[AR] Re: new glenn mockup
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket list <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2021 23:12:33 -0500 (EST)
On Thu, 11 Nov 2021, James Fackert wrote:
I keep hoping that the thousands of Blue Origin employees working for
years are building stuff to fly soon, but it has not surfaced yet...
They have a totally different and very closed development strategy to
Spacex's working in plain view approach.
While not disagreeing that Blue Origin is secretive and they really don't
seem to have accomplished as much as they should have, it's far from the
only company of which that can be said...
While SpaceX definitely has some more concrete accomplishments to its
credit, they too are *far* behind their original schedule, to say nothing
of things which have just fallen off the agenda altogether, like Falcon 9
second-stage reuse.
And SpaceX "working in plain view" is a thundering half-truth if there
ever was one. SpaceX comes out into sorta-plain view when it's time to
run flight tests, but that's pretty much inevitable anyway. Their level
of commitment to "in plain view" can be judged from the fact that they've
never openly admitted that the "engine anomaly" on Falcon 9 flight #4 was
a violent engine failure, *not* just a quiet commanded shutdown. (The
press releases were very carefully worded to encourage incautious readers
to jump to incorrect conclusions -- e.g., they say that a shutdown command
was *issued*, but never actually say that the engine obeyed it, or indeed
that there was any engine left to obey it.) We'd see even less if they
weren't doing a lot of business with a customer (NASA) who insists on a
certain amount of disclosure.
Henry
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