Finally some real competition for SpaceX?

Amid all the excitement of the last while I wanted to highlight one bit of good news.  Last week a bunch of stuff happened with regard to space launches.  Some bad as well with SpaceX's Starship exploded spectacularly (seriously watch if you haven't seen it).   They're still sort of supposed to be exploding at this point in testing but it exploded much earlier than expected and the danger of debris meant some flights had to be diverted.  But we had a couple more landers heading off to the Moon.  We had a fun re-entry science mission.  And we had Blue Origin's long awaited New Glenn launched for the first time and get right to its target orbit.

Blue Origin is a company that actually started slightly earlier than SpaceX but never had the other's sense of urgency.  Instead its motto has been “Gradatim ferociter” or "step by step, ferociously" with turtles reaching towards space on the original logo.  The company had spent a lot of time doing suborbital hops instead of aiming straight for orbit like SpaceX did.

But they've finally arrived and did so with aplomb.  Nobody would trust a real satellite to the first orbital launch of a space company but New Glenn was able to get the payload it carried into a high orbit and conduct two separate burns from its upper stage.  Even for organizations with long track records with orbital rockets par for the course seems to be two fiery explosions for each new model of rocket.  Typically one of the first few explodes and the group figures out what went wrong and fixes it so it doesn't happen again.  Then later some other issue makes a rocket explode and they fix that and carry on launching.  

Sometimes its one failure or three.  Sometimes, really only ULA seems to do this, there are no fiery explosions at all.  Sometimes, really only with poor braindrained ROSCOSMOS, rockets that have worked reliably for decades start having problems again.  But usually its two like with India's PSLV or Europe's Ariane 5 or Japan's H-II etc.

Now Blue was also trying to land the rocket's booster like SpaceX does and that failed but nobody has ever managed that on the first try so I don't hold it against them.

It's hard to get a sense of scale from launch videos but New Glenn is a very big rocket.  Bigger than essentially anything making it to orbit yet except SLS.  Here it is between SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 and Heavy and its Starship that has yet to reach orbit (but probably could if they didn't mind creating a huge piece of space debris).

Comparing just Falcon 9 and New Glenn for the moment, it can get a lot more payload to orbit.  First of all the fairing, the shell at the front that protects the payload, is 7 meters in diameter for the New Glen but Falcon 9 only has 5 meters even with the bulging fairing.  7 isn't that much bigger than 5 but remember that its volume instead of diameter that's the most important thing so it's more like 2.5 times as big.  If you have a really dense satellite or other payload you want to loft that won't matter - but it often does.

In terms of mass they can loft lets look at Low Earth Orbit (LEO) first.  Close to the Earth but only able to see a bit of it at a time that's where you want cameras looking down and the new generation of internet communication satellites like Starlink.  The modern Falcon 9, much improved since the original can get 17.5 metric tons of stuff up to LEO while still landing the booster on a barge in the water.  

New Glenn can lift over twice as much, 45 tons.

Lets say you want to go to GEostationary Orbit (GEO) instead.  For there the Falcon 9 can haul 5.5 tons and New Glenn 13.6 tons.  That's a bit of a better ratio than LEO and that's because New Glenn uses a hydrogen second stage while SpaceX uses the same kerosene fuel it uses in the first stage.  As I mentioned way back in my post series on rockets that to reach higher velocities it's easier to increase the exhaust velocity by the same amount rather than having to increase the ratio of fuel to payload exponentially.  Kerosene is dense and it's easier to get a good mass ratio but the propellant travels more slowly.  Together that means that as the final target speed gets faster hydrogen tends to do better.  Another way of looking at it is that as the speed of a rocket gets closer to the speed of the propellant more of the energy produced ends up in the rocket rather than the propellant.

But the bottom line is that New Glenn can get more than twice as much stuff to space per launch as SpaceX can.  The thing is, though, that New Glenn is apparently going to sell launches for $110 million each while SpaceX's commercial prices are currently $67 million, a lot less than a factor of 2.5.

Now, SpaceX can go lower.  Rumor is it takes them about $15 million to launch a rocket that lets them re-use the faring and booster.  But they've been raking the money in for each launch until now and if they actually end up having some competition they'll have to finally cut prices and make space cheaper for everyone else who wants to do interesting things there.  I have no idea how much New Glenn costs and it's possible that with Jeff Bezos's deep pockets they're actually selling each launch at a loss right now.  In fact given the loss of the booster that's a near certainty.  And that isn't the whole story either, SpaceX has a very long track record now and while they did eventually have a third launch failure with launch 354, well, they had had hundreds of successful launches before that.  New Glenn, by contrast, has exactly one successful launch so far and realistically is probably going to lose at least one of the next ten.

But as Blue starts landing boosters and gets the bugs shaken out I really think that SpaceX is going to have to start cutting prices to compete, good news for everyone else who wants to put stuff into space.