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Blue Origin Lands Rocket During Launch Escape Test (gizmodo.com)
SpaceX isn't the only private company interested in reusable rockets. Blue Origin, an American privately-funded aerospace manufacturer established by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, surprised everyone, including itself, by successfully landing its New Shepard rocket in today's in-flight launch escape test. Gizmodo reports: Moments ago, Blue Origin conducted an in flight test of its launch escape system, separating a crew capsule from its New Shepard booster at an altitude of 16,000 feet. This test was critical to ensure that the rocket will be safe for human passengers, whom Blue Origin hopes to start flying into sub-orbital space as early as next year. Not only did the crew capsule make a clean separation, deploy its parachutes, and land softly in a small cloud of dust back on Earth, but the booster -- which everybody expected to go splat -- continued on its merry way into suborbital space, after which it succeeded in landing smoothly back on Earth for a fifth time. Although Blue Origin has tested its launch escape system on the launchpad before, this is the first time such a system has been tested, by anyone, in flight since the 1960s. It was almost too perfect. You can watch the test here.
...seems to show one of its many upsides. This may spur SpaceX to do at least as well, or better. Forget about Boeing et al.. These are small, agile (in the dictionary sense, not in the software engineering sense) companies that can move, react and even pivot in a way Boeing et al. could not even begin to dream of. Great job, Blue Origin! Now it's SpaceX's move.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
...or does it look like Jeff Bezos is compensating for something?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Then they would have nobody to compete with. Which could, in fact, slow them down. This way, they are trying to trump each other... Competition is important - without the fierce competition between USA and SSSR, it is likely that we would be still waiting for the first man on Moon.
The way the parachutes opened was really quite beautiful, too
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hmm I'm not so sure. Sometimes a bit of competition, meaning pressure, can do more to inspire than having more brainpower and money on hand.
I'm just happy that there actually are people pushing the boundaries of human capability at all.
I think it's hard to say when competition helps and when it hinders. I don't think we'd have done more with the ISS if there had been two competing ones, for instance.
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This guy thinks people born between date x and date y are all the same as each other.
Bright guy.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
... like it was added in to the video afterwards. OR it was ALL faked. (Sorry, couldn't resist)
it's a tough one to call. Competition *can* leader to greater efficiency - but sometimes it causes very inefficient outcomes. Richard Dawkin's uses the following example: a meadow is a giant solar energy collector. A forrest is a meadow on stilts. The first plants to get stilts had an advantage over the other plants - they got more of the sunlight. Competition forced other plants to follow suit. By now you have a seriously inefficient outcome - all the plants are spending almost all the sunlight they get just on maintaining those stilts. It's a massive waste of the very energy they are competing for - but none of the plants can stop wasting it or they get none at all.
That's an example of competition causing a terribly inefficient outcome. Competition causes efficient outcomes only when it's constrained so nobody can do something that actively hurts their competitors and forces their competitors to adopt the same tactic. In nature, that would be the climate restraints that stopped meadows in some parts of the world from getting a lot of tall trees and being turned into forests as happened elsewhere. In economics - that's the role of regulation (and why an unregulated market would, in fact, be the least efficient form of the market you can get, quite aside from it's propensity for evil. The same drives that lead to inefficient outcomes being enforced by unregulated competition also leads to evil behaviour being required for survival).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No, they're not.
But those who don't know the difference between what Blue Origin is trying to do and what SpaceX is already capable of are idiots.
And if you believe that United Launch Alliance (Lockheed. Martin and Boeing) are looking forward to farm and honest competition - well, right. Sure, that is certainly the hallmark of the military industrial complex.
Big money likes to win and can afford to buy the privilege. SpaceX and Blue Origin had better hurry and hope UAL doesn't decided to swat the annoying startups.
Our country runs on money - we are a country dedicated to making the uber rich richer.
his cozy relationship with the CIA, and increasingly Amazon as well. But I have to admit: he has hired some smart folks for his hobby.
Just, wow.
I had to call my wife to watch this one! Wow, she said, a huge penis is blasting off! Yeah, I told her, watch as the crew capsule will separate... Crew capsule? Oh! yes, there goes the head!
Was the design on purpose, to troll radar operators with a penis cross-section?
It being funny of course didn't take much away from the important parts of the mission, nice landing for both booster and capsule. Good to see these guys progressing.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
So true, because manufacturing and engineering costs in 2016 are exactly the same as they were in 1993. Material science hasn't advanced at all in the last 23 years either.
We didn't "plunder" the scientists, they willfully and happily came to the US after the fall of Nazi Germany.
You mean the MD DC-X which never went above 10300 ft? Not exactly space...
And why would it not be cost-effective? Sure, you lose some capacity because you have to take extra fuel to bring the booster back (and you have to use more fuel to send that fuel up), but if you just make the rocket big enough, it won't double the price. If you can reuse the booster once, it's paid for itself. And certainly if it's a booster the size of the proposed BFR. You don't just want to throw that away.
