Ah, it’s fine. RAM’s cheap.

Wait, what now? Oh. Oh dear.

Reusable

Let’s save that term for hardware that’s demonstrated reuse in operational flights. So far, I think it’s only Falcon 9, New Shepard, and Electron that have launched paying customers on a reused booster.

Well, my rocket can get 250 tons to LEO. It’s also just a CAD model but like 75% of these are too.

SpaceX was founded in 2002, and announced Falcon 9 in 2005. By 2010 they launched, in 2013 they started propulsive landing experiments, and in 2015/16 they landed on a pad / a drone ship. About 13 years from founding to reuse, and ten years from F9 announcement to reuse.

Blue Origin was founded in 2000, declared first stage reuse a priority in 2013, announced New Glenn in 2016, launched in early 2025, and landed in late 2025. 25 years from founding to reuse, and 9 years from NG announcement to reuse.

I guess the difference is that SpaceX was making money in those intervening years, and Blue was content to, uh, do a lot of simulations I guess.

The view from the NSF stream right now looks like the lower section blew open sideways. Maybe they were pressure testing the methane tank and it didn’t go well?

So that’s a proposed upgrade from about 2,460 kN to 2,847 kN per BE-4, or about 15-16%. If nothing else it’ll help NG do something other than crawl upwards off the pad. (For reference, Wikipedia says Raptor 1 was 1,810 kN, R2 is 2,260 kN, and R3 will be 2,750 kN.)

Also, this part about the heavy variant just bugs me:

The vehicle carries over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, over 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. Additionally, the 9x4 vehicle will feature a larger 8.7-meter fairing.

Rocket companies saying their paper rockets do something (in the present tense) is terrible. It does nothing yet. It’s a design, not a vehicle. But BO can’t even keep that present-future tense consistent within the same paragraph.

In the revolutionary context, the extra days were all piled into the end of the year. Kind of a special short month, or more realistically a set of days not in a month. But yeah, leap days were added there when necessary.

Twelve months of five weeks of six days plus five or six days at the end for Christmas and New Years would absolutely rule. As long as weeks became 4+2 and not 5+1, anyway. I say we drop Thursdays and just keep the rest of the day names, they’re fine.

It takes a while to go from orbital insertion to operational orbit, but that would be the last 40ish launches worth of satellites working their way up.

Maybe a good fraction of them are parked as on-orbit backups?