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Blue Origin Release Flight Videos
Reality Master 101 writes "Space start-up Blue Origin (financed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) had a secret test flight on November 13, 2006. They've now released video and pictures of the very successful flight. Looks like they're making good progress." From the page: "We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it methodically."
We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.
What, you mean $20 million a person isn't low enough?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
You are going to run out of fuel.
Land on the pad quickly.
liqbase
I'm not sure what they are using for rockets, but it seems to frost over some of the camera lenses. They need to have some sort of defrosters on them.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"using as propellants what the company's website later confirmed to be hydrogen peroxide and kerosene." - From the wikipedia entry.
cool stuff...
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/x-33/dc-xa.htm
So, I suppose that you have one that flies higher?
a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space.
And to quote a great song writer "and it will take off and land on its tail, Like God and Robert Heinlein intended."
The year when space tourism goes big?
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Why yes, yes I do.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Looks really good. Pity the videos are in WMV format and I am running Linux....
You'd think Bezos cared. Most likely, he chose whatever codec gave him best compression so that he could handle the traffic best. Besides, you can use VLC to view them on whatever platform now.
Was anyone else reminded of the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space (series not '98 movie)? Not so much the shape (Jupiter 2 was flatter) but the take-off and landing looked very similar to those on the show.
That aside I wish the Blue Origin team luck
ACK NAK RST
There seems to be a slight problem with the reality translation module. Allow me to help:
"We're working, patiently and step-by-step"
Trans: "This is gonna be super safe. Trust us. Just don't expect miracles."
"to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go"
Trans: "And as soon as we can find a market and get the launch costs to the break-even point..."
"so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system."
Trans: "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"
"Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it methodically."
Trans: "Anyone who wants to pony up some funds will be welcomed, but it will still take a while."
I hope this helped.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I was impressed that the thing didnt just flip over and drive itself into the dirt. wonder how it would hold up with a bit of wind.
I want to see the video of the crayola sponsored craft with the four rockets in the corners being launched.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Amazon vs. Armadillo for the next Lunar Lander Challenge at the X-Prize Cup? It sure looks Bezos has more than enough to create some meaningful competition. Seriously though - how much bigger is this vehicle going to get? The photos of it on the flatbed truck are awe inspiring...yet I can't imagine how much of that must simply be for fuel. The website's career section has a lot of talk on cryogenics, turbopumps, and Delta/Atlas sized rockets. It sounds like Bezos is going along the conventional routes for launch (erm just look at the name of the rocket - the New Shephard), and the H2O2 rockets being tested out now in the video are only retrorockets to be used during landing, in place of or in addition to parachutes. It'll be really interesting to see what a sub-orbital version looks like.
Didn't SpaceShipOne already do this? Their method is already simplier, cheaper and safer.
whoop-de-friggin-do!!
They are charging 20 million a person?
l o_Program_Budget_Appropriations.htm and converted http://www.measuringworth.com/
When indexed for inflation the entire Apollo program would cost about $85,000,000. Hell, the entire NASA budget for 1960 through 1973 would be about 250 million. The Apollo program put six manned missions on the moon with 1960s technology.
We put 18 men on the moon for what it would cost for 4 low earth orbits.
That is pathetic. Now we've decided to go back but this time its going to take 15+ years and cost several billion dollars. And the worst part is that nobody cares.
I bet we here at Slashdot could raise enough money to start our own space program and beat our government back to the moon by at least a year or two.
numbers from http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-16_Apol
What a cute little rocket :D
What they should do is get business partners who already know how to build rockets and offer them incentives to partipate. NASA's vision right now is not on target but that is not a failure of NASA engineers but a failure of management. Draw the engineering teams into this that already have experience. Don't do it half-assed.
And before the NASA bashers get their RSS feed and feel the need to talk about how stupid NASA is...yes NASA has problems but between Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, ATK, the Russians, the other numerous companies who build and integrate rockets and have spend billions upon billions on launch vehicles, this current effort is honestly a waste to me. It's great to see people wanting to innovate, but wanting and doing are not the same.
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
If you want to innovate, get on board advanced propulsion or space elevator projects. sub-orbital is not hard...warp drive to the next galaxy is hard.
Executive Summary: "I'm lazy and want to gripe about Microslop some more."
...and following your logic, you can't be THAT sophisticated if you expect to view videos on the web without installing a COMMON codec type...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I would like to point out that they are making the same mistake that doomed the Delta Clipper. Four landing legs. As it seems these are not retractable, perhaps it really doesn't matter on this first gen prototype, but hopefully they won't make the same mistake on upscaled hardware.
