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

Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Rei]

Flights that just pop up to the Karman line and back down are virtually nothing like flights that actually go to orbit. Even the X-15, which actually reached a quarter of orbital velocity, was far more like an orbital flight than a straight up/down jaunt.

The Karman line is only 1/3rd to 1/4 of the way to proper orbital altitude. And the energy required to achieve orbital altitude is only a tiny fraction of that required to reach orbital velocity. And the rocket equation means that the faster you want to go, the exponentially more mass it takes. These little up-down jaunts do nothing except to confuse the general public into thinking that they're doing something similar to orbital spaceflight.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. The point (and it was clear even in the summary) is that the rocket landed back down. THAT's what was being tested. Granted, they didn't have to take as much propellant with them, but that isn't as big a deal when they were testing the ability to LAND from space.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Rei]

Again: "from space" is not the same thing, or even close, to "from orbit". It's not the height that causes problems, it's the velocity. And more importantly than that, it's the extreme mass limitations that reaching that velocity imposes on your craft. With suborbital flight you can dedicate all the mass in the world to making the task as easy on yourself as possible.

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[MrTester]

Yeeeessss....
They clearly should have spent 5 times the money to get further into space even though that would in no way help the validity of their test of recovery systems.

Why? Because that money would have helped shut up people who completely miss the point.
It would have been well worth it.

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]

But the public confuses space and orbit. To them they're synonymous. It is not technically incorrect to call it "reaching space", but it's also not wrong to point out that "reaching space" and "reaching orbit" are not even in the same ballpark.

Anyway, the oxidizer is HTP, so we can look forward to this company going bust shortly after they suffer from a catastrophic tank explosion - hopefully while nobody is around. Seriously, why did every other little suborbital rocket startup in the 1990s and 2000s suddenly decide that in contrast with the vast amount of evidence amassed earlier, HTP is in reality an easy, convenient, safe oxidizer choice? Because they can find household peroxide in their medicine cabinet and gee, it seems safe enough?

(It's not impossible to use HTP safely - for example, it's used for maneuvering in Soyuz - but it usually takes a number of explosions to get your process refined to the point that that doesn't happen any more)

In general, rocketry has pretty much well settled on the right general formula for liquids and hybrids: LOX (clean, absurdly cheap, relatively dense, low viscosity, stable and (by oxidizer standards) non-corrosive in the right conditions, and although cryogenic we've gotten good at dealing with that) burned with hydrogen or alkanes of varying lengths (depending on the desired balance between efficiency and temperature/density/power; they're clean, cheap, stable, low viscosity and readily vaporized, non-corrosive, etc) and optionally fine-grained aluminum if one can work it (up to 20% - cheap, rather clean, very stable, dense, and very energy-rich). Some of the alternatives under research may provide some benefits, and in certain particular situations there might be a need for "special cases" (for example, where hypergolics or monoprops are essential), but by and large for bulk "lifting" it's about refining designs, not propellant combinations.

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

[khallow]

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.

I've been told on occasion (by posters that warble on about the virtues of "blue sky" research) that's precisely why government space programs should be wasting money on this crap. Because nobody else will!

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[hackertourist]

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

Re:Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Immerman]

Except other people *are* spending money on the much more challenging task of creating actual, useful, orbital launch vehicles. Developing reusable suborbital launch vehicles while reusable orbital launch vehicles are under development isn't "blue sky research", it's attempted short-term commercialization of the "space"-tourist market.

Not to downplay Blue Origins accomplishments, I applauded when it landed successfully, but SpaceX has already done lots of successful test launches/landings of smaller prototypes. The big challenge is in succeeding under the extreme mass constraints of a functional orbital launch vehicle.

Re: Please put the word "space" in quotes

[Immerman]

Okay, fair point. Maybe if they can make it cheap and reliable enough it can put the Vomit Comet out of business. I'll wait until I see the evidence though before I credit them with regular commercial runs.

1) For now they are almost certainly far more dangerous than most recreational activities, limiting their potential customers to those wiling to accept the risks of relatively untested technology.
2) Unless/until they see extensive reuse it's still going to be very expensive, severely limiting their potential customer base.
3) With every reuse the risk of catastrophic failure is going to increase at least slightly, and if they ever lose a tourist group they will probably be sunk (though sufficiently robust in-flight emergency abort systems may minimize that risk)
4) There's very limited unmanned payload to take up the slack if an accident costs them the tourist business.

They may well carve a commercial niche for themselves, but it will be a tenuous one, and essentially unrelated to the orbital space industry. Still, there could be some advances in emergency abort systems and reusable rocketry systems that can carry over - fewer mass constraints allows for a much wider range of options for early-gen technology that may eventually be refined into something suitable for orbital launches. And who knows, if they can keep it up long enough maybe someday they'll make it to orbit.

Hmm, I suppose they may also end up developing technology with substantial applications for in-space flight, even if it's never suitable for surface-to-orbit launches. Interesting thought. After all for an "orbital taxi" long-term reliability becomes far more important than mass constraints, and there's really no reason a surface-to-orbit vehicle needs to do any more than reach low orbit, after which an very different set of "optimal solutions" kicks in.

Re:Cue the Musk apologists

[Anonymous Coward]

At least we didn't need to cue the people who don't know the difference between cue and queue.

"The Karman line? More like the LOSER line!"

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Billy (age 5): Look, Mommy, I writed a symphony!

Mom: Wrote, not writed, idiot. Let me see that. Harumph! This is barely a sonata. And no one writes for harpsichord anymore!

Billy: I wrote it for you! It's pretty, like you are!

Mom: Pandering, now? Disgusting. And I guess I would have been impressed, if Mozart hadn't beat you to it, by, oh, like, two hundred years!

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

god damn you, Sam I AM

[Thud457]

Did they land it on a barge?
No they did not land it on a barge.
Did they land it at sea?
No they did not land it at sea.

Blue Origin did not do these things I see.
So not as difficult can they be.

This is nothing but good

[kheldan]

Competition is nothing but good for everyone in the long run, and as much as I think Elon Musk and SpaceX have done some pretty cool stuff, this Blue Origin company is showing that they too can do cool stuff and be competitive, and I can't see any way that's a bad thing for anyone. So how about you whiners and complainers stop whining and complaining and just enjoy that they did something that was a success?

First fully reusable?

[macklin01]

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

Weren't both the White Knight and SpaceShipOne fully recovered for reuse? Wasn't that the point of the X-prize (and doing it twice in two weeks)?

links: SpaceShipOne and X-Prize.

Re:What about the other half

[ColdWetDog]

Was thinking the same thing - I wouldn't want to be in that capsule, check out the dust-ball when it smacks down!

- Walking the Walk -

Watch the Soyuz capsules when the land on the steppes of Mongolia. They do pretty much the same things.

Big badda boom.

Re:"The Karman line? More like the LOSER line!"

[werepants]

The backlash here is because the article's author claims "Jeff Bezos finally one-upped Elon Musk in space."

That's completely inaccurate. Jeff Bezos' sub-orbital landing is the commercial jingle to Elon Musk's five-movement symphony of orbital re-entry and landing. Anybody who is saying this feat is more impressive is just ignorant.

To be more technically correct, the author could have claimed that Bezos one-upped Scaled Composites and Spaceship One, which made sub-orbital spaceflights several years ago to claim the Ansari X-Prize, but even then he has only really replicated their accomplishment. So the point isn't that the New Shepherd isn't technically impressive (it is) or that sub-orbital spaceflight is easy (it isn't), but that the article is totally wrong in its comparison to SpaceX.