(exciting music)
- SpaceX is the most well known name
in the private spaceflight industry
and needs little introduction.
It was founded by dotcom
billionaire Elon Musk in 2002,
with the goal of making
humanity multi-planetary.
They have repeatedly made
ambitious development claims
and stunned the world
by delivering upon it.
Two years before that, however,
in the year 2000, Jeff Bezos,
founded a private spaceflight
company called Blue Origin,
with the goal of enabling
millions of people
to live and work in space.
The technologies being developed
by these companies seem
to largely overlap,
but they are just very similar answers
to two very different questions.
Today we'll be looking
at these differences
in their approach to spaceflight.
(soft music)
Hi everyone, TJ here
for I need more space.
In each episode of this series
I'm going to take two
components of spaceflight
and compare them to one another.
Hopefully, we both learn
how they came to be
and get a better
understanding of the story
of space's past and future.
In this video, we're
going to cover the origins
and motivations between
both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Let's jump in.
- [Narrator] Seven, six, five
- [Man] First station
engine sequence intiation
- [Narrator] Four, three, two
(rocket blast)
- On the 20th of September, 2008,
SpaceX's Falcon 1 became the
first privately-developed
liquid-fuel launch vehicle to reach orbit,
on its fourth launch attempt.
Blue Origin, almost a decade later,
still hasn't gotten there,
and this draws them a lot of criticism
from the spaceflight community.
It makes absolutely no
sense at first glance.
Between 2002 and 2019,
SpaceX has developed a smallsat launcher,
developed an orbital workhorse rocket
while also being one of
the cheapest launchers
on the market,
vertically landed the
boosters of said rocket,
re-flown them multiple times,
and dropped its launch cost even further.
They developed a cargo resupply spacecraft
for the ISS,
and a crewed variant
for orbital spaceflight,
developed the largest
rocket currently operational
and shot it into a heliocentric orbit.
Still not over that.
Developed the world's first
Full Flow Staged Combustion engine
for their fully reusable
interplanetary spaceship capable
of carrying 100 tons
to the Martian surface
and crews of up to 100 people.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin
has only managed to fly,
propulsively land, and re-fly
a suborbital booster-capsule system
called New Shepard for space tourists.
However they have nearly
finished development
on a massive semi-reusable
orbital launch vehicle
called New Glenn,
which absolutely dwarfs
their first rocket,
designed a lunar lander called Blue Moon,
planned a biconic crew capsule,
which they proposed for
commercial crew phase one,
and possibly even a space
plane called the New Lindbergh
in the far future.
So, what's going on here?
Why has SpaceX seemed
to make so much more progress than Blue?
They both hire from the same talent pool
of incredibly talented aerospace engineers
and they even poach them from one another.
So it makes no sense for them
to have barely anything to show for it.
Well, it's intentional.
Blue Origin's design philosophy
has been Gradatim Ferociter,
or Step by Step Ferociously.
SpaceX sprints through their development,
constantly tweaking their designs
to the extent that no two
Falcon 9 cores are identical.
They always have some new
hardware being tested.
Developing an orbital class rocket engine
is one of the hardest
engineering challenges known
to our species.
It is incredibly resource intensive,
requires a ton of auxiliary infrastructure
such as test stands,
and has no guarantee of success
because of the unique ways
in which it pushes mechanics,
thermodynamics and material sciences
into their physical limits.
SpaceX has had a very hard time funding
and developing their Merlin
engine by themselves.
Developing it from scratch
was near impossible,
but SpaceX does the
impossible all the time.
So they adapted NASA's Fastrac engine,
originally developed for the
reusable X-34 space plane
into the Merlin 1A.
This engine was very
different from the Merlin 1D
that flies on the Falcon 9 Block 5 today.
SpaceX didn't even build the
turbo pump assembly for it.
Instead it was outsourced to
one of the original developers
of the Fastrac, Barber-Nichols.
Over the next few years,
SpaceX developed the Merlin
with incredible testing regimen.
They would fire the engine
at the McGregor Facility
with new optimisations
until something broke,
failed, melted, or cracked.
Then they would relay
the data to Hawthorne,
order the fixes and replacements,
and torture it on their test stands again.
This has turned their Merlin
into one of the best Kerolox
engines in existence.
It has the highest thrust to weight ratio
of any liquid rocket engine.
Also being able to relight,
survive supersonic reentry,
and land the Falcon 9 boosters
with consistent precision.
Because of the same development,
the Falcon 9's payload
capacity more than doubled,
from 10.4 megatons on the first version
to 22.8 megatons on the Block 5.
