Blue Origin Will Be VTOL

Spy Handler writes "The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company's FAA permit applications. It will be a cone-shaped vehicle about 50 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter at the base, and carry 3 or more passengers to an altitude of 325,000 feet"

Comments

Impressive turn-around time, too...

[stoborrobots]

They're claiming that the commercial launch around 2010 will be able to make 52 lauches a year, meaning that they expect to be able to turn around one of these babies in a week from landing...

That will require some interesting reliability stats on the exposed surfaces...

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[Anonymous Coward]

An airliner has a turnaroud time of about an hour.

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[Grench]

EasyJet, a UK-based LCC airline, has a turnaround time of 30-minutes on its fleet of Airbus A319 and Boeing 737 aircraft. Their entire business model revolves around very low turnaround time, so that they can use the same aircraft as many times a day as is possible.

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[pookemon]

Or maybe they are having more than one of them?

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[drgould]

At one point they were able to turn the DC-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X) around in 26-hours.

It's just a matter of designing for reliability and servicability instead of cutting-edge performance like NASA does.

It helps that this is a sub-orbital vehicle.

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[Tx]

As others have pointed out, they'll probably have more than one vehicle. I would also add that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that there's be enough demand for 52 launches a year in the long term, though they could possibly sustain it for maybe a few months to a year after launch. After that, the novelty value will have worn off, and a trip in this thing will be looking like pretty damn poor value for money.

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[hey!]

I would also add that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that there's be enough demand for 52 launches a year in the long term, though they could possibly sustain it for maybe a few months to a year after launch.

This is one of those assumptions that you put in your business plan spreadsheet, that makes the difference between success and failure but which nobody can say for sure.

Elementary economics tells us you can't possibly say something like "there won't be enough demand for 52 launches per year in the long term." What you have to say is "the market will demand less than 52 launches per year at a certain price." Price the launch low enough, and you'll be able to sell a thousand or even a million launches; the question is, can you make a profit.

Creating a popular web site and creating a aerospace company are on the surface very different things. But one thing that is in common is that there is an adoption curve. You almost never have enough people want your service at the outset to sustain it. What you need is enough people to want your service to keep the ball rolling, to bring in enough cash that venture dollars don't feel too lonely as they're waiting to be shoveled into the furnace.

The key to everything is pricing and its relationship to volume. IN a mature business, you want to charge to maximize profit, but in a startup you aren't expecting to see profit. It's more complex because your pricing has to do more things than deliver a profit. It has to deliver enough volume so that you can begin to achieve economies of scale and learn how to operate the business efficiently; it also has to show that your business plan's ales projections and cost projections are realistic. Pricing and volume has to validate your assertions about your ability to manage the technology, as well as your assertions about how the market will respond to price.

In a venture like this, you'd charge more at the outset, because you really can't deliver more. So supposing after initial test, you think you can launch four times a year for the first year, because you're shaking down your system and learning how to scale the system safely and efficiently. So, you charge so much that the number of rides you sell is exactly four, neither more nor less. You still burn lots of money and don't get much back. Next year, you can launch eight times, which is twice as often. You drop your prices, hopefully less that 50%; let's say 66%. Presuming that your marginal costs stay the same or drop, it means you lose more money.

In time, repeat this process enough, and (God willing) your marginal costs start to drop, and you start to approach the area where you are making profit on each transaction instead of losing money. However, if your model was wrong, you may end up get no closer to that point: if you don't achieve economies of scale with increased volume, or if demand does not fall with price rising.

Every business plan depends on predicting the future, and making leaps of faith about certain assumptions. Most of the time, some assumption was wrong; if it's right, and you're talking about something like this where you can't create a business overnight, then you can expect to enjoy larger than normal profits if you are right. Higher rewards nearly always entail higher risks (although the converse is not true).

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[Tx]

Thanks for the Econ 101 lecture ;). Obviously my contention is that there won't be enough demand at the prices they will end up charging as the economics of the business work through. And yes, no one can say such things for sure. However my point is that the "product" here is fundamentally not a particularly attractive one, once you take out the "one of the first to do it" and "uniqueness of experience" factors. It's a fundamentally high altitude flight with a few minutes only technically in space, where even the most wildly optimistic pricing I've heard, $20,000 per head, would buy weeks in luxury on a tropical island. I'm a huge space fan, I'd sell significant limbs to do any kind of significant space travel, but I wouldn't pay $20,000 for a few minutes of suborbital flight, even if it was a minor sum to me.

