On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:37:57 -0700, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

wrote:

"The largest of the two new rockets, called the "New Glenn 3-stage," is an
enormous 23 feet in diameter (about half the length of a school bus), 313 feet
tall (close to the height of the Apollo moon rockets), and will spew out 3.85
million pounds of thrust — about half as powerful as NASA's Saturn V launcher.


And about 70% as powerful as Falcon Heavy, which will be available
before it is.

Yes, but maybe by not all that much time. I think FH just took another
year's hit due to the Amos-6 disaster. And SpaceX has a lot on their
plate with Commercial Crew and a big backlog of Falcon 9FT payloads
still waiting their turn to fly. I can easily see FH being
backburnered to 2018-19.

Frankly, given Musk's hints about BFR in 2021 or so and Falcon 9FT
getting ever more powerful, I wouldn't be shocked if he reaches the
conclusion that FH is a dead end and abandons it.

We'll see how long it takes them to successfully land one after they
actually get them built.

Flight 1 almost certainly will be a short Stage 1-only hop over to
LZ-1 or wherever their landing site is, with progressively longer
flights out to the barge and eventually "out and back", then moving on
to flights with Stage 2. Really, how else can he test the thing? It is
being built at KSC and launched at CCAFS and is too big to overland to
Van Horn. So no Grasshopper equivalent operations seem possible.

Brian