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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 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.
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.
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.
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.