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Blue Origin Building DC-X Lookalike
rrohbeck writes "The New York Times is running an article on what Blue Origin (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' space company) is up to after his Texas land grab. A couple of Flash videos show a short successful test hop of the 'Goddard' test vehicle. From the article: 'The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound. In one view, one of the nine rocket nozzles jitters as it maintains the ship's attitude. Goddard resembles the DC-X, another vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft under development in the 1990s by McDonnell Douglas for the Defense Department and NASA until the government pulled the plug.' And in case you're an aerospace engineer, they're hiring."
the thrust is applied throughout the flight, the sound is pretty interesting, wooshing like too much air coming out of a too small nozzle. They don't coast during this test flight at all, it seems, if the sound indicates relative thrust, it's pretty constant, with maybe a few % reduction throughout the flight and a small increase at the end.
the nozzles adjust during the flight to maintain attitude, I believe the DCx did the same thing. IIRC the DCx also had a series of manuvering thrusters spaced around the ship.
It looks impressive, but you can't get to orbit that way.
Single stage to orbit craft have to be somewhere above 97% fuel, with the best chemical fuels possible. People have tried to build SSTO craft, Rotary Rocket being a good example, but when your weight budget is that tight, it's next to impossible, and even if it works, the payloads are dinky.
Two stages work. The Shuttle is two stages; the solid boosters and the external tank are dropped off. To get to orbit on chemical fuels and have any useful payload, you have to dump some mass during lift. Even with two stages, the weight reduction efforts result in fragile spacecraft.
Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.
Taking off and landing safely are the two biggest obstacles to suborbital flight. They seem to be doing those two well enough. The only remaining obstacle seems to be altitude, which is simply a matter of working out the payload/fuel constraints. The Scaled Composites team took only three years from start of development to taking the X-Prize. 2010 is not an unreasonable goal for going from fully functional testbed to production vehicle.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Vertical Take off and landing. Notice the lack of heat, that is simple escaping gas, notice the lake of "smoke" or product of a oxygen reaction, the liquid and frost?...Some compressed gas propellent in the form of pressurized liquid was used to propel this "pod". Probably a test of the computer controls required to do a vertical landing.
The pod will probably be deployed atop a conventional rocket to shoot tourists into low earth orbit, take some snaps, puke in zero G then fall to earth, chute deploys then the last 5000 feet or so the landing "spray" take over with non-explosive propellent...for a safe, soft touch down.
Makes perfect sense, it is safer than splatting craft on the ground like the Russians do, and craft recovery is much cheaper with a soft touch landing than a splash down. Aircraft carriers are expensive.
I could be way off base...but don't expect any "secret amazing" drive technology out of commercial space vehicles. It is really about making space tourism, safe, repeatable and profitable.
-=Space Pod=- coming to a Six Flags near you.....
"but I also suspect that it can be tricky to properly and safely load a parachute of that size."
It may be tricky, but the math of carrying all that propellant with you is pretty darn inflexible. I've done that math, and I don't know how Blue Origin (and/or Rotary Rocket and/or Armadillo) plans on making it work.
I'm very, very eager to find out. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!