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Jeff Bezos's Space Company Reveals Some Secrets

Posted by Hemos on from the getting-some-details dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Bezos's commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, has kept its plans secret to better compete with rivals such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. But in order to build its launch facility in West Texas, it has revealed some details of its future operations: Blue Origin's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) will carry three or more passengers on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet above sea level. It will launch vertically and land vertically, and will use hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellants. It will operate autonomously under control of on-board computers, with no ground control. Blue Origin plans a maximum rate of 52 launches per year."

3 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cue the unmanned spaceflight mob by eln · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since the only real use for this sort of suborbital flight that isn't already adequately served by other methods (like high-flying aircraft) is tourism, unmanned flights wouldn't really work very well in this case.

  2. Cart, horse by Princeofcups · · Score: 5, Insightful


    I don't know. To me this is like the Wright brothers announcing their new airline and airport before ever flying at Kittyhawk.

    jfs

    --
    The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
  3. Government Regulations... by HopeOS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Wright brothers probably did not have to file environmental impact statements or calculate mean casuality per launch or estimate the damage of an explosion for insurance purposes or...

    Jeff Bezos brought his evironmental impact statement to a conference once; it's about the size of a metropolitan phone book. It has sections that state that their rocket will not cause floods or hurricanes, will not change the flow of any rivers, will not interfere with the mating habits of local desert lizards, and on and on.

    Present day aerospace development is regulated to the point of near inactivity. At least, the developers are still allowed to kill themselves in the process or nothing would get done.

    On the upside, recent legislation has made launching easier. Finding a launch site with an appropriate window and a minimum of EPA hassles is still tricky.

    -Hope