Blue Origin Launches and Lands the Same New Shepard That Few In November (blueorigin.com)

MarkWhittington writes: The commercial space race between Blue Origin and SpaceX got more interesting on Friday. In November, Blue Origin launched its New Shepard booster on a suborbital flight, and then successfully landed it afterward. On Friday, Blue Origin relaunched the same New Shepard spacecraft to a height of 101.7 kilometers, and then landed it a second time. Blue Origin has therefore accomplished a first by flying a vertical takeoff and landing rocket into space twice in a row. The company has taken another step toward its goal of taking the rich and adventurous on suborbital jaunts for fun and profit.

Comments

Ummmm....

[click2005]

'Few in November'? lol

holy crap

[p0p0]

Timothy. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Spelling isn't that hard. It reflects really poorly on this site when the editors can't spell. This happened on the article just before this too.

Re:holy crap

[elrous0]

In his defense, he's very drunk.

No comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

How can anyone compare Blue Origin and SpaceX in the same paragraph while still mentioning that Blue Origin flights are sub-orbital? There's really little basis for comparison at that point between Blue Origin and SpaceX and more comparison between Blue Origin and Scaled Composites. Of course Scaled Composites *already* flew multiple sub-orbital flights with SpaceShipOne - who cares that it wasn't a vertical take-off and landing - it's *still* more comparable.

Re:No comparison

[Immerman]

They're not, technically. And SpaceX has already done *lots* of rocket landing with the Grasshopper test vehicle.

The hard part is scaling the technology up enough to be useful - there's lots of non-linearities in the real world that confound such endeavors. Just a couple:

Getting up to speed while carrying a second stage requires a LOT more fuel, meaning the difference between launch weight and landing weight are MUCH greater. To the point where the Falcon uses only one of its nine engines when landing, throttles it down as far as it can go, and still is producing too much thrust to be able to hover. And being able to hover makes a *huge* difference in ease of landing - just stop a few feet above ground and then ease yourself down, rather than having to time things perfectly so that you hit zero vertical speed just as you touch down. Stop a foot too high and you can't get down short of cutting the engines and falling, stop a foot too low and you get serious impact damage.

Wind shear - thanks to the much taller profile, torques from ambient breezes are going to be much greater on the bigger rocket, increasing with roughly the square of height.

Altitude only first

[AJWM]

The "first" here is that New Shepard made it to the altitude arbitrarily defined as "space". The first launch and landing of a VTOL rocket that had previously flown was back in September of 1993 with DC-X's second flight (first was 8/18/93). Sure, it only went up a few hundred feet ... then stopped dead, hovered, translated sideways another couple of hundred feet, then landed. (I was present for that one. Frickin' awesome!) It flew yet again less than three weeks later.

On June 7 and 8 of 1996, it flew twice within 26 hours. That second flight reached an altitude of 10,300 feet (its record). Nowhere near space, but the DC-X program was more about the control software and reusability than going for altitude (it was a one-third scale prototype of the proposed Delta Clipper). And they were doing it with what is now over twenty year old technology. (Actually older, the thrusters were modified RL-10s from the 60s, much of the flight control avionics was off-the-shelf units that McDonnell-Douglas used in its jet aircraft.)

So, kudos to Blue Origin for reaching the edge of space with a previously-used rocket (something nobody else has done with the arguable exception of Shuttle, which was really never the same twice). But let's put the "first" emphasis where it belongs. (And it is significant -- it doesn't really matter how many times you can re-use a rocket if it won't get you to space in the first place.)

Space Race!

[WindBourne]

Hopefully, this leads to a bit of a space race.

However, to be fair, SpaceX is a LONG LONG ways ahead of everybody. They already have an orbital craft. They are able to land their first stage. They will likely re-use it in production sometime next year.
FH will launch in April.
Dragon v2 for human launches, will be end of year.
Raptor is supposed to be finished and fully tested around early 2017.
And that is on-top of MCT being developed.

OTOH, ULA, Airbus, O-ATK, Russia, etc will feel the heat shortly.

Re:Space Race!

[WindBourne]

LOL.
They already comply with NASA and DOD standards and still their prices remain a fraction of ULA, Airbus, etc.
And as to extracting money from the feds, ULA is nearly 100% dependent on the feds, while less than 1/3 of SpaceX are from govs.
And when it comes to getting 'subsidies' from the feds, they take in a FRACTION of what ULA, Boeing, L-Mart, Airbus, BAE, etc take in. Hell, in all of these other companies, they require the feds to pay costs+, which is ALWAYS outrageous profits, while with SpaceX, the feds have paid only a fraction of the price. SpaceX continues to pour their profits into R&D.

Finally, if they are so far behind that they are only 50's tech, then what companies are ahead of them and how much lower costs are they?

Re:Vertical Landing Rocket Economics 101

[CSG_SurferDude]

It's not twice the fuel. It takes most of the fuel to get to speed. At that point the booster is SIGNIFICANTLY lighter, so it takes (again with that word) SIGNIFICANTLY LESS fuel to slow down, and then to land.