[gangstead]

The incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course. The exciting thing in this announcement is the new 9x4 configuration (9 and 4 engines in the first and second stages vs the current 7x2). They don't mention whether the tanks will get stretched to allow for more fuel, or if this just burns the fuel faster. Starship generations keep getting both more engines and longer.

[bryanlarsen]

Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.

Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.

New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also just barely a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.

[Veedrac]

Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9.

Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I don't know a simpler way to estimate this than to run a simulation, and I don't have one with numbers I can toggle.

[adgjlsfhk1]

> New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass.

To be fair, the Falcon Heavy has way too little fairing volume for it's lift capacity (and apparently it is in the process of getting an extra 50% or so?)

[bryanlarsen]

The numbers:

BE-4 is 140 bar chamber pressure vs SpaceX Raptor 2 at 350 bar. Thrust to weight of BE-4 is 80:1 vs Raptor2 at 140:1.

I don't think the capabilities are as different as those numbers imply. I believe that it's due to the conservativeness of Blue Origin and SpaceX's willingness to blow up hundreds of engines on the test stand to iteratively push the margins.

[zaphoyd]

Based on the photo posted by the Blue Origin CEO the tanks are definitely getting stretched (also looks like a slightly different fin, landing leg, and fairing config)

[JumpCrisscross]

> incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course

Blue Origin is matching from Raptor 2 to Raptor 3. Comparing thrust at sea level, lbf:

Raptor 2 | 507,000 [1]

Raptor 3 | 617,000 [1]

BE-4 | 557,143

BE-4' | 642,857

BE-3U | 160,000

BE-3U' | 200,000

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton-force#Tonne-force

[DennisP]

Yep, 70 tons to LEO is more than the Falcon Heavy.

[testing22321]

Thing that doesn’t exist yet will have better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!

News at 10