Is Blue Origin a meme?

It's going to have delays like all rockets
So look for a launch in 2020
They aren't even building hardware

When will people realize that SpaceX-vs-BO is like blue-vs-indigo, when new space-vs-old space is what we should be focusing on. NASA needs to have a shit load of bureaucracy and corruption and pork scooped out and dumped by the wayside.

it's funposting

also because spacex fans are so easily triggered

It's not exactly hard to get a job at Lockheed. I'm not sure about Blue Origin, but considering how it is pretty much meme tier, I imagine the selection process was competitive.

Anyone that actually gets partisan about blue origin and spacex is being silly. The fact that two wealthy committed people with armies of engineers and scientists are competing in this area is amazing.

If you think about it,it's astonishing that more billionaires don't do this-there are like 1800 of them in the world, but most do nothing interesting with all of that wealth.

NASA is dead as fuck friend.

They have an engine, BE-4, which was fully assembled for the first time a few weeks ago, pic related. Of course, an engine alone does not a rocket make, and figuring out how to mount 7 of these things on one rocket, have the rocket handle all the structural loads of full and partial thrust, launch, reentry, landing, and revising everything once they get data back to understand what's wearing out the fastest, etc, is going to take a while.

At the pace we've seen BO moving, I don't expect NG to fly before 2020. I do expect some kind of grasshopper-like test vehicle which will inform and verify BO's software dev team and the engine characteristics during powered descent as well. I'm sure they learned lessons building NS, but those lessons won't apply exactly to NG, and with an entirely new engine that's much more powerful and complex it'll be a good idea to iron out the bugs by only risking one engine and a cheap prototype than the entire rocket.

>an engine alone does not a rocket make
cringe

They end up like Branson at best, surrounded by yes men and unwilling to look seriously at reality going on around them.

Virgin Galactic is going nowhere and will continue to go nowhere. Hybrid motors are a shitty meme and the feathering wing system is an inferior system compared to a lifting body with stubby wings.

Hark! A negro.

I have a quick question for you, since you seem to know your shit

Where are the major stresses in the rocket nozzle during takeoff? apart from the combustion chamber, what about the actual throat and exhaust sections? I've always been curious structurally why they dont just break apart

it also helps that the Air Force is paying ULA to flight test their engine for them

I feel like a few months of reading shit about rocketry & flying would let you design something better than whatever they are doing.

Pretty much.

Hybrid motors are shit because it's essentially impossible to get even close to a 100% fuel-oxidizer mixture ratio by passing a gas over a solid, meaning a good amount of propellant is simply wasted as it flows out of the nozzle. They also change in efficiency, thrust, and combustion stability as the fuel burns away and the channel widens as a result. They're also difficult to even light off in the first place because you have to heat the solid fuel grain to ignition temperature then start passing oxidizer over it in order to start combustion, and start enough combustion that the heat released can keep the reaction going. A simple pressure or electrically pumped liquid rocket engine would have been a far better choice, but Branson wanted to be 'ground breaking' I guess.

The feathering wing design is just retarded and adds points of failure and reduces control authority in exchange for slightly more drag.

>Where are the major stresses in the rocket nozzle during takeoff

I assume you just mean when the rocket is running.

The major stresses are tension, which is good because metals are very good at handling tension forces. There's also the extremely powerful sound, which can be bad because it can make the nozzle oscillate in a harmonic resonance and tear itself apart if you design your injector poorly and end up with a rotating flame, among other design elements.

When the rocket is running the hot gasses rush from the high pressure region of the combustion chamber and through the throat of the nozzle, which accelerates them to the speed of sound. They then expand sideways through the diverging part of the nozzle and push against it, making the gasses move even faster and go hypersonic, and in doing so apply more force that gets transferred through the engine and into the rocket. The radial expansion of the exhaust inside the diverging part of the nozzle essentially inflates the nozzle. If the nozzle is too long and the exhaust gasses reach ambient pressure inside the nozzle, they can separate from the nozzle wall, which can cause the plume to slam back and forth and rip the nozzle apart. In a vacuum this doesn't happen because there's no ambient pressure, but at sea level it's a serious concern.