Find the soul

Enlarge / Track-edging red, white, and green painted curbs at the exit of the Variante Della Roggia chicane next to the gravel trap during practice for the 2012 Italian Grand Prix on the Monza Circuit, Italy.

On Sunday, under floodlights in Abu Dhabi, the 2021 Formula 1 season came to an end. The most electrifying championship fight in many years came down to a last-lap pass after a dominant Lewis Hamilton got caught out on old tires after a very late caution let rival Max Verstappen pit for much fresher rubber.

Partially due to Netflix’s Drive to Survive show, the sport has reached levels of popularity not seen since the 1980s, even here in America, so many people have opinions about the role that F1’s race control officials have had in influencing the title fight.

However, I’m not here today to dissect the confusion of the last five laps. Instead, I have a bee in my bonnet about an incident that could have decided the championship that happened just a third of the way around lap 1.

Enlarge / A full-power test of the BE-4 rocket engine in April 2019 in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin is unlikely to deliver two flight-ready versions of the BE-4 rocket engine to United Launch Alliance (ULA) before at least the second quarter of 2022, two sources say. This increases the possibility that the debut flight of ULA’s much-anticipated new rocket, Vulcan, could slip into 2023.

Vulcan’s first stage is powered by two BE-4 engines, which burn methane and are more powerful than the space shuttle’s main engines. The sources said there recently was a “relatively small” production issue with fabrication of the flight engines at Blue Origin’s factory in Kent, Washington.

As a result of this, the engines will not be completed and shipped to the company’s test stands in West Texas until next year. Once there, each engine must be unpacked, tested, and then re-configured to be moved to ULA’s rocket assembly facility in northern Alabama. A reasonable “no-earlier-than” date for the engines’ arrival at the rocket manufacturer is now April 2022, and this assumes a smooth final production and testing phase.