Aside from the part where you missed the zeroes, $20M really isn't that big a deal anymore, relatively speaking. The Forbes 100 no longer has millionaires on it. In fact it no longer has people worth less than $6 billion on it.
Ironic that most other sites with an embedded video needs only one click to start it playing; I had to download the WMV then open it. I've even heard of some online bookstore patenting the idea for ordering with single click.
Too bad the poor fellow who put this page together couldn't have taken a leaf outta their book. Maybe he's afraid of the patent holder going after him?
It says it was "successful" but all I see is a bunch of pictures of the thing sitting on the ground.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The problem is NASA doesn't seem interested in cheaper access to space.
One might even say all NASA seems interested in is transferring government money to Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, et al. without anything to show for it. *cough*X-33*cough*
Maybe they need to be embarrassed into some actual innovation instead of more business-as-usual.
Ever wonder why office chairs have to have 5 legs instead of 4?
Yes that would be for stability which clearly wasn't thought of here post DC-X.
hehe.
I can understand vertical take off but why do a veritcal landing? It would seem it would need a lot of energy just to land meaning you need much more fuel. More fuel means more weight which means more energy to take off and to land. This would seem to make space flight more expensive not less expensive. The Space Shuttle and Space Ship One glided to a landing burning off the extra engergy with the lift (which is drag) from flight. The only advantage I see is a smaller landing area.
H2O2 + a fuel. They are pretty secretive about what they do out on the ranch but that much is known from public filings. And no (to answer sibling post) this rocket isn't orbital although it may be the upper stage of an orbital craft (or just a technology testbed)
Bezos hired some of the ex-DC-X people. Which explains the similarities.
video encoder. seeing as the current guy can't understand that interlaced video will look crap on pcs, let alone make the video poorer/larger.
just wondering...
What's Bezos talking about?
.us domains were registered with those words at the end of November.
All Google seems to know is that some
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Somehow, I suspect that by the time they are launching that there will be too many cheap launchers for leaving this planet. But I wonder if that craft can be used as a pure lunar vehicle. It would be useful to have something that can land and take off from the moon and be re-fueled in lunar orbit. In addition, if done correctly, this could be used for jumping all over the moon. If this gets done in a few years, then this combined with modified BA-330's (for 1 time landing and base building) may allow for a quick build up of the moon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I am not going to get all excited about cheap space flight before someone demonstrates to me a pretty much completely revolutionary propulsion system. Do that, and the rest is easy. Despite all these fancy scale models that fly up a few hundred meters, we still have physics to contend with when trying to get to orbit, and it is setting really tough limits ... using current technologies, orbital flight is simply not going to happen with anything lesser than conventional huge rocket stacks.
Using a single-piece design for the spacecraft isn't helping, as you're lifting the whole thing up all the way instead of just the tip of your stack while the rest gets dropped behind during ascent. And isn't tail-first powered landing horribly inefficient as you need to burn fuel even during that... and transport that fuel, too, up there?
Let's build the space elevator instead and then construct nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft in orbit...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I love that it refered me to the "Red Rocket Hobby Shop"
redrocket! redrocket!
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
Jeff Bezos is no stranger to recruiting good talent. Before Amazon, he worked at DE Shaw & Co., a premier quantitative finance firm known for ridiculous recruiting practices. Bezos will find people of the skill level he needs and compensate accordingly.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I hate to be a grammar cop, but unless you are regarding the members of a group individually, then the collective is singular, not plural. What the headline implies is that Blue Origin is a group of independently acting people, some of whom have released their own flight videos. I doubt that's the case.
I mean like I just got my WinNT installed and haven't upgraded the media player. Yah yah I know, I'm dumb but why don't they accommodate MEEEEEEEE.
Shaddap whiner. You're ranting about your install's current state, not the site.
All the companies you mentioned have an interest in keeping space flight and expensive, government-only prospect. While hiring engineers from those companies might be OK, those companies in themselves are part of the military-industrial complex and have no interest in making cheap consumer goods.
Would make a lot more sense. LH2 is hard to work with, and takes up a huge volume per unit energy available. But LOX and JP2, that is easily available and easily workable, and it's been done before.
It would sure be interesting if the test and development cycle could beat the Ares I, which is having significant weight issues. (Atlas could do the job, though). If Blue Origin could have an orbiter that could launch the CEV with a little extra left-over throw-weight, when the CEV/Aries stack fails to be ready on time, maybe Congress would take notice.
