[AR] Re: new Glenn mockup

  • From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2021 09:57:48 -0700

On 11/10/2021 6:41 PM, James Fackert wrote:

Gradatim Ferociter.

...trying to figure out where ferociousness fits into the Blue picture.

My preferred translation for that slogan is "Ferociously Methodical".  My take on Blue Origin for a while has been that the company culture evolved a bit strong on the methodical side while Bezos was still primarily focusing on Amazon - not as much ferocity as you'd expect from an outfit founded by a New Tech type.  Now that he's taking charge at Blue, well, drastically changing culture at a company that's been around for twenty years can get interesting. But I'd expect things are headed in the direction of becoming more of an Amazon-like fast mover.  Likely a painful transition though, protracted as well.  I expect it'll be a couple years before we have definite indications how it's going.

  The step by step part, fits, and as Henry pointed out, this is a useful step to testy ground support equipment.
If you are still engineering with 20th century development tools.
If you were engineering with 21st century tools, you would know when you designed the carriers erectors etc. that they would fit and manage the loads, and there would not be much risk in using a real flight article for the first real fitting.

It's not just fit with the ground handling gear.  It's building up experience in the crew that'll operate the gear (which I think very unlikely to be totally automated.)  Rookie crew learning to operate heavy stage-handling machinery is EXACTLY where it's really good to have a hard-to-break test stage for them to make mistakes on. Marketing already got their value out of the fancy paint job in the photos we've seen.  Now it's time to scuff it up some while the operators climb the learning curve.

Henry



Other related posts: