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."

Comments

that's better

[macadamia_harold]

Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound.

I suppose that's better than taking off and landing again with a crashing sound.

Re:that's better

[fifedrum]

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.

Re:that's better

[Rei]

You know what? Every time I get out of bed, I don't explode. I guess this makes me 100% better than NASA.

What's that? I'm comparing apples and oranges by comparing "getting out of bed" with "getting many tonnes of payload to a low-earth orbit"? You don't say...

It made me think of...

[d3m0nCr4t]

Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." :D

Quick, somebody call Mork;

[The_REAL_DZA]

I think we've found his egg!

Re:slow on the uptake

[Bucc5062]

Actually, slashdot is true toform and dup'ing the news. This http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/0 3/2344241 was posted on Jan 3. Even repeated it is a cool story.

Re:slow on the uptake

[Thansal]

well, it is a dupe (and hey, the /. story is actualy earlier then the pythom one):
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/0 3/2344241

Makes sense

[tsotha]

DC-X was a very successful program. It had many successful flights until the Air Force turned it over to NASA and NASA crashed it on the first flight. Then they cancelled it.

Re:Makes sense

[Richard_at_work]

NASA flew the DC-X four times, with it being lost on the fourth flight. The US Airforce programme damanged the DC-X on its last flight with them and refused to spend funds on repairs, which was why NASA stepped in - they offered the funding to repair the vehicle and resume testing.

A little optomistic

[Silver Sloth]

From TFA

That craft, as the site says, will be "designed to take a small number of astronauts on a suborbital journey into space." The pace is deliberate, with commercial trips starting as early as 2010 285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.

Re:A little optomistic

[camperdave]

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.

Re:A little optomistic

[FleaPlus]

285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.

As another commenter mentioned, taking off and landing (which they've just demonstrated) are the most difficult parts of a launch. Additionally, SpaceShipOne went from starting full development in 2001, to their first test flight in 2003, to their first suborbital flight in 2004.

Not like DC-X

[J05H]

The Blue Origin's vehicle isn't anything like DC-X, except that they are both VTVL. The Goddard/New Shepard vehicles are axisymetric, base-first reentry and use hydrogen peroxide/kerosene. DC-X (and follow-ons) were biconic, used a side-first reentry with body flaps and were LOX/LH2 powered. Very different machines, both these test vehicles and any further versions. DC-X was based on the classified AMARV test article, the Goddard is more like the old "mega capsule" heavy lift concepts from the 60's and 70's, such as Boeing's LEO.

All the best to Bezos and Blue Origin! The flight video is excellent!

Josh

Re:Not like DC-X

[Rei]

1) People *always* say that on rocketry forums on Slashdot. It's a tradition.

2) Stored much easier? Apparently you've never dealt with high-test peroxide. It's not like the stuff you find in your medicine cabinet. Ask the crews of the Sidon and the Kursk what they think of this "easy" to store material.

3) Okay, lets pick one -- SS1. Budget ~25 million. Payload -- ~300kg to 100km. Per-launch cost undisclosed, but believed to be about half a million dollars. Lets compare this to, say, the SR-S sounding rocket: ~100kg to 200km, which should be a roughly equivalent challenge. Price: $95,000/launch (one launch to date). Total program budget at time of initial launch: $1.7 million (which developed and tested two scorpius designs, and initial work on the upcoming, larger variants). The entire Scorpius project (leading up to multiple orbital variants) is expected to be $20-25 million.

Yes, they didn't have to make it man-rated ("experimental" man-rated, that is ;) ). And if you want a sounding rocket with more launches under its belt, the development costs are generally several million more. But if you want to call projects like SS1 "shoestring budgets", I'm just going to laugh. Sounding rockets are trivial compared to orbital rockets. SS1 serves the same role as a payload-recovery sounding rocket. Don't expect "oohs" and "aahs" just because some companies add a cockpit/cabin and charge an arm and a leg for people to ride. Heck, for the price of a SS1 launch, you could launch twice the payload nearly to orbit on a Black Brant XII.

4) It was implied, and see #1.

5) See #1.

6) That's the thing: the space industry currently *is* run by corporations. While development is generally (but not always**) government subsidized, corporations usually (but not always**) bear the operating costs, compete for launch contracts, and gain the profit from the launches -- just like in any other industry.

** -- For example, the Orbital's Pegasus, SeaLaunch's Zenit, and SpaceX's Falcon.
*** -- For example, everyone's favorite punching bag, the Space Shuttle.

Re:They're hiring?

[kfg]

I wonder what they pay?

Money.

KFG

Can't get to orbit that way

[Animats]

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.

Re:Can't get to orbit that way

[Moofie]

Sure! And we wouldn't even need flashlights when we get there!

Re:Can't get to orbit that way

[rrohbeck]

Jerry Pournelle has some data that make it sound feasible.
A mass ratio of 17 (5.9% payload) with RL-10 engines doesn't sound too bad for a start.

Re:Can't get to orbit that way

[FleaPlus]

Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.

I'm sure it'd be trivial compared to the spread of radioactive particles from coal power plants.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

Blue Origin Design

[amightywind]

Powered ascent and descent results in a craft that is 4 times more massive than one that would reach the same altitude but land using a ballistic reentry and a parachute. You would not see Burt Rutan embrace an inefficient design like that.

Re:Blue Origin Design

[UtilityFog]

It's not that simple. The basic design of the SSTO as a cone-shaped capsule uses ballistic re-entry. The powered landing needs only the delta-V of terminal velocity, not orbital. We're talking on the order of 100 m/s instead of 8000 (probably more like 10k if you account for air resistance on the way up).

good backgrounder: Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere.

Re:Blue Origin Design

[Moofie]

"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. : )

In case you're an aerospace engineer

[iamlucky13]

Correction: In case you're a highly experience aerospace engineer.

I already checked. They don't seem to be doing a Google style "young talent" hiring search or accepting those with marginally-related experience. If you look through the jobs page, they're generally asking for 10 years experience with some very specific skills (like direct experience with RS-68's or RL-10's). Your chances probably aren't very good if you're looking to break into aerospace, even with an advanced degree. *sigh*

With good reason, I'd wager. I would attribute a large part of SpaceX's rapid pace of development of the Merlin engines to having recruited the same kind of talent directly off of Lockheed and Boeing. They didn't have to figure out many of the details of how to build a working rocket because they people they hired had already built them.

This is probably critical for Blue Origin. Space.com's reported that their current test vehicle is powered by catalytically decomposed hydrogen peroxide. If they're going to achieve the payload and altitude they want, suborbital though it may be, I doubt they're going to get there without a bipropellant; fuel + oxidizer. Just switching to H2O2 + kerosene would double the theoretical specific impulse, or energy they can get per mass of fuel. On the downside, burning a bi-propellant increases the complexity of the engine significantly and complicates throttling, and if they're planning on using turbopumps instead of a pressure-fed system (a scheme their jobs page supports), it gets even more complicated.

Next up for Blue Origin

[sokoban]

Building DC-9 Lookalikes, but with rocket engines in order to transport Thetans to Teegeeack in clusters (packaged by the thousands together), and thereafter drop them in two volcanic areas, one of which is Las Palmas, and the other Hawaii.

(The preceding joke is based upon the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, which make up a core belief in Scientology (OT III, Incident 2))

Testing VTL control...

[bodland]

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.....

My favortite part of the video...

[Anonymous Coward]

"10... 9... 8... 7,6..5... 4...... 3, 2... 1"