Slashdot Mirror
More Clues About Blue Origin's Space Plans
FleaPlus writes "Blue Origin, the secretive company started by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has recently released a number of new details about their suborbital launch plans and their private desert launch facility. The vehicle will be fully reusable, and similar in many ways to the vertical-takeoff-and-landing DC-X. The details were part of a 229-page environmental impact statement the company filed to comply with federal regulations. The company plans to start launching test vehicles later this year, with commercial operations beginning in 2010."
BTW. To all you Yanks reading this - I think you guys made the greatest achievement of the human race, to date, happen. The reasons aren't important - you should be very proud.
It was not Americans. Even if they like to point out the exelence of Armstrong or Kennedy, the real innovation and work was done by German people. Let's see how space.com puts it in its articleRemembering Wernher von Braun's German Rocket Team:
Walter Jacobi, one of the few remaining German technicians whose genius helped put American astronauts on the moon, is frail now. At 84, he doesn't move as quickly as he used to.
But sitting recently in the lobby of a space museum, his eyes sparkled when asked about the legacy of the team of 119 scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, who arrived in this north Alabama city a half-century ago and turned its cotton fields into a landmark of space exploration, including the first moon landing in 1969.
``I don't know how to describe it, it's a tremendous achievement, you know?'' he said. ``We always knew we could do it.''
Their number now down to about a dozen, the German team's accomplishments are indisputable: Manned space flight, including lunar landings, the space shuttle and the international space station -- all the direct result of their work developing rockets in the United States following World War II.
But to some that legacy is marred by the group's initial work creating V-2 rockets for the German military with the help of thousands of concentration camp laborers under the Nazi boot.