He probably thinks that getting a rocket in to a stable orbit, delivering long term useful cargo, and then landing on a moving barge in the ocean is a LOT harder than shooting a rocket practically straight up and coming right back down to land.
I think I agree with him.
Damn, that was really smooth. They didn't even expect the rocket to return; this is a double-win for Blue Origins. The commentator said this was both vehicles "final flight"...that rocket looks pretty beat up on the outside lol. Hopefully, after all the post-flight analysis is done, Jeff donates this to a museum. I'd love to go get a up-close of this impressive vehicle even if it's slightly phallic lol.
who are going to first search the Internet as soon as they encounter a problem
Are you somehow suggesting that looking on the internet to see if someone else has encountered and solved the same problem is somehow inferior than spending hours (or days, or months, or years, depending on the problem) trying to solve the problem yourself? Or are you suggesting that every time someone needs a wheel for something they "re-invent" it?
In an academic environment I would condone such behavior, in the real world a company that operated that way wouldn't last a year.
Is that the internet comments would immediately turn this into a pissing contest between SpaceX and Blue Origin. How about cheering on -any- company trying to make new strides in space tourism, space services and space exploration? Fuck off wankers.
Are you somehow suggesting that looking on the internet to see if someone else has encountered and solved the same problem is somehow inferior than spending hours (or days, or months, or years, depending on the problem) trying to solve the problem yourself? Or are you suggesting that every time someone needs a wheel for something they "re-invent" it?
Depends on the problem. I'm an engineer, and I've seen colleagues turn to Google when they need perform basic unit conversions that really should be second nature. The Internet is a fabulous resource, but tends to promote laziness and loss of problem-solving skills when relied upon too much. It also seems to dilute common sense, as when information is assumed to be correct because the source appears to be authoritative, even though cursory inspection shows the information to be wrong.
Yes they did.
Considering the alternative was a lifetime of research in the "Worker's Paradise" or staying in the country where their handiwork was dropping daily on people's heads.
Tom Lehrer has a great song about that...
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Just note that Blue Origin is a sub-orbital rocket. SpaceX has put stuff into orbit and recovered the first stage, which is much more complicated.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
That looked like a Right Stuff quality ride. I hope they had enough sensors in the capsule to simulate it. It might be a case of being able to successfully land a tub of goo.
No, they're not. But those who don't know the difference between what Blue Origin is trying to do and what SpaceX is already capable of are idiots.
Ya, Blue Origin is just trying to supply the new engine to the ULA along with man rated personnel module, while SpaceX is doing everything on their own and already has an engine.
These guys (Musk and Bezos) are different men with different business models, different technical approaches, different goals, etc and they are BOTH doing great stuff
Yeah, Musk has sent stuff into LEO to and from the ISS and also out to GEO. This is all excellent work and very promising BUT it's also been massively subsidized by NASA who saved SpaceX from bankruptcy by signing a contract to launch payloads on Falcons before Musk had ever proven he could fulfill that contract, and then signing up for a bunch of additional flights AND handing out several piles of development cash as soon as he showed he could. Musk has now repeatedly launched and recovered his capsules, has launched com sats, and has recovered boosters (hooray!) BUT he has never re-flown a booster and has now had a second 2nd stage explosion in the space of only about a year, with doubts that he properly diagnosed the cause of the 1st failure and no cause yet for the 2nd failure. Musk went for orbital flight before Bezos and before recovering boosters because HIS model required getting to orbit and then securing contracts to take stuff to orbit thuse securing a funding stream.
Bezos, on the other hand, has done his work without taxpayer dollars. This means his program is necessarily tied to his shorter-term "space tourism" sub-orbital business model. He has a constant cash flow from Amazon and therefore did not need to rapidly secure a huge contract for orbital flights. Bezos has focused on sub-orbital flight and booster recovery and re-use because that's tied to HIS business model. While Bezos has not yet gone orbital, it's NOT because he cannot figure out how to - the additional horizontal speed was not a requirement for his early plans. What Bezos HAS done brilliantly that Musk has not yet been able to match is [a] the re-flight of a booster (the same one, five times!), [b] the re-flight of a spacecraft, and now [c] an in-flight Max-Q abort demonstration. It's doubly impressive that Bezos's 1st stage not only survived having an abort motor fired directly against its top end at Max-Q and then having the aerodynamics of the stack change so dramatically at the most-critical moment of flight, but it completed a normal pre-programmed flight and successfully landed - this has never before happened and it says a HUGE amount about the durability of that launch vehicle. The old Atlas rockets of the sixites would crumple and collapse if stood-up into launch position on a pad without being filled with fuel or a pressurisation gas.
BOTH men are doing great work and BOTH men are breaking new ground on two different paths. BOTH are doing things the other has not yet done, and all future spaceflight is benefitting from what BOTH are doing.