The space shuttle glides all the way in. It does not come in under power. The only propellant it burns on its way in is for the deorbit burn.
Note that the cost of the propellants is a very small portion of the overall launch costs, and therefore having to carry extra fuel is not a big factor in the economics. In fact, it makes sense: you are already carrying the engines, all you need is some extra fuel, and guidance.
-OThe Bell "rocket pack" of the 1960s uses the same principal - H2O2 + catalyst (silver). It creates instant heat and exhaust. The problem is, it's very heavy for its lifting capability. You can't really carry enough to make a lengthy flight. Bell's pack lasted about 21 seconds. Neat for Superbowl halftime shows, but that's about it. if they're using this as a testbed for guidance/control and othery flight systems, then great. But if they're intending to launch anything H2O2 powered "into space," I wouldn't put much money on it...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
>> The problem is that the extra weight needed to carry the wings for the two spacecraft you mention (the shuttle and SS1) will add more weight to the craft, and thus need extra fuel anyway.
Wings add weight only when they're tacked onto a craft as an afterthought.
If the craft *IS* a wing by design, then they add no weight at all.
Internal structural buttressing is required whatever the shape of the craft, even if it's spherical, because weight considerations mandate that walls be thin so you can't rely on the shell materials alone for structural integrity under reentry pressure. Consequently it's fair to say that wings don't even add buttressing weight.
The best approach would probably be a combined one: (i) use wings for shedding reentry velocity through lift, but not for landing because that requires heavy landing gear; and then, (ii) once you've glided off all your velocity, just land vertically using your takeoff rockets. Hence, no additional weight is required, and much less fuel is needed for landing.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Armadillo Aerospace now refers to this as the "Flying Crayon."
NASA managed to get hold of the vehicle after the BMDO was shot down by the Democrats. NASA proceded to replace all of the robust structural engineering with highly experimental light-weight stuff - NASA has the opposite philosophy of the Delta Clipper/Phoenix design, which was robust, off-the-shelf, small crew, and rapid turn-around. The NASA remake of the DC-X crashed and burned because it was too weak in comparison to the original vehicle, and it burned because of the composite that NASA remade it from.
It was, after all, "not invented here" and Algore for some reason (family money connections?) pushed for the Venturestar over and against the Delta Clipper. Venturestar, as we all remember just plain didn't work and couldn't work within budget, but the Clipper could have been flying by now.
Blue Origin... lowering the cost of space flight by bringing in giant jumbotrons for fans _at the launch site_ to watch.
According to the wikipedia, it is fueled by hydrogen peroxide and kerosene.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Four legs seemed to be good enough for the Lunar Module during the Apollo days. Why is it a bad idea now?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
seriously! it's like a toy. a cutesy, wutesy wittle toy wocket...with very little potential to actually take anyone into orbit let alone return them to earth safely. one would have to scale that thing up about 10-50 fold to even start talking about obtaining serious altitude. how 'bout that whole stability thing - it's amazing they got it to remain vertical, but it's a pretty unstable equilibrium... the slightest nudge (say, from a gust of wind or something) might cause it to veer dangerously to one side. fuel is a major issue too -- whatever they used burnt way too cleanly. which often means they are not getting as much bang for their buck as compared to just plain old jet fuel or some nice solid fuel boosters. seems like their little UFO is little more than a novelty, and IMHO will stay that way if they continue with their current strategy. i thought their goal was to minimize costs?? right now the cheapest way to orbit is through a single, multi-stage rocket. good old fashioned rocketry, just like grandma used to do it ;)
i know, i know, they're just at the early stages, and they'll get better at it. i just think their concept is fundamentally flawed. but i guess we need a few innovative failures to show us that conventional rocketry is still the way to go, and maybe one of these days some one will do it better (i'm looking at you, spaceship one!).
no offense to Jeff - probably a great guy, but there is something seriously screwed with the structure of human society to have private individuals so rich they can finance startups that take people into outer space
Gas core nuclear reaction rockets can be up to an order of magnitude more powerful than the best chemical rockets. It is possible to build a rocket that could put thousands of tons into LEO per launch, or an order of magnitude more cargo than a SaturnV, reusably.
As for a tail first landing, that is the best way to go when landing on airless, or nearly airless targets such as the Moon, or Mars. Not only do you not have to worry about atmosphere density or maintaining flight speeds (how many runways are there on Mars?), but once you're down, you're already set up for re-launch.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
with 4 legs if one fails the thing falls over. with 6 legs any two can fail and the thing will still remain upright, provided the weight is uniformly spread.
