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Blue Origin Launches Its First Test Flight of 2018 (mashable.com)
After several delays on Sunday morning, a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket blasted off from the west Texas desert just after noon Central Daylight Time, sending a crew capsule carrying a dummy named "Mannequin Skywalker" on a brief trip to space. For the eighth time, Jeff Bezos' commercial space company successfully tested the system it hopes to use to send paying passengers on suborbital flights in the coming months. From a report: The rocket reached a maximum altitude of 350,000 feet during the test flight, which took roughly 10 minutes from liftoff to the rocket and capsule touchdowns. This test marks the first test flight of the New Shepard system in 2018. The launch of the capsule and rocket was the eighth overall test flight of New Shepard, and the second time this rocket and capsule have flown to suborbital space together. The capsule also carried "Mannequin Skywalker," the test dummy outfitted with sensors used by Blue Origin to give flight engineers a sense of what a person might experience during a flight to space aboard the New Shepard.
Eventually, Bezos hopes that New Shepard will take paying customers up about 100 kilometers into the air, where they will experience weightlessness and be able to see the Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule falls back to the ground under parachutes. But Bezos' ambition stretches far beyond sending tourists to suborbital space. Blue Origin also has plans to build larger rockets that will be able to send big payloads and crews of people to orbit and beyond.
Eventually, Bezos hopes that New Shepard will take paying customers up about 100 kilometers into the air, where they will experience weightlessness and be able to see the Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule falls back to the ground under parachutes. But Bezos' ambition stretches far beyond sending tourists to suborbital space. Blue Origin also has plans to build larger rockets that will be able to send big payloads and crews of people to orbit and beyond.
2 choices to see space close to Earth:
1) View high-definition videos of space travel, safely in your home.
2) Go into near outer space with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin, and possibly die if there is an accident or technical deficiency.
Is Jeff Bezos careful to be logical? It seems to me the answer is no, if you judge by looking at the messy, sloppy Amazon web pages that distract you by trying to sell you other things when you are researching a product.
Blue Origin does not now have the technical ability to orbit the Earth, apparently.
Ya.. that's what it looks like :/
[($)]
Did the lone passenger order a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?
Thatâ(TM)s when you crash probes into Mars, instead on gently inserting them into orbit. 350.000 feet = 100 kilometers.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Video of the whole flight is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The webcast, being aimed primarily at a US audience, used exclusively Imperial units (feet altitude, miles per hour speed), save for one mention of the Karman line, which was defined (accurately) as 100km.
I am sure the entire engineering and operations team worked in SI, but the stuff the public was shown was not.
See, a TRUE geek would LOVE this because it's yet another private space firm making progress. To one day, colonize space and take that one little teeny tiny step to a World like in Star Trek instead of something like in Mad Max.
I see above and below this hostility towards this. Why?
But a story on Space X results in several hundred comments of an Elon Musk circle jerk.
Could it be that some Slashdotters here think this is a threat to the subject of their masturbatory fantasies?
From WikiPedia:
Gravitational acceleration at the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space which lies at an altitude of 100 km, is only about 3% lower than at sea level.
If I weigh 100kg (ok, 100lb, this is /.) then I would weigh 97 at 100km. The majority of the 'weightlessness' is just free-fall; sort of a massive erect vomit-comet. :)
Hey, Tardchris! Don't forget to get your Microsoft certification before the end of April!
> sort of a massive erect vomit-comet.
So, these customers are paying for the privilege of vomiting in space?
Actually, let's be honest here: Don't Use Metric. Those Europeans landers have had some real problems. Meanwhile, the ones from the US seem to land just fine. But as soon as the US added a little bit of the metric system to a probe? Whammo!
Y'see, when those units are so easy to convert, you start making mistakes. When you know it's tough, you check things out more thoroughly.
(And, yes, I'm being facetious for those of you who are missing it...)
The Mile High Club has a new goal; perhaps the Kármán Club? How long do you have weightlessness in the Blue Origin (aptly named colour)? I'd only need a minute or two...
True, but no different than being in microgravity during orbit. This is also due to being in free-fall.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The reason you see people a lot more interested in SpaceX is that SpaceX really is making it more affordable to put things in space, and soon people. For Blue Origin, that is all in the future and we hope that they get there but they seem to be in no hurry. So far it looks like SpaceX will start demonstrating short flights of the upper part of their next rocket design before Blue Origin has New Glenn. Things may be different someday...
Bruce Perens.
Is it just me, or does this look like a toy compared to the SpaceX launches?
True, but no different than being in microgravity during orbit. This is also due to being in free-fall.
[We could be talking about different things here... but I've typed it up so out it goes...]
Not quite... During orbit you have the orbital velocity to create the centripetal force to constantly counter the fall (aka orbit). This rocket is just strait up & down. This certainly makes re-entry simple as you don't have to deal with the orbital deceleration energies (ablation / retros) but you'll never attain orbit or leave this planet for more than a few minutes with "this" setup. With this you do get to tick the 100km altitude attained checkbox which is what it's primarily about for now.
That said, I do salute them and the setup will almost certainly evolve... Great times! :)
You really think a US lander is internally programmed in imperial units?
