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Blue Origin Pushed Its Rocket 'To Its Limits' With High-Altitude Emergency Abort Test (theverge.com)
Blue Origin pulled off another successful test launch today, landing both the New Shepard rocket -- a reusable vehicle designed to take tourists to the edge of space and back -- and capsule after flight. From a report: The company ignited the capsule's emergency motor after it had separated from the rocket, pushing the spacecraft up to a top altitude of around 74 miles -- a new record for Blue Origin. The firing also caused the capsule to sustain up to 10 Gs during the test, but Blue Origin host Ariane Cornell said "that is well within what humans can take, especially for such a short spurt of time."
[...] The rocket which went up today is the third New Shepard vehicle that the company has ever flown. The first one flew to a super high altitude in April 2015, but the booster was unable to land back on Earth after flight. The second iteration of the vehicle was much more successful, however. Blue Origin launched and landed the rocket and booster a total of five times before retiring the system. This third New Shepard has already done two launches and landings, and it sports some upgrades over its predecessors. For instance, this one actually has windows in the crew capsule; the second vehicle had its windows painted on. Blue Origin is building even more vehicles to carry passengers, though there isn't a firm date for when the first crewed flights will occur. The company's president Rob Meyerson has estimated that the first test passengers could fly as soon as this year, while commercial flights could start in 2019. Blue Origin also plans to start selling tickets next year, too.
[...] The rocket which went up today is the third New Shepard vehicle that the company has ever flown. The first one flew to a super high altitude in April 2015, but the booster was unable to land back on Earth after flight. The second iteration of the vehicle was much more successful, however. Blue Origin launched and landed the rocket and booster a total of five times before retiring the system. This third New Shepard has already done two launches and landings, and it sports some upgrades over its predecessors. For instance, this one actually has windows in the crew capsule; the second vehicle had its windows painted on. Blue Origin is building even more vehicles to carry passengers, though there isn't a firm date for when the first crewed flights will occur. The company's president Rob Meyerson has estimated that the first test passengers could fly as soon as this year, while commercial flights could start in 2019. Blue Origin also plans to start selling tickets next year, too.
Not likely. New Shepard goes up at about Mach 3, orbital speed is about Mach 25. Testing suborbital doesn't really get you anywhere toward orbital flight, and as far as I know they haven't built or done any tests of their theoretical orbital rocket yet.
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It's true that suborbital is an order of magnitude away from orbital velocity, and two orders of magnitude away in terms of energy, but I will say the method that Blue Origin is using to achieve suborbital flight above the Karman line is more extensible to orbital spaceflight than either Virgin Galactic (using hybrid rockets and feather reentry) or XCOR (although XCOR, may they RIP, did have a hydrogen variant concept that would've been extensible).
The New Shepard booster is using pump-fed hydrolox engines, and vertical takeoff/landing is very scalable to large sizes. Their orbital rocket has a new factory in Florida that is basically finished (currently being furnished inside) with a launch pad undergoing construction, and the engines for it are currently undergoing extensive testing. So you should take their orbital aspirations seriously, although there is a long ways to go. The upper stage of New Glenn uses couple vacuum-optimized engines based on this sea-level-optimized one used for New Shepard, so there is some direct heritage.
New Shepard is to New Glenn (the orbital rocket) as Falcon 1 is to Falcon 9 or maybe Falcon Heavy.
Doesn't matter what they're shipping if they can't get it anywhere close to orbit - and Blue Origin can only get about 10% of the way there. Getting out of the atmosphere is easy - we've got space enthusiast groups launching balloons that can make it almost all the way out (see Airship to Orbit). The hard part is getting up to orbital velocity, which requires about 10x as much energy as required to reach to the right altitude.
While Blue Origin is doing some interesting and impressive things in rocketry that are fun to see done, and may eventually prove useful for space launches, for now they're engaging strictly in scale model R&D. Nothing they've done so far is even remotely capable of reaching space, unless you define "reaching space" as nothing more than crossing a completely arbitrary line somewhere above where the atmosphere has become too thin to be useful. Which might turn out to work well enough for casual "experience tourism" purposes, but is mostly irrelevant to space travel and research. They can get above more of the atmosphere than air-breathing aircraft, and can offer about 6x the free-fall duration of Vomit Comet parabolic aircraft flights, but that's about it. (And with 15 parabolic segments in a typical flight plan, the Vomit Comet still provides roughly twice the total freefall time per flight)
Now, they could design a second stage to replace the current passenger capsule that might indeed be able to reach orbit. Unfortunately the completely fueled second stage probably couldn't weigh much more than the mostly-empty passenger capsule while using the New Shepard booster, and that severely limits the maximum payload that could be delivered, but there is a market for micro-satellite launches.
So for now, while they're doing some interesting research that might eventually pay off, the only real contribution they're making to space travel is PR and a weak reminder to SpaceX that if they drop the ball to hard and long, they may eventually face real competition. And, I suppose, helping show governments around the world that reusable rockets can be done
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How fit will you have to be to make one of these trips? If you have to be able to withstand up to 10G for any amount of time, even if just in an emergency, how do you determine who is fit enough to be a space tourist? Granted, that is less than many car wrecks but still dangerous...
--I like turtles...
Falcon 9 will be human-rated soon. Blue Origins is not 'space travel', yet. Its a ticket to nowhere. We are not at the stage where you can fund actual space travel through democratization of the tech.
Good-bye
New Shepard is to New Glenn (the orbital rocket) as Falcon 1 is to Falcon 9 or maybe Falcon Heavy.
Not really. Falcon 1 was also an orbital rocket. New Shepard still just isn't.
Are they learning things, as they say? Yes. Are they learning relevant things? Some. Not very much. They've gotten really good at landing something that never really goes very fast. Being able to build any rocket that can ignite, fire, and shut off without exploding is an achievement, of sorts, but the Max-Q New Shepard experiences is nothing like the Max-Q an orbital vehicle experiences. Their engine people are maybe learning useful things. Their structures people aren't being pushed at all.
Suborbital may be useful for things like ultrafast delivery, transportation, etc.
Scaling up suborbital for a reasonable number of people/cargo/weight is still easier than scaling up LEO launches. Assuming the launch vehicle is easily reusable - along the lines of 'preflight, launch, land, refuel, repeat' - then it may have viability even though it never puts anything into orbit.
Pricey, sure...but if you could do NY to London in an hour people would pay for it. Very rich people would pay a very large amount of money for it.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
New Shepard is to New Glenn (the orbital rocket) as Falcon 1 is to Falcon 9 or maybe Falcon Heavy.
Not really. Falcon 1 was also an orbital rocket. New Shepard still just isn't.
Okay. New Shepard is to New Glenn as Redstone (which carried Alan Shepard--first American in space) is to Atlas (which carried John Glenn--first American to orbit the Earth).