Finally something concrete from these guys! They've been working for over 10 years on this and shown almost nothing.
The capsule looks nice; big curved windows and no RCS thrusters tell us that this is not an orbital capsule.
The 1st Stage reuse concept is interesting; the ducting near the capsule connector is quite novel. There are 8 large spoilers that protrude into the airflow to help slow descent. I wonder if these can be modulated to give some kind of stability control?
It's interesting to note that although the capsule landed successfully, they make no mention of what happened to the launcher. I presume that it failed to land, but I didn't see any smoking wreckage in the background of the capsule landing video, so maybe it made it down in 1 piece? I'm sure they would have told us if it had.
Anyway, a good day for the US space industry; Blue Origin finally have something cool to show and have proved that they're not just purveyors of vaporware. I'm looking forward to seeing what else they can come up with.
As as you mentioned RCS thrusters I thought, "but reaction wheels are cheaper and don't require fuel, for all but the largest vehicles they are not needed", then I realized this was real life and not Kerbal Space Program.
Helpful, not essential. If you are willing to use smaller engines or can be careful with the throttle (and throttle shutoff) on larger engines you can dock plenty of smaller ships.
I wouldn't want to try it with something with a 180 degree turn time of 30+ seconds.
I wonder if any of this is true in real life? Doesn't a spaghetti rocket just explode in real life?
Rocket restart is harder in real life than in KSP. Typically a rocket is designed to be started a limited number of times, this is where RCS fills the gap.
One of the big problems is that in space you not only have low temperatures you also have limited ability to reject heat (no real convection to speak of, only conductivity; which is bad because you can get heat seep into other parts, or radiation, or to a much lesser degree ablation). This means that it is harder to engineer parts for engines; you can have a heat range of +1000C to -200C and also subject often to uneven, and for restartable engines repeated, cooling and/or heating, which all leads to fatigue.
Secondly you have issues with fuel/oxidisers; cryogenic fuels/oxidisers need to be regularly stirred in low gravity because convection doesn't work the same as it would in the presence of gravity. This is why most RCS systems use non-cryogenic hypergolic bi-propellant fuels or mono-propellant fuels as the systems are much simpler; pressurised tanks, one or two one-way valve(s), possibly a catalyst, a combustion chamber and bell for the simplest of systems.
In addition to the other replies, there's also the problem of simply igniting the flame. For example, a Falcon 9 uses kerosene and liquid oxygen, which burn real nice when ignited, but won't do anything if you just mix them together and let them sit. Just like lighting a stove, you need something to get the process going. With a Falcon 9, this is done by injecting a small charge of two chemicals called TEA and TEB. They're hypergolic with each other, meaning they ignite on contact. This then starts the combustion of the actual propellants. The amount of TEA and TEB carried on board is limited, so you can only restart a certain number of times.
Using hypergolic propellants solves this problem. The trouble is that hypergolic propellants are inherently dangerous (they'll explode if they come in contact, that's the whole point) and are typically highly toxic. They're OK in small quantities, thus they show up in RCS systems, but making an entire orbital launcher using hypergolic propellants is a massive pain. It has been done, but the result tends to be more explodey than usual.
> but making an entire orbital launcher using hypergolic propellants is a massive pain.
I think Russia might disagree with you.
Wikipedia describes the Proton launcher as "one of the most successful heavy boosters in the history of spaceflight."
TEA/TEB (Triethylaluminium /Triethylborane) aren't hypergolic - they're stored mixed in a single container. They're pyrophoric, which means they burn on contact with oxygen or any other oxidiser. TEA is so reactive it will ignite on contact with liquid oxygen - very few things can do that.
The SR-71 used TEB to ignite its engines, as JP-8 was so hard to ignite.
One of the main reasons it's hard to restart a rocket in space is simply because there's no gravity to feed the propellant to the outlet of the tank.
While the rocket is running, the acceleration caused by the motor causes the propellant to pool at the bottom of the tank where the outlet is. As soon as you stop the motor, the acceleration stops and the liquid starts floating around inside the tank. If you tried to restart it now, you would get an unstable mix of propellant and pressurizing gas which might not allow the rocket to startup properly.