Remember this is going to weigh a lot more than the lunar lander and will land on earth, with it's much stronger gravitational pull, both those factors multiply the stresses on the gear and even with services these are designed to be reused, microfactures will creep through and joints will stick
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Very pretty rocket. It goes 100 metres up in the air then down again. I appreciate the complexity of this task and praise the team... but... how does this scale to going orbital? links and info welcomed.
Individuals seem able to start far greater advances to mankind than governments can (who tend to want to restrict the technology for themselves rather than make it available to the masses - see NASA) or conventionally funded corporations (who would never try space because it's harder than selling books online).
And when you look to seriously rich individuals, consider the guys like G. Washington who helped launch a country with funds from his slave farms and his pirate ship; and his buddy Robert Morris who pretty much financed the revolutionary war.
I respect Bezos much more for trying to accomplish something impressive like this with his wealth instead of those like the Walmart family who mostly use their wealth to enslave low cost manufacturers worldwide.
Isn't a vertical landing a waste of a lot of resources? You have to carry the fuel into orbit that you need to land as opposed to landing with minimal fuel ie Shuttle and Spaceship One. I guess the best thing would be you don't need a runway but that does not seem like it should be problem.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
He is talking about a UFO that was spotted over O'Hare airport in November. Clearly it isn't this project, they are in the stone age side of whatever was over O'Hare. That is, if there was anything there at all. Some people think it was a weather phenominon bending light to fool the eye. If it wasn't weather and it really was a spacecraft or aircraft of some sort, I'd like a ride!
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
To quote John Carmack, "Rocket science is not as easy as amateurs think it is, but it's not as hard as the professionals think it is."
NASA is only part of the problem. The other problem are the Lockheed's, etc, who think nothing can be done for less than a billion dollars. They have zero incentive to reduce the cost of space -- why should they? They make billions of dollars off it. Do you think they would ever try the "cheap clusters of modular rocket systems to orbit" as Armadillo is going to do? Hell no. That would bring mass production into it -- and we can't have that.
Do you know why the insurance company was willing to put up the money for the X-Prize? Because they asked the old guard, and the old guard told them it was impossible to do for less than a billion dollars.
Only the competition from new blood is going to break the stranglehold (and the arrogance, as you demonstrate) of the old guard.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Something tells me that this craft as configured would not be capable of achieving orbit from a ground launch. Perhaps a balloon launch would make things more feasible. However, why would you want to come down with such BIG empty fuel tanks that are no longer necessary? There being empty certainly decreases the mass
In any case
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
NASA absoluetly has incentive to make spaceflight cheaper. Their incentive is they can run more missions on a shrinking budget.
Just remember one thing though. NASA is a public agency. This means that they are incredibly afraid of PR problems that occur when their vehicles explode with people on board. Granted that this will hurt a private corporation too. But not until it actually happens. Do not expect double and triple redundancy in the efforts of the private firms to provide an elevator ride just above the atmosphere.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I believe you are overestimating the desire of billionaires to take a brief rocket ride to the edge of space only to be immediately pulled back down. Then there is the risk factor. Anytime you're dealing with rocket fuel, there is a serious risk of going BOOOOM!!!!
Billionaires may be rich. But do you think they're stupid? Besides, billionaires get to their status by getting SOMEONE ELSE to pay for it. Like say
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
As a governmental agency, the last thing NASA should be interested in is directly competing with private industry. If cheaper spaceflight helps NASA's mandate, fine, but no federal agency should be involved in what is, essentially, a commercial venture.
NASA absoluetly has incentive to make spaceflight cheaper. Their incentive is they can run more missions on a shrinking budget.
I would say that is an unsupported assertion. NASA is a mature bureaucracy. Their incentive is to expand their bureaucracy, period.
This means that they are incredibly afraid of PR problems that occur when their vehicles explode with people on board.
Which could mean they are disinclined to actually launch anything. Cheaper launches means more launches means more failures means more bad PR means smaller budget.
In a mature bureaucracy like NASA, that means studying a problem to death. Generate reports and white papers. Create committees to evaluate the reports. Create committees to evaluate the committees. Nobody can fault you if you're exercising due diligence. Nothing can go wrong until you actually build something and test it. And if something went wrong, then you failed because you didn't study the problem enough.
