Blue Origin "New Shepherd" Makes It To Space... and Back Again (arstechnica.com)

Geoffrey.landis writes: Blue Origin's "New Shepherd" suborbital vehicle made its first flight into space (defined as 100 km altitude)... and successfully landed both the capsule (by parachute) and the booster rocket (vertical landing under rocket power). This is the first time that a vehicle has made it into space and had all components fully recovered for reuse since the NASA flights of the X-15 in the 1960s. Check out the videos at various places on the web.

Comments

Space Ship One?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is the first time that a vehicle has made it into space and had all components fully recovered for reuse..."

Re:Space Ship One?

[Rei]

Their design was kind of problematic. People naturally gravitate towards polybutadiene because of its use as a binder in solid rockets. But hybrids are not solids. Hybrids are great in most regards except for generally pathetic burn rates. Rather than consider other fuels, SS1 just used a typical solid rocket binder. One can compensate for the low burn rate, of course - usually by trying to increase the area by making many, smaller channels - this they did. But the more your propellant looks like swiss cheese, the more likely you are to have chunks break off as the rocket burns down. Which is exactly what happened on one flight, they had such a loud bang during the strike that the pilot thought his engine had exploded.

The proper solution is pointed to by research. Rather than polybutadiene the propellant should be something like paraffin or polyethylene. They melt at lower temperatures and become very fluid. The combustion basically whips up a "spray" off of the surface, making for very rapid combustion. With rapid combustion you don't have to "swiss cheeseify" your propellant. The polyethylene and the high melting point paraffins also are very strong and stable at room temperature.

OB XKCD link

[CSG_SurferDude]

Going to space vs getting to orbit

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Rei]

To put it another way: the Falcon 9 first stage has a loaded mass of 418 tonnes and an empty mass of 23 tonnes, or a ratio of 18,2 to 1. New Shepard has a loaded mass of 75 tonnes and an empty mass of 20,5 tonnes, or a ratio of 3,66 to 1. Noticing a bit of difference here? New Shepard has, proportionally, 5 times more mass to throw around toward making their landing easy. How easily do you think they could cut their spacecraft to 20% of its current weight and still land? And on top of that, they face far lower wind loadings and heat loadings to boot and have far less crossrange to deal with, making it that much easier on them.

Suborbital spaceflight is the special olympics of spaceflight.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Rei]

a feat that not even government space programs have achieved

Because they haven't seen fit to waste any money on it because it's such a meaningless endeavour. There's so little money in it, except for tourism, which government space programs (possibly excepting the Russians) have no interest in.

As a general rule, when governments shoot something up, they want it to stay up.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[D.McG.]

To reinforce the point of comparing a hummingbird to a raptor, Blue Origin's New Shepherd suborbital vehicle did not substantially travel laterally before landing. They had a near zero lateral velocity (winds in the upper atmosphere do not count) and came back to land at the launch site. The SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage however is traveling laterally at Mach 10 upon separation, and attempts to land 200 miles down range. Falcon 9 is also 3 times taller than New Shepherd. Not a fair comparison at all.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[hackertourist]

The BE-2 used HTP. The BE-3 seen on this flight uses LOX+LH.