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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."
we do not refer to it as a "capsule"
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
These of course match the grey's prototypes from Hangar 18.
I fail to see the entertainment value in going up in an uncontrollable firecracker to go float around a cramped tin can for a few minutes.
I fail to see the entertainment value in sitting for hours on a worn sofa shoveling salt and sugar into one's mouth for hours... As with the evening Couch ride vs the Rocket ride, it's the view that's important, not the vehicle.
If there were so much demand for these types of trips, there would be a lot more private jet fighters since a few decades.
The last time I checked, the Classic Jet Aircraft Association reported over 300 jet warbirds in private hands.
Just because you aren't interested doesn't mean nobody is.
If you read the article, you'll find out that the company was stopped for political reasons. On one hand, the fear that knowledge about building missiles could get into some African countries where the company had testing facilities, and on the other hand political pressure from some powers that didn't want Germany to have their own long range rocket technology.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sort of the AK-47 of the space capsule world.
You mean that it's going to be popular with insurgent, revolutionary and terrorist space agencies?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin_New_Shepard
The purple thing is a capsule for BO's reusable suborbital rocket "New Shepard". BO got some money from the 2009 era stimulus package for some minor development work related to it. It is the "composite pressure vessel" mentioned in the wiki link. The capsule sits atop the vertical take off/vertical landing reusable suborbital rocket, and separates in the event of an accident.
The biconic capsule in the third picture was part of Blue Origin's entry for later commercial crew development work for NASA. It would carry seven crew to the ISS, and launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket, or later Blue Origin's own future reusable orbital rocket. They were awarded about 20 million in the first round of funding which that wind tunnel test was part of, among other participants like SpaceX's Dragon, Boeing's CST-100, and SpaceDev's Dreamchaser who received larger amounts of funding. Further money for such development work was slashed by congress and so BO's entry was winnowed out.
And yet interested enough to post in the discussion thread about it; curious. The summary says it's a space transportation company, what else did you want to know? Of course, you were probably in such a rush to post your lame-ass comment that you didn't read the summary either.
Yes, the name is reminiscent of evil videogame megacorps or secretive sci-fi splinter groups. If I saw this name in fiction, I'd shake my head and laugh at how silly it was.
And right now it's powering the USA's space program too. Without the shuttles, it is currently the only man-rated launch vehicle operating.You want to get to the ISS? You're going up in a Soyuz
You spelled "freedom fighter" wrongly.
Sort of the AK-47 of the space capsule world.
Yeah, occasionally something jams
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Oh well. I didn't think the US was actually serious about manned spaceflight anymore.
There's only one obvious reason for a spacecraft company to be secretive. They're involved in a top secret military project.
Then again, maybe Blue Origin is trying to be the Apple Inc of the space transport biz. Except that Blue Origin's chief financial backer is a web billionaire named Jeff Bezos. So maybe Blue Origin is trying to be secretive like Amazon?
Maybe BO has figured out a way to bring down space fares to a new low, a Kindle Fire among the iPads of the launch industry? That, or JB is trying to cover up the lack of progress.
Same could be said if by any non-professional looking at the list of symptoms in psychological diagnosis manuals like the DSM or WHO's equivalent. Researchers and professionals are aware that everyone has those traits to some degree. But those symptoms in diagnosis lists don't mean you have it to any degree, but above some threshold that is much less common and that even many self-diagnosed people would fail to meet. Listing a symptom that everyone has is obviously pointless, which is why anyone familiar with what is involved in such diagnosis know that there is a lot more effort and training in being able to know where the threshold for such issues is.
Next stop - Planet Ten.
in soviet russia, soyuz flys you! .... oh wait
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
What did this 'arcticle' show or say that hasn't been really, really old news for a really, really long time?
Checkoff?? Surely you mean Chekov. You may turn in your geek card.
I fail to see the entertainment value in going up in an uncontrollable firecracker to go float around a cramped tin can for a few minutes.
Since that value exists despite your failure to see it, maybe you ought to educate yourself first before commenting further. It's got to be one of the top five annoying Slashdotter traits, that if I can't see how to do something, then it must not be possible.
Autism research is just another gravytrain, as well as an excuse to proudly announce "My child is different and special".