They are very reliable
and there is just one incident
of them shutting down in flight,
on the Commercial Resupply One Mission
which still completed successfully.
All of this,
on an engine that they had
not designed themselves.
This represents the best of SpaceX
and the reason for their
absolute superiority
in the launch industry.
They took the engine they
could afford to develop
and honed it into becoming one
of the best in the industry.
The same engine powered
trailblazing Falcon 1,
their workhorse for the Falcon 9,
and the colossal Falcon Heavy.
This earned them the
CRS contracts from NASA,
which were essential to SpaceX's survival
in its early days.
It brought on their
most important clients.
Iridium, SES, NROL, foreign governments,
and private satellites.
This provided them with
the capital they needed
to survive and continue developing
towards their goal of
interplanetary spaceflight.
Blue on the other hand
believes that "Slow is
smooth, and smooth is fast."
They take large, calculated
development steps,
three at a time.
The design choices they make
are deliberate and strategic.
Consider the New Shepard.
It is a suborbital booster
that carries crew and lands vertically.
It uses hydrogen as its main propellant.
This sounds like an
absolutely awful decision
at first glance.
Hydrogen is very difficult to work with.
Its only advantage is
that it has the highest vacuum efficiency
of any liquid propellant,
which is wasted as its
entire launch profile
is within the Earth's atmosphere.
Hydrogen has a tendency to
leak through the tank walls
of the booster because of
its smaller atomic size
and light the exterior on fire,
which makes it unsuitable
for carrying crew.
Hydrolox engines are heavier than most
and hence have poor
thrust to weight ratio,
a factor which is very important
for vertical propulsive landings.
Hydrolox is more difficult to throttle
because of its lower density,
which also makes landing it harder.
So why would Blue pick Hydrolox
out of all the propellant options?
Well because you can make
it out of lunar ice deposits
via In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Wait, what?
The New Shepard can't even get
to lower earth orbit by itself.
What does the Moon have
anything to do with it?
Okay, let's look at the
New Shepard booster.
Now imagine that the
LH2 tank gets replaced
by a massive spherical one,
and the liquid oxygen tanks gets split
into two attached around the sides.
Isn't that basically the Blue Moon lander
with a crew descent stage on top?
Blue Origin build the
technologies they required
for their lunar lander,
while also developing
a space tourism vehicle
that will generate revenue.
The engine they developed for this vehicle
will be reused as the super
efficient second stage engines
for New Glenn.
It's honestly a genius move.
Blue Origin has also built some
very strategic partnerships,
both in the industry and politically.
While SpaceX prefers
tight, vertical integration
and developing everything in-house,
Blue Origin is willing to collaborate
with legacy industry.
Blue's BE-4 engine will be the main engine
on United Launch Alliance's
next generation Vulcan rocket.
The Blue Moon lander can be launched
with a variety of rockets
apart from New Glenn,
including the Space Launch
System, Vulcan, or Atlas V.
When NASA solicited a crew
lunar lander for Artemis,
they quickly partnered
with Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman, and Draper
to make a very strong bid.
They also worked with Maxar
on the Gateway's power
and propulsion element, and interestingly,
Blue's Low Earth Orbit
Space Station concept
showed a very similar module on top,
suggesting further collaboration.
While SpaceX picked the locations
of the manufacturing at Hawthorne,
testing at McGregor, Texas,
and launch sites at the Cape based
on feasibility, affordability
and convenience,
Blue's recent moves have been
more politically motivated.
They have their HQ in
Kent, a suburb of Seattle,
which is home to Amazon,
and they fly New Shepard from West Texas.
But, now, here's the interesting part.
They picked Cape Canaveral
to manufacture their New Glenn rockets
and leveraged Florida's
Space Coast subsidies.
They are also building an
engine production facility
in Huntsville, Alabama, which
is politically significant
for spaceflight policy.
It is home
of United Launch Alliance's
manufacturing facility
and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center,
where they will test their engines
for both the New Glenn and Vulcan.
This represents the core
distinction between SpaceX
and Blue Origin, and it is a
product of their upbringing.
See, when Elon founded SpaceX,
it nearly used up all the capital he had.
SpaceX had to scramble to get customers
and contracts if they
were going to survive,
let alone develop anything else.
This turned them into an incredibly agile
and efficient company that
iterates their designs
as well as their plans constantly.
This is clearly indicated by
Starship's development process,
which has fundamentally changed the design
in every possible way
while still being true to its purpose,
a fully reusable Super
heavy-lift launch vehicle
capable of taking crew and
cargo to the Martian surface.
Blue, on the other hand,
has had no such constraints.
