Can the New Glenn launch more times than the Falcon 9 in the first 10 years?

[dglow]

Even if NG outpaces F9 over an artificial window of ‘the first ten years’, it won’t ramp like Falcon has in the past five years.

[brahmanknight]

No.  It was never built to fly as much as Falcon 9. 

[DanClemmensen]

Based on the OP, we can reformulate this as "will New Glenn launch more than 86 times before January 2035?"

I think the answer is "no", because it will not compete well against F9 in the early years or against Starship later. It won't fly often until BO perfects booster reuse, and by then Starship will have perfected full and rapid reuse.

Their only hope is Kuiper, but Amazon's shareholders will not permit them to pay more per satellite if they can get a better deal from SpaceX.

[Yggdrasill]

I think they can. 8.6 launches per year isn't that much, and while Falcon 9 took 5 years to get to the first successful landing, New Glenn should perform the first landing in the first year. Falcon 9 was made on a shoestring budget, including all the production facilities. I think New Glenn will be able to comfortably surpass the Falcon 9 cadence for the first few years of life.

[AndrewM]

Blue wants to ramp to 24/yr as early as 2026 but they currently are licensed for up to 8/yr. I could see them reach 86 by Jan. 15, 2025 but I doubt they'll hit 24/yr. I could see an annualized cadence stabilize around 15-18. 

[spacenut]

I still say no, because it is a larger launcher.  It can carry more satellites than Falcon 9.  So, accordingly it will not need to launch as much.  It will be a little more expensive $/kg than Falcon 9 because it uses a hydrolox upper stage.  Hydrolox is more expensive than kerosene, and it is harder to handle.  Now, if they can recover the upper stage, that may change things.  Blue is awful slow. 

[Robotbeat]

I still say no, because it is a larger launcher.  It can carry more satellites than Falcon 9.  So, accordingly it will not need to launch as much.  It will be a little more expensive $/kg than Falcon 9 because it uses a hydrolox upper stage.  Hydrolox is more expensive than kerosene, and it is harder to handle.  Now, if they can recover the upper stage, that may change things.  Blue is awful slow.

Hydrogen isn’t THAT much more expensive than kerosene, and you need less of it.

New Glenn’s upper stage has 42t of propellant. Suppose BE-3U has a mixture ratio of 5, that means it needs 7t of hydrogen. Hydrogen is about $10/kg (can be cheaper industrially, but this is a nice round number), so it is about $70k.

Kerosene has a lower Isp, let’s say 3.5km/s vs 4.4km/s for hydrolox. And so let’s say you’ll need about 25% more propellant, or around 52.5t, and a mix ratio of like 2.34, so you need 16t. But it’s cheaper, maybe $1/kg. $16k.

So you save about $50k, but that’s insignificant. It’s all the handling costs and higher dry mass of the stages that matters, not prop costs for an upper stage.

[Robotbeat]

I also think no, unless F9 drops quickly. F9 grew at a rate of about 40-45% every year roughly this year, as spacex is focusing investment on Starship now. If New Glenn does that, it means doubling every 2 years. So after 10 years, that’s 32. The only way it’ll beat F9 is if F9 also reduces in launch rate by about 40% per year starting now, or if NG grows much faster than F9 did.

[DanClemmensen]

I also think no, unless F9 drops quickly. F9 grew at a rate of about 40-45% every year roughly this year, as spacex is focusing investment on Starship now. If New Glenn does that, it means doubling every 2 years. So after 10 years, that’s 32. The only way it’ll beat F9 is if F9 also reduces in launch rate by about 40% per year starting now, or if NG grows much faster than F9 did.

F9 launch rate will drop by about 66% between 2026 and 2027, assuming SpaceX can launch almost all Starlink on Starship in 2027.

[Robotbeat]

That assumes a pretty optimistic launch ramp rate for starship. Even assuming doubling of launch rate every year, that’s still just 32 launches in 2027, which I don’t think is enough. They can fit, I dunno, maybe 40-50 starlinks per starship launch, or only about twice as many (due to the larger V3 Starlink satellites). In 2024, they did 90 Starlink launches, plus another 5 dedicated Starshield launches, let’s call it 100 flat. So they’d need about 45-50 Starship Starlink launches, not counting Artemis or Mars related flights or anything else. So they would need to ramp more than twice as fast as Falcon 9 to launch often enough by 2027 to not need F9 any more for Starlink/starshield. I wouldn’t bet on it. 2028? Sure. Could happen by then.

[DanClemmensen]

That assumes a pretty optimistic launch ramp rate for starship. Even assuming doubling of launch rate every year, that’s still just 32 launches in 2027, which I don’t think is enough. They can fit, I dunno, maybe 40-50 starlinks per starship launch, or only about twice as many (due to the larger V3 Starlink satellites). In 2024, they did 90 Starlink launches, plus another 5 dedicated Starshield launches, let’s call it 100 flat. So they’d need about 45-50 Starship Starlink launches, not counting Artemis or Mars related flights or anything else. So they would need to ramp more than twice as fast as Falcon 9 to launch often enough by 2027 to not need F9 any more for Starlink/starshield. I wouldn’t bet on it. 2028? Sure. Could happen by then.

Yep. As you say, if they get Pez Starship fully functional in year N, then we expect the F9 rate to drop dramatically in year N+1. "Fully functional" is full and fast reusability. Remember that if they can actually achieve their goals, they can get to one launch per day using a total of one pad, one booster, and two Pez Ships.  That's one launch+Booster catch plus one Ship catch per day.

Just to remind us all, this is a peripheral topic. The base topic is still whether or not New Glenn will launch more than 86 times by January 2035. This peripheral topic is whether or not the New Glenn launch rate will ever exceed the F9 launch rate in some month in the future, and it depends on the ramp-down and EOL of F9 and the ramp-up, ramp-down, and EOL  of New Glenn.