Given that that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, allow me to be the one to declare this as complete bollocks. Thank you.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
and on the other hand political pressure from some powers that didn't want Germany to have their own long range rocket technology.
Given they pretty much invented it, it seems ironic on one hand and yet totally understandable on the other...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But Astronauts must click through an ad to get to the guidance and control system.
Until Boeing gets the CST-100 built, or SpaceX uprates their Dragon capsule, or if the Chinese want to let you fly in one of their Shenzhou spacecraft. Orbital Science is also working on a crew-rated capsule too.
Still, since the ISS partners don't trust China for trips to the ISS, the Soyuz spacecraft is pretty much the only way to get there at the moment.
I don't know if the SpaceShipOne design is necessarily inappropriate for orbital spaceflight. Certainly some other way to get more velocity is needed (like perhaps a significant booster engine being used by Stratolaunch) and there would need to be some sort of thermal tiles added to "SpaceShipThree" resembling what was done for the Space Shuttle. The "shuttlecock" re-entry mode thought up by Burt Rutan has some interesting characteristics which would be very useful to at least explore in terms of how much further that engineering design can be used and how far it can be scaled up. For returning smaller payloads from orbit, it may even be a very useful design. The nice thing about the "shuttlecock" design is that it has passive guidance rather than needing a pilot showing skill on re-entry. A pilot can be unconscious and still technical survive at least the atmospheric re-entry itself, even if not necessarily the landing.
Still, energy is really the key to spaceflight, and you need a whole lot of energy spent very quickly in order to get into orbit.
Let's be serious, folks. Sierra Nevada did a captive carry test, in which they took their model and dragged it around on a helicopter for a while. Blue Origin might not have gotten that far. Meanwhile SpaceX fully qualified their cargo solution, has a contract to carry real cargo, and is working on the manned version. So far, exactly one of the companies mentioned has a spacecraft.
Bruce Perens.
You still need to dump energy getting down. That is why heat shields get so hot, as it is the atmosphere + shield which is absorbing all of the kinetic energy of the spacecraft on its way back to the surface.
An alternative solutions has been proposed by JP Aerospace with an alternative launch + reentry vehicle design that uses airships rather than rockets. It seems like a really crazy idea as it is something that nobody else has even considered and doesn't really have anything to be used in comparison. Still, JP Aerospace seems to have a whole lot of experience with high altitude balloons and being able to operate them from a high altitude remotely. Their goal is to send hundreds of tons of supplies into orbit for under a million dollars. If they can pull it off, it would radically change commercial spaceflight. There would still be a need for conventional rockets, but they would be fast couriers rather than the only game in town.
...someone should have mentioned WTF "Blue Origin" is. Apparently its so secretive, I have no idea as to what it is. Not interested enough to find out either...
Yes, we do a shitty job of reporting information, like leaving out large portions of "what the hell is this and what does it mean", and thats worthy of a -1 troll rating.
I used to think the group moderation scheme was a good one, but apparently many people don't understand how it works. You see, a 'troll' is when someone posts something wrong or unnecessarily inflammatory, with the primary intention of riling people up.
Reporting a story saying "Wow, this is really exciting!" without saying what it is, or why its exciting...well...thats a little less than worthless. If you already know, then you didn't really need the news. If you don't, then reporting incompletely stories isn't particularly worthwhile.
The problem with the airship/balloon concept is that while it can get you above most of the Earths atmosphere it doesn't actually get you anywhere close to orbit. Think of it this way: since they depend on buoyancy balloons can only approach the edge of the dense atmosphere - about 60km above sea-level, but to maintain a stable orbit you need to be above the thin atmosphere as well - any orbit below 200km will rapidly decay. Moreover the real killer is speed - in terms of just the raw energy delta needed to reach LEO (ignoring implementation details) only about 10% of it goes to reaching the desired altitude - the other 90% goes to getting going fast enough to *stay* up (7+km/s).