Why would anyone be so brain dead to attempt that?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Though their platform overall is far better than the scales composites one, which will never fly above 100km. This launcher could be extended to fly to orbit.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Is Jeff Bezos careful to be logical? It seems to me the answer is no, if you judge by how Amazon is managed. More evidence, added to the evidence in the parent comment:
A Slashdot comment: "you still can't sort prime-only items by price correctly (it includes the lowest priced non-prime seller)..."
And: "... Amazon literally still builds their rich pages using their normal grid layout, and in the most impossible to navigate way possible.
Amazon: Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit (Seattle Times, April 3, 2012)
Amazon: Amazon Under Fire Over Alleged Worker Abuse in Germany (Bloomberg, Feb. 19, 2013)
Amazon: Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon's sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers (Salon.com, Feb. 23, 2014)
Amazon: Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace (New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015) Quote: "The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers..."
Amazon: Amazon paid no US income taxes for 2017 (SeattlePI, Feb. 27, 2018)
Amazon: Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break (Business Insider, April 16, 2018)
Amazon: The undercover author who discovered Amazon warehouse workers were peeing in bottles tells us the culture was like a 'prison' (Business Insider, April 18, 2018)
Amazon: Amazon Gets Tax Breaks While Its Employees Rely on Food Stamps, New Data Shows (The Intercept, April 19, 2018) Quote: "Though the company now employs 200,000 people in the United States, many of its workers are not making enough money to put food on the table."
Safe space flight depends on careful thinking. Everyone involved with flight into space must be logical. Maybe Jeff Bezos just needed to find a place to put his money; maybe he doesn't influence Bllue Origins much. But even if that is true, he has influence, and that is scary. My opinion.
That said, I do salute them and the setup will almost certainly evolve
You don't "evolve" from non-orbital to orbital. It's a complete redesign.
Frankly, I'm surprised that they are still putting so much effort in non-orbital test flights.
Didn't Elon Musk say he'd eat his hat if a competitor launched a rocket before 2023 or something?
While technically you can modify a suborbital design to be an orbital one (see many ICBMs that were refashioned into launchers and still are) it doesn't generally work too well and it is doubly inefficient for a reusable design. However the intent of Blue Origin with the New Shepherd was just to get a bit of practice in dealing with a reusable vehicle (fueling, refurbishment, flight operations, etc) and to get the public used to space not being something in the domain of governments. It was a nice idea in theory, but I think it was based in the "reality" of the glacial progress of space access over the past few decades. With SpaceX making advancements that most laughed at as borderline impossible/wildly impractical only a decade ago I don't know if it's a valid approach anymore. Though SpaceX probably should start playing things a bit safer (especially with payloads/passengers) Blue Origin needs to start making some progress or they'll still be developing a partially reusable LEO launcher when SpaceX is making fully reusable fights to the Moon/Mars and back.
Well, again, I'm being facetious. So don't take it too seriously. And, yes, I'm aware that NASA uses metric measurements and the crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter was that a piece of hardware was generating non-metric measurements when NASA expected measurements in metric. The joke is that the US, which I am incorrectly stating is using non-metric units because they do so everywhere else, manages to land on Mars while the Europeans and Russians, which use metric units, can not.
That said, I'm not sure it's that big of a deal to a computer. Accurately converting between kilometers, meters, and centimeters is dead simple for us humans. Converting between, say, miles, feet, and inches is much harder for us humans. But it's not like it makes that much difference to a computer whether it's dividing by 1000 or dividing by 5280.
Which Scaled Composites system, White Knight Two or Stratolauncher? From what I understand both are intended to launch orbital payloads eventually, though obviously the White Knight Two system will only be for cubesats and Stratolauncher probably won't launch anything more than small to medium satellites.
And your comment also clearly puts in perspective the vast differences between what they're doing and what SpaceX is doing. The energy requirements to simply go up and fall back down are significantly smaller (and thus much simpler engineering) than to attain orbital velocity as well.
Most people mistake rockets are going 'up' when the majority of their energy is actually going 'over' (well, accelerating tangent to the surface of the earth). This is why things like the giant plane for Virgin Galactic are largely useless for actual (read: orbital) space launch capability.
They built a fancy roller coaster...and one that will perhaps be useful for ultra-high-speed commuting. What it won't be useful for is access to orbit.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Actually, let's be honest here: Don't Use Metric.
And while we're at it, let's define "space" to be 100 miles up, not 100 kilometers. If we're going to be arbitrary, let's be AMERICAN arbitrary! USA! USA!
Have you read my blog lately?
The comment is a little inaccurate.
Weight measured in lbs is not an alternative unit to mass measured in kg. Scenarios like this is the reason for that distinction. Your weight on earth would be measured in Newtons if we were using the SI system. Your weight at 100km from the earth's surface would be lower than your weight measures at the earth's surface. Your mass measured in kg would be the same in both locations.
Well, pointing out that landing on Mars is hard, is not really a joke.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com...
Most to of the attempts failed on earth or in earth orbit. The only european project that failed was the UK Beagle landing. The main goal of the mission is/was the orbiter.
I guess the problem (at Mars, not in Earth orbit) is meteorology. Air pressure has probably a much wider swing range than "scientists" think. So the difference between landing in a near vacuum, and using parachutes for "predetermined X seconds" and then launching rocket boosters, versus landing in a high pressure zone ist probably to high.
I guess the only reliable way is to have a kind of ground radar to get a better judgement about how to use the parachutes and if/when to use rockets.
The mass issue or unit conversion issue is a minor one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.