To restart reliably, you need to apply a force to the tank to force the liquid back down to the outlet. During Apollo, this was done with many small solid rocket motors called Ullage Rockets. These would fire for just a few seconds just immediately before the rocket was restarted. The force was just enough to get the propellant down to the outlet in time to be sucked into the turbo pumps before ignition.
Gemini also had ullage rockets. Pic related, my authentic Gemini program "Direct Ullage" indicator buttons (took me a day to find them). http://imgur.com/AeSObj9
Ok, that 307,000' landing looked a bit painful (pretty big whumph at the end there) of course it hits the ground at 16mph if I did the conversion from 24 fps correctly.
But the really really odd thing for me is listening to the callout in feet and feet per second rather than meters and meters per second. I've gotten quite used to velocity in particular being called out in m/s.
I wish they were a bit more open with the progress they were making.
Their website says that they employ solid landing rockets just before touchdown, similar to the Soyuz. The 'big whumph' is probably just dust kicked up by these rockets.
On openness, give them time. I think Blue Origin's focus is on delivering a quality result in minimum time. Right now their customer is Bezos, and nobody else. I suspect you'll hear a lot more as they move toward flying paying customers.
Sub-orbital flights only, to just above the Kármán line.
This seems to be ideal for transport as well? That is, if we're trying to get from Tokyo to NYC quickly, we never want to actually go into orbit, do we?
If BO can demonstrate that the risks of a flight into space are comparable to other hazards we encounter in life (car driving, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, surgery), they're going to have plenty of people (myself included) who want to go.
True in general, although for tourism, you don't really want any horizontal velocity, because you want to land as close as possible to the take-off point.
A suborbital trajectory is an ellipse that intersects the ground, and it will do so twice within less than half the world's circumference. If you can make it halfway around the world, you're orbital.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
(Note: I'm approximating by assuming no forces other than gravity, which is an extremely good approximation for a ballistic rocket. In perpetually powered flight the trajectory can of course take other shapes.)
A suborbital trajectory is an ellipse that intersects the ground, and it will do so twice within less than half the world's circumference. If you can make it halfway around the world, you're orbital.
My experiments with Flappy Space Program contradict this. b^) It is perfectly possible to miss orbit even after a complete circumnavigation. Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
Well it's more like a quarter, but even if it were half it would take significantly less energy than orbit.
> It is perfectly possible to miss orbit even after a complete circumnavigation.
Yes, if you have a source of lift, and you're within the atmosphere, then you can circumnavigate the globe without reaching orbital velocities. A ballistic rocket generally has no significant source of lift and spends nearly all of its time in space.
> Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
All orbits are conic sections: either an ellipse, hyperbola, or a parabola (the limiting case between the two). But a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory has escape velocity, whereas only an elliptic trajectory is planet-bound. The apogee of the ellipse is locally approximated well by a parabola, which is why for non-orbital mechanics ballistic trajectories are often modeled by a parabola, but all suborbital trajectories are actually ellipses, not parabolas. If the Earth were flat and the gravity vector were constant, then they would be actual parabolas.
Orbital mechanics is very counterintuitive. I recommend Fundamentals of Astrodynamics if you'd like to learn more, or play KSP rather than FSP.
> Well it's more like a quarter
On this you are correct, the map I looked at deceived me. :)
OK, thanks for the knowledge. Given all that, and the fact that there are several ICBMs with ranges longer than Tokyo-NYC, I still suspect that the speed-energy-distance combination will eventually work out for some segment of the travelling public.
Yes, but even one quarter the way around the world turns out to be very close to orbital energy, because your delta-distance per delta-v increases rapidly as you increase energy. Nearly all ICBMs are multi-stage rockets for this reason. Vehicles designed for suborbital tourism like Spaceship Two, Lynx, and New Shepard aren't traveling more than a couple hundred km without a second stage.