Bezos graciously sells $1
billion of his Amazon stock
and leaves a neat pile of cash
at the factory's doorstep every year.
Stable funding is guaranteed,
and no one's in a hurry to grab contracts.
They can take their time
to build incredibly robust
system infrastructures
and will support their plans for decades.
It is the reason
why their first orbital rocket
isn't a smallsat launcher
but a behemoth with a seven meter core
and height comparable to the Saturn V.
Oh, and Bezos casually mentioned
that this is the smallest
orbital launch vehicle
they'll ever build.
So, now we can clearly see
why SpaceX and Blue Origin take
their respective approaches.
But what are they doing it for?
Why do they choose to go to space?
Why does Kent play Hawthorne?
- Why does Rice play Texas?
- That's my terrible JFK impression.
Sorry.
SpaceX has a very clear goal.
To make humans multi-planetary.
We are the only sentient
life form we are aware of,
stuck here on the pale blue dot.
Over the past century,
humanity has grown to a scale
where our individual actions
have measurable effects
on the entire planet.
Climate change, nukes,
bio-weapons, AI, who knows.
This is an existential
risk, and the probability
of our extinction will be much lower
if we can have
self-sustaining civilizations
on multiple planets in the Solar System.
Elon believes that it is uncertain
how long the window to
achieve this would be open.
Therefore we must do our best
to establish a backup
civilization on another planet.
The only feasible option being Mars.
The minimum number of resources required
for a self-sustaining
civilization on Mars works out
to be about one million people,
along with a massive amount
of cargo, raw materials,
structures, supplies,
and equipment manufactured on Earth.
To accomplish this
with traditional rockets
simply isn't possible,
which is why SpaceX is focused
on developing Starship,
to transport 100 Mars settlers at a time
along with supplementary cargo missions.
Blue Origin has different
plans and motivations.
They stress on the fact that
this planet is irreplaceable.
No other place in the Solar System
can provide a better place to sustain life
than Earth itself.
However they do acknowledge
that it is finite.
We are reaching the limits of the material
and energy resources,
and damaging this planet
in the process.
Blue Origin's solution
involves moving heavy industry
into space and turning Earth
into sort of a national park for humans
and the rest of the biodiversity.
It is also essential that
humanity keeps growing.
In the far future,
even the Earth as a whole
cannot support a population
of trillions of people.
This is where Jeff Bezos'
grandest vision comes
into the picture,
enabling O'Neill colonies.
O'Neill is known for questioning
why humans must live on planetary surface
in the first place,
and for his designs of
massive rotating cities
in their orbits.
This has a vast amount of advantages
and is much broader
topic for another time.
Bezos was absolutely
fascinated by the idea
and even discussed it in
his graduation speech.
Jeff Bezos acknowledges
that the gargantuan rotating space cities
won't happen in his lifetime.
Instead he hopes
to create the infrastructure
it would require for future generations
of entrepreneurs to make this a reality.
He likens it to the internet,
the postal delivery network,
and banking system that he
was able to build Amazon upon,
and would like to solve some
of the barriers to spaceflight access,
so that the humans of the future
can develop the new frontier.
This involves reducing the cost of launch,
making the use of asteroid
resources feasible,
and accessing the lunar ice deposits
to fuel a colossal cislunar economy
capable of bringing
such visions to reality.
So, we have spent this video
establishing the differences
between Blue Origin and SpaceX.
Let's leave it off on a note
about something they share,
a firm belief that humanity
isn't confined to this planet.
They are both committing the drive,
resources, and talent we require
to solve the major barriers
to spaceflight access.
These companies are at the forefront
of a new wave of private spaceflight,
and they are taking some very
interesting approaches to it.
So, who do you think has a better vision
for the future of human space settlement?
Is it SpaceX's Mars
habitats, terraforming,
multi-planetary spaceships,
or Blue Origin's vision
of preserving Earth
as a natural park
by moving factories into space
and building sprawling space cities
from off-world resources?
Let me know in the poll above.
Let's have a discussion discussion
in the comments section
about other distinctions
in the approaches taken
by Blue and SpaceX.
What did I miss?
Also, I just really want
to do a quick tease,
that I have started a store,
INeedMore.Space/Shop or /Store.
Both work.
I've got some shirts on here,
and just some cool
designs I think you guys
would really enjoy.
So thanks for watching.
Hope you follow me on social media.
I'm at TJ_Cooney on Twitter.
I just post random photos
and videos about spaceflight
and the history of spaceflight
I find interesting.
Just really hope you consider subscribing
and join me on this adventure.
All right, thanks guys,
and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
(sweet music)
