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Bezos Discloses Failure of Blue Origin Rocket Test Flight
astroengine writes "An experimental suborbital space vehicle developed by Blue Origin, a space startup founded by Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos, was lost during a test flight last week. During the secretive flight, the vehicle reached an altitude of 45,000 feet and attained a velocity of Mach 1.2. Soon after, things went horribly wrong. 'A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle,' said an upbeat Bezos in Friday's statement."
Things go boom. Pretty much no one in the business of putting up boosters has managed to do so without create a fair amount of debris and fuss.
Bezos seems to appreciate this. It's a disappointment, for sure but it's just that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I find this article especially interesting, as I did a job shadow at Blue Origin last year as a part of my requirement to graduate High School. One of the Employees showed me around the test facilities and showed me the various systems in place to try to prevent this kind of failure from happening. It's unfortunate that this happened, but as the employee told me, most of this is chump change for Jeff Bezos, and Blue Origin is in all reality a pet-project of his. Cool fact though, the Blue Origin Building in Kent, WA is home to an original Bell X-1 as well as the original model of the Starship Enterprise that was used in the episode where the Enterprise gets destroyed, I believe. All sorts of other cool things there too.
One click detonation by the range officer.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No one said they. Read carefully.
It was traveling at 1.2 times the speed of sound at the time.
The flight was not "secretive", the flight was "secret". The people involved were being secretive in order to keep it secret.
secretive
adjective
having or showing a disposition to secrecy;
Obviously we should abandon everything, because almost everything has been done before. I mean, who the heck needs new, faster PCs. We should just optimize the heck out of old software to make it faster, right?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yeah, why dont they just license the tech from NASA, or get some of off-the-shelf components and just fly away.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think it's really cool that it looks like something from a 50's science fiction comic. Not being sarcastic.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Well, I said that in my second post - wasn't thinking through it carefully. It's something that usually comes up every time Mach number is brought up here.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...it is valuable research for the next test flight. The stuff their working on is really somewhat innovative because it hasn't been explored much by NASA, RKK or ESA. Their vehicle is intended to be entirely reusable, albeit as a suborbital craft as well but it will be an impressive marit with ideas that stem from some of the earliest space-flight ideas. Should be interesting to see when the time comes that Virgin and Blue Origin are competing for customers.
the Amazon tablet will be more lucky. When I read 'A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle,' sounds exactly what HP needed to do.
Yeah, like why did European people come back to America after Columbus' discovery? What is the attraction?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...sometimes, it -does- take a rocket scientist.
POGO oscillation used to be a problem with rockets. Wonder if those POGO sputters from the Blue Origin picture were the problem or not? One might think that today's rockets like Blue Origin are so sophisticated that they are happy with POGO oscillation. The Wiki article is below. Would appreciate any knowledgeable insight on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying... (Eye roll).
Other bodies in our solar system are chock-full of precious resources that will be sorely needed in the not-too-distant future - and I include minerals and land in that category. Makes sense to work on getting there before it's urgent.
dude. f=ma is the only "science" they are using here, and that has been established for a long, long time. What Blue Origin is doing is engineering, not science.
We're endlessly told by all the libertardians on slasdot that private companies don't have such failures [...] Either this story is false, or the libertardians are talking out of their asses.
Third option: you're making shit up (ie, a strawman) and you're the one talking out of your ass. Or in other words, [citation needed].
-- Alastair
No, what was said is that it will be cheaper to be using private companies, who have a built-in incentive to minimize such failures and a reason to reduce cost. Governments don't care about cost because they can just confiscate it from somebody else (usually you and me) if they start to run out of money and therefore have no incentive at all to reduce costs. Ditto for quality, but quality of the product follows because it is mainly a way to reduce costs as low quality stuff is always more expensive in the long run.
With Niobium currently going for about $50/kg and Titanium going for about $3/kg, the scrap metal value of several metric tons of the stuff would be worth the effort to call up a scrap metal company to haul it out of your yard and potentially could buy you a new automobile. That is on top of the insurance claim you could file against the "billionaire" or whoever dropped the thing onto your house where you could also sue for damage.
If you live outside of the country where the launch happened, there is an international treaty where the "host country" promises to reimburse any damages done by spaceflight (presumably taking a pound or two of flesh from the company who did the screw-up). Every single spacefaring nation has signed this treaty, so unless the company is doing something like launching a rocket from Monaco or Tuvalu you are pretty much covered. Most of these small countries have also signed the treaty because they get to collect the potential damages if one of these big countries makes a mistake.
Because what they're doing hasn't been done before, and that's the way technology advances. If there was off-the-shelf hardware that did what Blue Origin is trying to do, don't you think they'd use it?
Guess what. These people are pretty smart.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!