Math:
Reaching the edge of space requires 100 km altitude, or 1,000,000 m^2/s^2 of specific energy, which is 1,414 m/s velocity. Redirect that to a 45° angle and you have 1,000 m/s in both the vertical and horizontal direction, which comes close to maximizing your distance. That gives you 200 seconds of flight, which puts you 200 km downrange.
The booster couldn't make a soft landing due to a failure in the hydraulics system.
> “Of course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent,” Jeff Bezos wrote in a blog post. “Fortunately, we’ve already been in work for some time on an improved hydraulic system. Also, assembly of propulsion module serial numbers 2 and 3 is already underway – we’ll be ready to fly again soon.”
Love seeing that American flag on the side of American spacecraft. This is truly a land of freedom, technological innovation, and unprecedented human happiness.
A few people alive today have forgotten that, but most people alive today have never known it.
edit: HN, I just typed a long response to a comment below but can't post it becuase I'm "submitting too fast." Cut the crap and tell me about that before I write a long comment.
I'll grant you that culturally and regulatory wise, there are advantages to certain regions in the US. Some of those features are shared in parts of Canada, UK, Australia and other Commonwealth culture countries, where a view of entrepreneurship, risk, and ambition seems to differ with that of say, some continental Europe cultures. But I'd also include China, a politically unfree country in that last, in the sense that, despite "Communism", the country has many regions of wild west of wide eye entrepreneurs and greed.
Like Obama said, you may believe in American Exceptionalism like the British believe in British Exceptionalism, or the French believe in Francophone Exceptionalism, but it's not unique. Canada's not really less free than the US for example. And unprecedented human happiness? Really, with the events of Baltimore (my hometown) going on, you can say this with a straight face?
We live in an amazing amazing time that entrepreneurs can now do what only nation states did in the past. But our current situation is a precarious thing, and rather than be rah-rah about freedom and human happiness, we need to be worried about the environment and a breakdown in our social structure that might be fueled by such amazing abilities.
Automation, software, robotics, et al, are starting to devalue labor, but we have not evolved politically or socially to deal with perhaps, the decline of work itself, as a focus of human self worth or well being.
Those rioters are thugs trashing their own neighborhood for a laugh. SJWs will pretend it is about poverty but blacks who live there understand exactly what is happening and were even trying to protect the police who are majority black.
I am familiar with Baltimore. Beautiful downtown with drugged out zombies wandering around everywhere. The piece you linked to said black cops are by far more brutal so I don't see how that helps the narrative. Until you have to get a parenting license the cycle will continue.
I'm pretty sure I'm more familiar with it, as I grew up only a few blocks from where Gray died, and I watched as the neighborhood turned from a rather fine urban neighborhood in the 70s into a crackhouse infested burnt out Detroit-style inner city (where I had bars on my windows to prevent druggies from breaking in)
But I also lived in a mixed race neighborhood and watched how my friends and playmates became "drugged out zombies", most of whom are now either in jail or dead. My own sister is dead from a lifelong addiction to heroin. I made it out.
It's not "social justice warrior" to try and understand how people become trapped in poverty and succumb to gangs and drugs. My siblings were raised by the same parents, but some of them got involved with the wrong crowd, and some didn't. I watched both working class black and white families encounter the same disintegrations.
The right wing or libertarian narrative seeks not to find solutions, but to scold. It wants to say that people "get what they deserve" and so all of the poverty and misery must be justified somehow. If you're poor, if your kids are criminals, well, you have no one but yourself to blame, or them.
Did you ever consider what causes people to become addicts in the first place? Or to join Gangs, or for many black families to be fatherless? Do you have any idea how hopeless it is to get a career off the ground if you've got an arrest record? Especially if you've got a felony where a white offender got a plea down to a misdemeanor?
Baltimore wasn't always full of drugged out zombies. When I was 10 years old at the beginning of 80s, I used to walk halfway across town to the Inner Harbor by myself without fear. There was a sea change that happened, and it wasn't become the people who lived there suddenly became assholes, deadbeats, criminals, and bad parents. That all happened over many years from external factors.