Where there could be potential for airships is in conjunction with something like a tumbling-cable space elevator where an airship could conceivably position itself below a descending end and transfer a capsule to be hauled into orbit so that the elevator only has to deal with the extremely thin far upper atmosphere.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Speed is a much bigger issue than you're thinking, reaching 60km (the so called "edge of space") only takes ~10% as much energy as it does to then reach orbital velocity (~8 km/s). Reentry has the same problem - there's just no way to do it gracefully - sure at 60 km the ultra-thin atmosphere will cause your orbit to gracefully decay... right up until you get into the thicker lower atmosphere, at which point you suddenly realize you're traveling at about Mach 23 and the front end of your craft is beginning to vaporize from the extreme heat of the compression front you're creating.
Now I'm not prepared to say the SS1's technique will *never* be useful for such a situation - but at those sorts of speeds things like graceful control become a distant second to not getting ripped apart, and those shuttle-cock wings say to me "lots of important fiddly bits that will be difficult to shield from the heat and forces involved in traveling at hyper-sonic speeds.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I would suggest you look at what JP aerospace is proposing. The interesting thing is that they are working on propellers that can work at very high altitudes for thrust, and their long-term plan is indeed to use airships for travel into orbit, not just high altitude locations. They are fully aware of the delta-v requirements, and it is a part of their business plan and development model for their vehicles to get there.
Yes, a simple balloon like a weather balloon is not going to get you there, and those folks who put on demonstrations in a stratosphere saying how they got into space really haven't. I get that, but then again there is a reason why the upper stratosphere is called the "ignorosphere", because it is pretty much out of reach for most long term studies. Orbital altitudes have quite a bit of information and experience has built up due to space stations like the ISS, Mir, and Skylab (as well as the Manned Orbital Laboratory and the Salyut stations that were developed before those other stations). The lower stratosphere is understood due to commercial jet aviation and some military experience, but the upper atmosphere is too thick for spacecraft and too thin for most forms of aviation. That is where the JP Aerospace "airship to orbit" is trying to make a difference, with technologies that specifically operate in this regime and can get this necessary delta-v with the main issue that the delta-v will be accumulated over the course of a week instead of in a ten minute period of time like is the case with rocketry.
I have no idea if these guys can pull it off, but it certainly is a novel approach to spaceflight.
That other approaches might be possible as well, it doesn't mean this particular concept won't work.
There are ways to make re-entry possible without the traditional ballistic re-entry process that currently is being used. You need to manipulate your overall density and engage in some flight dynamics that haven't really been explored to any significant degree, so it really is bleeding edge science. In theory you could ride something appearing like a surf board and be able to attempt re-entry without a capsule (something seriously considered for emergency situations for crewed flight in orbit) and you may also be able to ride some aerogels or something else with a huge surface area compared to weight that may "skip" across the atmosphere a fair bit longer than sinking into the atmosphere in a metal capsule.
The trick is to dissipate the energy over a longer period of time, as what happens in reentry is the kinetic energy is transformed into heat energy. Taking longer implies that the heat energy doesn't get pushed onto the vehicle in a short period of time.
Yes, I realize the speed is huge for orbital spaceflight. It still is an energy budget that you are dealing with.
I would need to review the mathematics of the whole endeavor, but it may be possible to use something like the SpaceShip One shuttecock system for very small payloads (about 5-10 kg) where you end up with still another flight regime, with the small size of the "re-entry vehicle" being able to do things that a larger scale vehicle can't get away with. The U.S. Air Force for a great many years experimented with small return vehicles for their photo reconnaissance missions with actual film being returned in those re-entry vehicles. I would imagine that there could be commercial applications where due to bandwidth issues or simply for operational security that you may want perform a similar "micropayload" return vehicle.
Certainly there are other ideas on how to engage in spaceflight, where not all possible ideas have been tried. There are certainly drawbacks to any other alternative, but if those drawbacks can become strengths in some cases, it may be worth looking at.
Ah, It seems that when I skimmed their site I spotted their publicity stunts and missed their actual plan. That does look intriguing, though I have my doubts about whether the second suborbital-to-orbit stage is feasible - my gut tells me that if the air is dense enough to support an airship then traveling through it at several km/s is going to be a challenge, but it could well be wrong.
If they're really going to test the high-altitude prototype soon that will be one to watch...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Even if it does fail at least it managed to put things in space and in orbit unlike the last round. An F-15 does not allow you to go to the edge of space or experience zero gravity.