A Few Photos From Secretive Blue Origin: Is That a Crew Capsule?

RocketAcademy writes "Among the emerging commercial space transportation companies, Blue Origin is the most secretive and mysterious. A VIP tour by NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver afforded a rare glimpse inside Blue Origin's headquarters, including a look at what appears to be a Blue Origin crew capsule."

Comments

Looks like a Soyuz capsule

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously - maybe they bought used components or are just ripping off the design to stay relevant?

Re:Looks like a Soyuz capsule

[ColdWetDog]

Seriously - maybe they bought used components or are just ripping off the design to stay relevant?

My thoughts as well. Bear in mind that the Soyuz TMA is probably the most successful manned space craft ever. More of them have flown than anything else combined. They power the manned programs of Russia, China and India.

Sort of the AK-47 of the space capsule world.

Re:Looks like a Soyuz capsule

[Immerman]

It makes sense actually, orbital reentry presents some pretty demanding engineering challenges, and your options are basically to try something completely new or clone a time-tested design. The Apollo/Gemini/etc style conic capsules have history on their side, while the Soyuz was designed to have an extremely high volume-to-surface area ratio (closely related to the ever-important volume-to-weight ratio), while providing good lift and air control (a sphere would be purely ballistic).

Then there's space-places like the shuttle, which is basically a one-of design at this point in terms of repeated use, and doesn't have the best track record. It's also been criticized for making some serious design compromises to enable it to do a lot of things that it has rarely if ever actually done.

Other variants like SpaceShipOne are interesting, but only really relevant to suborbital flights - getting up there is the easy part, going fast enough to stay up takes the other 90% of the energy, and without a heatshield you also need to carry along enough fuel to slow down again instead of letting atmospheric friction do the work for you, more than doubling the fuel requirements.