We need to understand how these external factors undermine our social capital and learn how to reverse it, otherwise you'll be living in a walled fortress in the future trying to avoid Zombies.
Although I'm no hater of the good old USA, this is a little self-congratulatory. You're certainly technological leaders in most fields for the understandable reasons of wealth, size and necessity (military driving cutting-edge research in order to maintain position as the dominant world superpower). But I'm afraid the 'unprecedented human happiness' you cite is only readily available to an elite few.
> You're certainly technological leaders in most fields for the understandable reasons of wealth, size and necessity
This ignores the history of capitalism, which is more important than the factors you mention. And capitalism was a philosophical and legal development.
> But I'm afraid the 'unprecedented human happiness' you cite is only readily available to an elite few.
That's just not true. The American sense of life is a happy one, unlike the British or continental European sense of nausea, dread, anti-semitism, nationalism, requiring one's brother to be one's keeper, and so on. Unfortunately I think the American sense of life is mostly gone in the east coast cities.
I'm not religious, but given that the context of that quote, being your brother's keeper is not that bad a plan. Better than murdering them.
To be simultaneously jingoistic about the USA while wagging a finger at Europeans for nationalism and bigotry reminds me of another bible quote. First cast out the beam out of thine own eye.
You really think so? I personally think the US is going downhill recently with the violation of basic human rights (NSA, police brutality, arm-twisting to please minorities, etc.) Corporate interest (Monsanto, fracking, military complex, law firms, etc.) is above people's, conflicts are still stirred around the globe and military aggression is still ongoing. Innocent people are killed by drones abroad and others labeled as "terrorists" assassinated without trials. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are allies. UN is often ignored. Cold War 2.0 is being brewed as 1.0 was fun and profit. As a First World country with such bold claims, many basics need to be taken care of before this baseless patriotism.
My hopes were in Ron Paul, but this great American will never be let make the much-needed changes to truly justify the "democracy" label!
Police brutality has gone down significantly over 40 years. The rate at which police kill black people has dropped by between 50% and 75% over 40 years, depending on the age group. The rate of police killing all other races, hasn't changed in 40 years (as in, it hasn't gotten any worse).
What you're seeing are actions by the police that would have previously gone unreported, or otherwise not been widely exposed to a large population via eg social media.
Obviously the NSA reference is spot on. As would have been a point about incarceration and SWAT deployments.
It's also worth noting that the war on drugs is finally beginning to end. That is an improvement, and will lead to less police brutality almost by default as pot is fully legalized across the US, and other drugs start to be de-criminalized in favor of treatment.
Corporations are far more regulated and controlled today than they were as recently as the 1960s or 1970s. The EPA didn't even exist until 1970. If you think corporate interests are running rampant today, you really would have hated the first 150 years of US corporate history.
And of course the US has been militarily aggressive since WW2, with Korea and Vietnam being larger military actions than Afghanistan and Iraq. Not much has actually changed there in 70 years.
Well, I'm sure there are improvements, but the status quo is not good enough for me personally - it's 2015. It doesn't serve America best to say "we're great, there's no better". On the contrary, we should always strive to improve, and avoid the patriotic circle jerks.
I wouldn't even say that. By "land of freedom," I really meant in the past and in essence, but not in practice today. The spirit is still there, that's all.
Tell me a place in the world where I can live without being treated, in principle, like a sacrificial animal, and I'll tell you it's good to live there.
> HN, I just typed a long response to a comment below but can't post it becuase I'm "submitting too fast." Cut the crap and tell me about that before I write a long comment.
Use the back button to get back to the page you posted it from. The text is still there in the text window. Copy it.
That is, the text is probably there. HN seems to be better at preserving it than many other sites, but I don't guarantee that this will work.
Thanks, but I know that. It's just that I want to write a comment, post it, and move on.
I don't want to go back, leave the tab open, and have to remember to try again in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on.