Re:Impressive turn-around time, too...

[StrawberryFrog]

No, the difference is that people buy books and other stuff all the time, so when you want/need other books/stuff later you favour the shop that served you well before.

When you get thrown 99km upwards to the "edge of space" (whoo-hoo, you're not even in orbit) and float down again, you don't need to do it again. The novelty wears off and that's over. That's the point - the interest is to due the novelty; the service being essentially uselesss it will become passe when it's common. 52 flights ought to be enough to do that.

Scales better than SS1

[MichaelSmith]

SpaceShip[12..] is a design which will only work as a straight up-down suborbital vehicle. The basic idea behind Blue Origin: to have a straight forward rocket with a high mass fraction can be made to scale towards semiballistic lobs and eventually orbit. Its a good way to go.

Re:Welcome to 1961

[Pacifist Brawler]

I think the important fact that we are overlooking here is the concept of a controlled veritcal landing -- one that allows for subsequent vertical take-off. Otherwise anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry and poor instincts for self-preservation could do this much cheaper.

In normal units

[Sklivvz]

"The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company's FAA permit applications. It will be a cone-shaped vehicle about 15 meter tall and 7 meter in diameter at the base, and carry 3 or more passengers to an altitude of 99 kilometers"

Re:In normal units

[MichaelSmith]

to an altitude of 99 kilometers

I suspect that a rounding error crept in there.

Distance to space?

[wjcofkc]

Considering that medium orbital distance is 6,250 - 10,000 miles high, and that this craft is intended to go no higher than 62 miles, is this a spaceship, or a space plane? Is sixty-two miles qualifiable for low Earth orbit? Otherwise, it is a nice thought to be able to go 62 miles straight up and land somewhere else on Earth in short order relative to a jumbo jet.

A fine step forward eitherway. I look forward to the day when these new space companies will competing for passengers - regular people passengers.

Priceline.com, get the best rates for a moon vacation!

Re:Distance to space?

[Red Flayer]

this craft is intended to go no higher than 62 miles, is this a spaceship, or a space plane?

Neither. Here's a rather dull/akward metaphor:

If a (flying) bird is a creature of the air, and a swimming fish is a creature of the water, what do you call a fish that can momentarily break the surface of the water?

I'd still call it a creature of the water.

Similarly, I'd call Bezos's craft a VTOL airplane -- though I might give it an asterisk -- VTOL airplane*.

*capable of reaching super-mesospheric** altitude.

**Where super-mesospheric*** means above 99.9999% of the atmospheric mass.

***Though at the the time of the X-15 flight (1963) the US considered 50 miles**** (~80km) to be the boundary of space.

****But the significance of the 100km boundary is that it is the approximate altitude of the turbopause, below which turbulent mixing***** of the atmosphere predominates; above this, molecular diffusion dominates.

*****Speaking of which, it's time to get another cup of coffee (with milk, turbulently mixed) before the asterisks really get out of hand.

Re:Distance to space?

[zentinal]

Shouldn't / Doesn't the definition of an airplane include the vehicle achieving flight primarily through the exploitation of aerodynamic forces, instead of primarily through the expulsion of reaction mass? The Blue Origin vehicle (if the picture on the cover of the FAA Draft is any guide) has no wings, it looks like the DC-X.

If a vehicle has wings or a lifting body, and flies by using the lift generated by those wings or the lifting body, then it is an plane. If the vehicle travels exclusively through the atmosphere using aerodynamic lift, then I'd say it is an airplane (driven by gravity, propellers, jets, or rockets). If part of the operational envelope includes operation beyond the 62 mile (100km) altitude normally defined as the limit of space but it still has aerodynamic lift generating elements used for takeoff, cruise (think of the "skipping" designs), or landing, then it is a spaceplane. The shuttle is a spaceplane. Spaceship1 is a spaceplane.

What then is the Blue Origin vehicle? It doesn't have any (as far as I can tell) any lift generating surfaces, so it cannot be a plane of any sort. Is it a manned rocket? According to pedants in the thread, rocket applies only to the means of propulsion, so I'll play along and say no. Is it a missile? How about a manned (what it carries), sub-orbital (altitude envelope), ballistic (flight profile), missile (type of vehicle)?

Re:Distance to space?

[zentinal]

If you throw up during the flight. Would that be "projectile vomiting"?

