Jeff Bezos's Space Company Reveals Some Secrets

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."

Comments

Sand Crash?

[centauri]

Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, The Baroque Cycle, etc.) has taken a part-time job as a consultant for Blue Origins.

Re:Prediction...

[rev_sanchez]

There are a few standard hospital diagnosis codes for spacecraft accidents:
spacecraft accident ground crew
spacecraft accident occupant
spacecraft accident person (non-crew)
falling in a spacecraft (I guess that means floating into something)
and the generic spacecraft accident

Being almost too young to remember Challenger we'd kid around about these at work until Columbia.