Do not expect double and triple redundancy in the efforts of the private firms to provide an elevator ride just above the atmosphere.
Space flight, even suborbital flight, is dangerous. There are lots of dangerous human activities; kayaking, base jumping, bulding your own airplane, etc., but people do them anyway. You take the best safety measures you can and go on.
Even NASA with their double and triple redundancy still had the Challenger and Columbia disasters. If you expect space travel to be as safe as an elevator ride, you're going to have a long, long, long wait.
This is nothing but tinfoil hat nonsense created by the space fanboi crowd to explain why a magic wand hasn't been waved and provided them with masturbatory fantasies.
The reality those companies have every incentive to chase profit making opportunities... But that's the catch, its quite unclear that building cheap rockets (which means building rockets by the metric buttload) will be profitable. It costs from tens of millions to hundreds of millions to develop a new rocket and to build out the manufacturing, support, and launch infrastructure - and prospects for a return on that investment are, to put it very mildly, bleak to nonexistent. The markets simply don't exist.
*yawn*. If this was pre DC-X, I'd be impressed. But startup space companies building toy demonstrators are about as common nowadays as startup dotcoms with toy websites were a decade ago.
One might even say all NASA seems interested in is transferring government money to Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, et al. without anything to show for it.
:)
With a Republican in the White House, I'm shocked that someone would say that!
You don't think the war in Iraq/Afghanistan *really* costs *that* much, do you?
Its not the companies that have these decades of experience, its the engineers in those companies that do. These Companies do not innovate because NASA doesn't ask them too. They are on Cost Plus contracts, that makes innovation detrimental to the bottom line. So the engineers who actually developed the products in the company are either, retiring, dieing or quiting to join these startups that are trying to innovate.
In 10 years the companies that rely solely on NASA for there aerospace buck will have no engineers, just production line operators, with no idea how to improve something if NASA ever did get the political balls to ask for it.
With a Republican in the White House, I'm shocked that someone would say that! :)
Yeah, things were so different under Clinton.
You don't think the war in Iraq/Afghanistan *really* costs *that* much, do you?
Which has what to do with NASA?
> Yeah, things were so different under Clinton.
Have you seen the national debt figures since Bush came in? That deficit was gone _before_ 9/11.
>> You don't think the war in Iraq/Afghanistan *really* costs *that* much, do you?
> Which has what to do with NASA?
Someone made the point of funneling money from NASA into aerospace companies. The same funneling that happens with war equipment contractors is the link. Sorry if that was too subtle.
It's moderated funny - but it's the stone cold brutal truth. And space fanboi and alt.space (NewSpace) communities have been doing all they can for decades to ignore it.
> Yeah, things were so different under Clinton.
Have you seen the national debt figures since Bush came in? That deficit was gone _before_ 9/11.
Ok, I was thinking of NASA funding under Clinton, so ya got me there.
But all that strays from the topic at hand.
Translation: "No matter what the nominal topic of the thread, I'll fill it up with unoriginal anti-Bush screeching."
Give it a rest, nutjob. And take your meds, m'kay?
Hmm, this VTVL idea seems to me to be a deliberate attempt by Bezos to position his endeavor for eventually taking a trip to the moon. First they go for LEO trips, and then later they decide to use the same spacecraft to touch down on the Moon.
After awhile, they could set up a small base, then eventually a Disneyland/Hotel/etc.
So IMHO, the guy is planning his tech tree carefully. That means this spacecraft is not intended as SSTO. That's why Bezos wants Delta-IV engineers, so that he can build a comparable booster on which to perch this spacecraft, to get to LEO.
The problem is that the [wings] will add more weight to the craft
Paragliders are flying steerable, ram-air self-inflating airfoils that carry 30 times their own weight to a low-speed landing at a 10:1 glide ratio. These parafoils have been scaled up to carry half-ton payloads so far; there is no reason to believe they couldn't be scaled up further. Skydivers' parafoils are less efficient (lower glide ratio, higher airspeed) but more robust, and deployable at free-fall speeds.
A parafoil-based landing system for spacecraft would trace its ancestry to the Apollo-era parachute reentry systems. This is no accident: after all, the design constraints (safety, low weight, etc.) haven't changed. What has improved a lot in recent years is our ability to design and build highly efficient ram-airfoils.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
Wow, you certainly must have some strong experience in rocket building with such an authoritative stance on the matter. How many "fanbois" have you had to disprove in person, IRL, with your sheer technical excellence?.
Someone should have modded this guy TROLL, not funny at all.