12 thoughts on “BE-4”

  1. First order of business should be for Blue Origin to establish some revenue streams.

    Else Blue Origin will dry up and blow away with Bezos’ passing. Like Stratolaunch with Paul Allen’s passing.

      1. I’m not sure Bezos will ever go away. Given the penchant for life-extension among tech billionaires, he’ll probably still be a major player when we’re developing Titan’s casino industry in the early 2200’s.

  2. Man almost two years between first hotfire and full power? Their pace is molasses. Maybe in 2022 they’ll run an MDC.

  3. The Raptor has 80% of the thrust of the BE-4, however both engines are in the development phase and may see significant upgrades.

    However, I’m confident there will be a Raptor upgrade (v1.1 FT?) that matches the initial thrust of the BE-4, and the DoD and ULA will probably be happy to have two competing metholox engines in the same thrust range for the Vulcan rocket, even though swapping would require redesigning some of the bottom bits.

    Of course that assumes that Vulcan will have long-term viability when everyone else is landing and re-using their much larger and more capable booster stages.

    “Building the rockets of yesterday” isn’t exactly a winning slogan.

    1. It’s a dead certainty that further Raptor evolution will occur. SpaceX is already talking about Raptor models optimized for highest possible thrust that lack throttleability and even steerability for use on future versions of Super Heavy.

      Makes sense. A throttleable and steerable engine in the center of the cluster, and a few others in the outer ring, are all that should be needed to insure control authority for ascent and landing. Most of the engines could just be muscle-bound brutes built for strength alone.

      Having way fewer “fancy” engines would also benefit both reliability and maintainability.

      I don’t know it it’s even going to be physically possible for the Raptor to follow in the footsteps of the Merlin’s nearly 3:1 thrust improvement in less than a decade, but, if so, future versions of SHS could have payload capacities to LEO that would match or even exceed the 300 tonnes posited for the original ITS design back in 2016. By the end of the 2020’s, we could find SpaceX building SHS’s that are as much taller and more capable than the Block 5 F9’s are anent their v1.0 forbears.

      1. Just a guess, but given where SpaceX was in maturity and funding back then vs. where they are today, I’m guessing the initial version of Raptor is much closer to its ultimate performance than was the initial version of Merlin.

        P.S. “Anent” is uncommon and sounds affected to my ear. Just wondering how you started using it? Thanks.

        1. Anent is a fine old two-syllable word that has unaccountably fallen into disuse. Why the three-word, four-syllable phrase “with respect to” ever replaced it in common usage is a linguistic mystery as the usual evolution is in the opposite direction, at least in American English. “Anent” is quicker to write and to say than “with respect to” and is even faster to say than the godawful texting-as-latter-day-shorthand abomination “wrt.” So I’m indulging in a modest one-man campaign to bring “anent” back from undeserved dusty obscurity.

        2. I agree that the Raptor is likely much closer to its final performance numbers. The existing size give tremendous multi-engine redundancy to Super Heavy, and I’m not sure where any sweet spot would be regarding ultimate size.

          As engines are scaled up beyond some point, they should encounter a scaling law that shows a linear decrease in thrust to weight ratio with size, simply because the combustion chamber and bell are like a pressure vessels whose weight scales linearly with volume, whereas optimized thrust scales with cross sectional area. As a thought experiment, if you used four sets of Raptor turbopumps to feed one giant combustion chamber, what happens to the weight and length compared to using four individual Raptors?

          And “anent”? Weel, it’s a lang story but th’ wuid ne’er pure disappeared. Ah min’ back when th’ SLS project was first gettin’ started, it seems loch eons ago, th’ sassenach leid hadnae evolved as much as it is the-day.

          Translation: The English language continues to evolve on pace with the SLS. Many of the words and phrases used in its early development now seem quaint and antiquated, like “low risk rapid development” and “Lunar Gateway.” Looking back, why would we need a gateway to the moon? Is their a fence around it or something? But that’s apparently how our language worked back then.

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