governments and enormous aerospace corporations like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It's only recently that "new space" startups have started to prove themselves as viable in the market. Blue Origin's BE-4 rocket engine, the one in the OP, was selected for ULA's new Vulcan booster (which is to succeed the current workhorse Atlas and Delta vehicles), and will also be used on Blue Origin's own "New Glenn" orbital booster. On a smaller scale, their suborbital New Shepard rocket looks close to being ready to start carrying human tourists to the edge of space for a few minutes at a time. As for the other big one, SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 first stage has brought down launch costs by something like a factor of six (it's the first real shakeup in the industry in decades), and their Dragon spacecraft is now regularly ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA also just recently selected SpaceX's great big Starship design (you may have seen videos of it landing and/or exploding in test flights) as the lander craft for Project Artemis.
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May 8, 2021 17:27
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