Today, I actually did the dishes and the laundry, and still could not post the long post I was referring to, so I just closed the tab (gave up). At that point, you either close the tab, or you put it on your todo list, and I am not going to clutter up my todo list with stuff like that.
So is this the first time they have release any footage of their rocket? This looks rather impressive.
I remember Elon Musk ridiculing Jeff Bezos sometime back. The only thing I knew about Blue Origin by then was they are making a new engine for United Launch Alliance to replace their Russian RD-180 engine on Delta rockets.
Musk (or rather, SpaceX) has been putting stuff into orbit for paying customers for some years now, and has made five successful launches so far this year, which is a pretty much unprecedented launch pace.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, having been around even longer than SpaceX, just had their first ever test launch, of a sub-orbital rocket.
It's cool that they're doing this, but I wouldn't call it impressive (yet! maybe it could get there) and certainly doesn't seem to counter Musk's ridicule.
"If [Blue Origin] do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
But, the one thing that looks impressive to me is that, the way they are handling the rocket with a single engine, which is similar to spacex's grasshopper.(also assuming they will make a vertical landing soon)
You're right that Blue Origin is older than SpaceX, as it was founded in 2000 vs 2002 for SpaceX
However, SpaceX is using off the shelf russian engine designs, if I recall correctly (possibly off the shelf engines in the early days?[1]) Blue Origin, on the other hand, seems to be developing its engines from scratch.
SpaceX's strategy certainly should have gotten it to market faster, and has. Blue Origin's in theory should give it a technology lead (engines designed now rather than 50+ years ago.)
It appears that in the 2020s we'll see when both companies (I believe) start launching heavy lift vehicles. SpaceX will have more launches under its belt then, but maybe Blue Origin will have caught up?
[1] I remember reading a blog post that the Merlin engine was based on a russian design, but I can't seem to find evidence of that now. Maybe I'm mistaken.
I think you might be confusing SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which flies old Russian engines on its Antares rocket (the most recent of which blew up during a launch at Wallops Island, VA).
As far as I know, SpaceX designed their own engines. They did so relying heavily on what is known from earlier NASA and Russian engines, but that is true of everyone these days.
The Blue Origin rocket is unusually short as man-rated rockets go. The only figures I can find for the dimensions gives the height as 49 feet (15m) [1]. Now compare this to 224 feet (68m) for Falcon 9 [2].
So basically a rocket like the Falcon 9 will appear to be traveling much slower than a much shorter rocket like the New Shepard for the same reason a 747 on landing approach looks like it is traveling much slower than a 737 traveling at the same speed.
Rockets are phallic, but this one is exceptionally so. The proportions are very similar to a human penis. The payload on top flares out like the glans of the penis.
I saw a video of it being lifted from a horizontal to a vertical position and it looked like a penis getting erect [1].
I think if a sex toy was made out of this design, it would be more agreeable to its users than one modeled after the Saturn V or a Falcon.
Grow up? I have no issue with its penile nature. I'm just commenting on it. It's so much more penis like than other things it's worth noting.
Maybe you have issues with penises. By telling others to grow up, perhaps it is you who are uncomfortable with penises, since you'd prefer this be ignored?
You are totally right, I apologize for calling you out. Please continue your valuable discussion on the subject. I'm excited to see what insights will bubble up from the roiling cauldron of ideas sure to spring from your observation.
The capsule looks nice; big curved windows and no RCS thrusters tell us that this is not an orbital capsule.
The 1st Stage reuse concept is interesting; the ducting near the capsule connector is quite novel. There are 8 large spoilers that protrude into the airflow to help slow descent. I wonder if these can be modulated to give some kind of stability control?
It's interesting to note that although the capsule landed successfully, they make no mention of what happened to the launcher. I presume that it failed to land, but I didn't see any smoking wreckage in the background of the capsule landing video, so maybe it made it down in 1 piece? I'm sure they would have told us if it had.
Anyway, a good day for the US space industry; Blue Origin finally have something cool to show and have proved that they're not just purveyors of vaporware. I'm looking forward to seeing what else they can come up with.