If it's used mainly to send Billionaires on trips between continents, would it be an InterContinental Billionaire Missile?

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.

Re:What will it cost?

[pookemon]

You mean Virgin Galactic. It's rumoured to be around $200k per flight.

Only shuttles aren't VTOL.

[Vo0k]

Soyuz for example gets launched vertically and lands vertically (on a parachute). That's not what is usually meant by VTOL but certainly meets the definition. What about that craft? Launch will almost certainly be vertical, landing on a landing strip is much harder than a splashdown or such. So will it be a cool "all-terrain space plane" or just a vanilla space rocket?

Re:Hmmmm

[Salgak1]

Sounds more like the old DC-X / Delta Clipper project. . . In fact, according to Wikipedia, Blue Origin has hired a number of DC-X engineers . . .

Re:Normal units are boring!

[Big Nothing]

"The Blue Origin spacecraft, being built by Amazon.com multi-hundradaire Jeff Bezos' new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company's FAA permit applications. It will be a pointed-shaped vehicle about 8.3 fathoms tall and 2.17313508 x 10^-16 Parsecs in diameter at the base, and carry ~pi or more passengers to an altitude of 9.90600 x 10^14 angstrom"

Actually

[Xiph]

The only spacecraft EVER which have NOT been vtol are the shuttles, the russion ones are retired and dead and the american ones have had their share of problems lately.

While the news of how they intend to do this, i think as someone stated above me, the real question is whether you can call it a spaceshuttle when it's only designed to go to weightlessness and return.
Yes it gives a spacelike feeling, but it's not useful for putting up satelites, not possible to go to spacestations with it, from my point of view, it's just a step up from a parabolic flight, but it's not more a spacecraft, than a tow ferry is a ship.

PS. i wish i had one :)

VTOL, as it should be

[Ranten_N_Raven]

"Just like God and Robert A. Heinlein intended!"

Man -- I wish I was the one who'd thought that one up....

Why can't we use journalistic units?

[dmatos]

"The Blue Origin spacecraft, being build by Amazon.com multi-millionaire Jeff Bezos' new venture, will have VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capability, according to the company's FAA permit applications. It will be a pointed-shaped vehicle one sixth of a football field tall, and 270,000 human hair widths in diameter at the base, and carry as many passengers as can comfortably fit in a volkswagon beetle to an altitude of 260 empire state buildings (179 CN towers)."

Useful as a first stage for an orbital craft

[Latent Heat]

While it would be nice to have a VTOL rocket craft that can reach Earth orbit, I think there will be more uses for this thing than people let on.

The Redstone rocket was far from capable of achieving orbit -- it was pretty much straight up and back down as you say. Wiley Ley writes that the Redstone in its missile application didn't have range beyond 200 miles. But what the Hunstville people did was put a cluster of solid-fuel rocket stages on top of it, and not only could they reproduce the flight path of the much longer range Jupiter rocket for doing tests, they could get small payloads into orbit. A Redstone first stage followed by three more stages of clustered solid fuel rockets stuck on top was the Jupiter C. Not very high performance but stupid, simple, and reliable for its day. Not only did it fly a test trajectory for the up and coming Jupiter missile (the Jupiter C was not the Jupiter -- it was a Jupiter wannabe), it was capable of earth orbit years before Sputnik, but Ike wanted to go with the untested Vanguard because he did not want to use Army rockets (Jupiter) to avoid militarizing space. Of course Korolev got there first with Sputnik, the Vanguard blew up a couple of times trying to get there next, the Huntsville Germans finally got to fly their Redstone and launch Explorer 1, and a physics professor from Iowa named James Van Allen became a household word.

I see Blue Origin as the new Redstone. If it provides a cheap, reusable access to suborbital space, it can act as a first stage to orbital craft for launching small payloads into orbit. Think of it, people have been talking about "flyback liquid-fueled boosters" for a long time -- this thing is a flyback booster.

The other smart thing about Blue Origin is that the people ride in a separate capsule. It would be neat if the whole thing took off vertically and then landed vertically on rocket thrust with the crew and passengers inside. But this way, if the capsule lands separately on parachutes and landing rockets in the style of Soyuz, you don't have to worry about the people if the guidance system burps on the main spacecraft and the thing crumps on landing. The fact that Blue Origin has a capsule on top makes it just like a Redstone -- in addition to putting Shepherd and Grissom into a suborbit, it was capable of lofting an upper stage to put small instrument packages into orbit.