Total Members Voted: 504
This is proof that Raptor is way behind even ULA's AR-1 engine. They have to start power-pack tests again for the full scale engine at Stennis. Full Raptor development is going to take at least 2 years.What I find typical is that: 33.6mln + 67.3 mln = 100.9mln development cost for 1MN raptor. ?what was the prometheus engine development going to cost?
The locations of performance are NASA Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Hawthorne, California; and Los Angeles Air Force Base, California.
Work will be performed at NASA Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Hawthorne, California; McGregor, Texas; and Los Angeles Air Force Base, California[.]
This is proof that Raptor is way behind even ULA's AR-1 engine. They have to start power-pack tests again for the full scale engine at Stennis. Full Raptor development is going to take at least 2 years.
How did you get to 105 M$ investment from US Air Force ? They only communicated on 33+40 M$ contracts to SpaceX. And only 66 M$ investment from SpaceX has been confirmed so far in the frame of this OTA with USAF. Do you have complementary information ?
Wow, I poked a hornet's nest of dickishness on Twitter. Really disappointed at how consistently arrogant Blue's own purported engineers are, especially publicly so on Twitter. In response to Jeff Foust's simple Raptor funding article (http://spacenews.com/air-force-adds-more-than-40-million-to-spacex-engine-contract/), a BO propulsion engineer commented, "Or they can pay $0 for a more reliable engine that produces more thrust and already tested at full scale 🙃". An extraordinary statement that is really hard to rationally parse for an engine that has fired for no more than 3 seconds at half thrust and experienced at least one serious failure during testing. Another BO employee chimed in, "How exactly is a subscale version of an engine "ages closer" to flight readiness than a full scale version of an engine?" Me: "That 1MN Raptor has been tested for 100s nonstop and > 1200s total should be self-explanatory"Me: "I would also be a fool to totally discount a company's CTO saying that it is "simple to scale the dev Raptor to 170 tons""BO guy: "You'd also be a fool to just blindly believe everything that person says when they've proven to not do things when they say they will." BO guy: "But since you admittedly have no tech expertise, sure just believe what others say. I have technical expertise and know it's not that simple" It doesn't exactly take a genius to understand that Musk has a habit of understating the difficulty of doing relatively hard things, but both of these BO engineers were dead-set on a single 3s 50% thrust firing of a full-scale engine indicating that BE-4 was somehow closer to flight-readiness than subscale Raptor, with (probably multiple) successful ~100s hot-fires and more than 1200s total. It boggles the mind. I really want to cheer on Blue Origin but s*** like this makes it rather difficult to support a company with such a seemingly arrogant culture. These are anecdotes, of course, I can only hope that they are representative of a tiny minority. It's almost as if Jeff "Welcome to the club" Bezos managed to only hire clones of himself...
To me it just sounds like actual rocket engineers being cheesed off that they've been told what's what by armchair rocket engineers.
Quote from: JamesH65 on 10/22/2017 07:36 pmTo me it just sounds like actual rocket engineers being cheesed off that they've been told what's what by armchair rocket engineers.I fully agree that I am a complete non-expert in comparison to actual propulsion engineers, but that doesn't excuse the highly irrational and arrogant attitude towards Raptor. Even if scaling thrust by ~70% is far more difficult than SpaceX's RPS engineers believe it to be, almost completely discounting 1200 seconds of hot-fires, half a decade of Merlin 1D mass production, and orbital and vacuum rocketry experience fly directly counter to the ideals a functional and rational engineer/scientist ought to hold. and FWIW, I did not start the discourse. The trash talking was begun unsolicited by a BO propulsion engineer.
I bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 10/22/2017 09:29 pmI bet BFS will get to space before New Glenn or Vulcan or Ariane 6 or SLS.https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/921106486272675840
I think Blue will be able to compete eventually. I just think SpaceX is ahead with BFR.