Slashdot Mirror
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
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."
Why yes, yes I do.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
It's powered by H2O2.
"We're working, patiently and step-by-step"
Trans: "This is gonna be super safe. Trust us. Just don't expect miracles."
Where do you get the idea that they're promising something "super safe"? All I got from that is that they're trying to warn people that they're trying not to rush things.
"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..."
Huh? They've already have a market. Just look at the number of people that have already made reservations for flights on Virgin Galactic.
"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."
The company is being funded out-of-pocket by (multi-billionaire) Jeff Bezos, and I'm fairly certain he wants to keep financial control over it for at least the near future. It's his baby, pretty much. I really don't think they're begging for funding.
Dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous!!
Oh, it's dihydrogen dioxide? Carry on then!
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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!
I hope this helped.
I'm not sure it helped, but at least you're nominated for Cynical Poster of the Month award. I hope you attend the show to take the prize, but as always, the competition for that spot on Slashdot is really tough.
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.
Yup. In fact, many of the engineers who worked on the DC-X are now at Blue Origin.
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.
We want burning flames and heat haze not condensation and frost.
It's not condensation and frost -- it's steam. As another commenter mentioned, the rocket uses H2O2 as propellant.
2 H2O2 => O2 + 2 H2O
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?
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.
The thing is much bigger than I expected. I would guess with a 2m radius and 4m height. It is quite fat, so I guess they are using spherical or ellipsoidal propellant tanks. The shape reminds me of the Kankoh Maru and the shell seems to be made of composites or plastic. I guess the blunt nose makes sense because the thing is suborbital and they do not have a wide cross range requirement like the Delta Clipper had.
I am not an expert, but the burn looked too clean, I guess it is a pressure fed mono propellant. Perhaps H2O2 (Hydrogen Peroxide) like someone else said. Much like what Carmack tried to do with Armadillo. I counted 3 x 3 = 9 thrust chambers in that setup.
The man requested someone with experience in cryogenic turbopumps. Even mentioned the RS-68 explicitly. So it seems to me he is going for a pump fed LOX/LH2 engine. It makes much more sense to me than the H2O2/Kerosene rumours I heard before. Why risk it all by going for an engine no one has built before? I mean the only rocket engine with that combo I remember is the one in the British Black Arrow rocket from the 70s. Beal killed himself by going with a risky H2O2/Kerosene combo and a filament wound shell.
A LOX/LH2 engine with a variable mixture ratio would do the trick. H2O2 is IMO overrated and finicky. LOX is cheaper than high purity H2O2 and has pretty good density. You have to go for LH2 if you wanna go orbital anyway for the ISP AFAIK (unless you use a lot of stages, which I guess is what they do not want).
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.
...or for better results see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
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.
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.
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.
-OGas 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.
I think that's pretty much how the "New World" was colonized, wasn't it? A bunch of richer-than-God private individuals footing the initial bill to create startup companies importing, say, exotic foods (tea, rum, tobacco)?
I can't say the rate of return for a space-tourism venture would be on the same level, but it's pretty much how exploration has always traditionally been done.
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.
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.
People, this isn't even remotely close to something that could provide reach to orbit. H2O2 monoprops are pretty worthless as far as orbit goes; you might as well make a sugar rocket. It wouldn't be an upper stage; its propellant is too heavy for how much thrust it provides (poor ISP). It wouldn't be a lower stage, obviously. It's so far from an SSTO it's laughable. It's not a stepping stone to an orbital craft because they'd have to completely redesign the engine, the tanks, and basically the whole craft.
It's a rocket with one purpose: brief high-altitude joyrides.
Don't watch these distractions that cater to rich thrill seekers. Watch companies that are actually going to space, like SpaceX. They're the ones that have the potential to make a difference.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Agreed about H2O2. Why are people so in love with this stuff as far as rocketry goes? You just have to look at its history to see that the devil is in the details. The stuff likes catalytic decomposition (the hotter it gets, the faster it decomposes, releasing heat). You have to have stabilizers in it to prevent it from exploding in your tanks, but those stabilizers hurt your ability to decompose it on catalyst packs and tend to clog them. You have to have spotlessly clean tanks, which is clearly an additional manufacturing/maintenence cost, as even a little particulate matter will help decompose the H2O2. Etc. H2O2 is only metastable. If you want a metastable propellant, why not, say, working on cost-effective mass production of cubane or cubane compounds? The energy in cubane is crazy, yet it's metastable because of a lack of good decomposition paths. After all, in orbital rocketry, fuel costs are generally only a very small fraction of launch costs. Expensive fuels are justified if they give you that extra kick of ISP.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."