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Blue Origin Building DC-X Lookalike
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jan 10, 2007 12:18 PM
from the carrot-on-a-stick dept.
from the carrot-on-a-stick dept.
rrohbeck writes "The New York Times is running an article on what Blue Origin (Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' space company) is up to after his Texas land grab. A couple of Flash videos show a short successful test hop of the 'Goddard' test vehicle. From the article: 'The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound. In one view, one of the nine rocket nozzles jitters as it maintains the ship's attitude. Goddard resembles the DC-X, another vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft under development in the 1990s by McDonnell Douglas for the Defense Department and NASA until the government pulled the plug.' And in case you're an aerospace engineer, they're hiring."
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theodp writes "The WSJ has the behind-the-spaceport story on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Texas land grab for his Blue Origin space tourism venture. Bezos deputized an attorney (who once handled Amazon SEC filings) to make ranchers offers they couldn't refuse (and can't talk about), acquiring property through corporate entities with monikers including 'James Cook L.P.,' 'Jolliet Holdings,' 'Coronado Ventures,' and 'Cabot Enterprises' — all named for famous explorers and all using the same address, c/o [Star Trek-monikered] Zefram LLC. BTW, FAA temporary flight restrictions are in effect for Blue Origin until Monday ('DUE TO ROCKET LAUNCH ACTIVITY'). Let's hope it's more successful than Blue Origin's maiden flight."
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that's better (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose that's better than taking off and landing again with a crashing sound.
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The device just does not look like it should work the way it does. Sure, the take off looks normal, put at the apex it looks like it should flip over and come down nose first!
I don't have any sound on this computer so I have a hard time telling, are they ussing some sortta propulssion in the entire flight (something to keep them stable?).
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the nozzles adjust during the flight to maintain attitude, I believe the DCx did the same thing. IIRC the DCx also had a series of manuvering thrusters spaced around the
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What's that? I'm comparing apples and oranges by comparing "getting out of bed" with "getting many tonnes of payload to a low-earth orbit"? You don't say...
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It made me think of... (Score:3, Funny)
Quick, somebody call Mork; (Score:2, Funny)
Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Dang, what am I still doing QA work for? (Score:2)
Well, actually, seriously, I'd hate to get a job at one of these places and then end up finding it tedious and hating it, the way I end up hating everything once I get into Type-A workaholic mode.
A little optomistic (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A little optomistic (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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As another commenter mentioned, taking off and landing (which they've just demonstrated) are the most difficult parts of a launch. Additionally, SpaceShipOne went from starting full development in 2001, to their first test flight in 2003, to their first suborbital flight in 2004.
Not like DC-X (Score:5, Informative)
All the best to Bezos and Blue Origin! The flight video is excellent!
Josh
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1) A minimally suborbital vehicle is only a hop, skip, and a jump from being an orbital vehicle.
2) A heavy, low ISP vehicle without a TPS is a stepping stone (or even "an upper stage") to an orbital craft.
3) A rocket that carries a few hundred kg up 100 km is somehow something new, and is somehow a significant force to advancing rocketry technology, simply because the payload is humans instead of sounding rocket insturmentation.
4) If two spacecraft
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2) Stored much easier? Apparently you've never dealt with high-test peroxide. It's not like the stuff you find in your medicine cabinet. Ask the crews of the Sidon and the Kursk what they think of this "easy" to store material.
3) Okay, lets pick one -- SS1. Budget ~25 million. Payload -- ~300kg to 100km. Per-launch cost undisclosed, but believed to be about half a million dollars. Lets compare this to, say, the SR-S soundi
Can't get to orbit that way (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks impressive, but you can't get to orbit that way.
Single stage to orbit craft have to be somewhere above 97% fuel, with the best chemical fuels possible. People have tried to build SSTO craft, Rotary Rocket being a good example, but when your weight budget is that tight, it's next to impossible, and even if it works, the payloads are dinky.
Two stages work. The Shuttle is two stages; the solid boosters and the external tank are dropped off. To get to orbit on chemical fuels and have any useful payload, you have to dump some mass during lift. Even with two stages, the weight reduction efforts result in fragile spacecraft.
Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.
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Yes, what a disaster that would be -- we would get trace amounts of radioactive particles on the Earth's surface! Oh teh noes!!!11!
Been down in any good basements lately? :P
But seriously, spreading radioactivit
Re:Can't get to orbit that way (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure it'd be trivial compared to the spread of radioactive particles from coal power plants.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
Parent
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Unless we get invaded by the
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http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-S paceship/dp/0805059857 [amazon.com]
Very interesting book. One of the interesting tidbits was they figured out that an Orion burning out of *orbit* would result in significant fallout at ground level--enough so that they could estimate the additional number of cancer deaths--and this was one reason among many why the thing never got built. To be safe to Earth-bound life, Orion would have be launched from the Moon (how to build one *on*
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The shuttle could take the ET all the way to LEO, which would make it a true 2-stage rocket, but it could carry little pa
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This things seems to have really good handling, and is probably has less Kinetic energy than most other Launch Vehicles. What if you launched it/recovered it off a stable suborbital platform (say a structure suspended between to dirigibles? (although I suppose that would make this a second stage)
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Yes, but you could put something much like this rocket as a second stage on top of a big dumb booster and maybe get to orbit that way.
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I hope someday we could build a fusion-thermal engine. That would make a very interesting SSTO vehicle. Imagine re-entry without need for atmospheric braking.
In the meantime, I still expect somehow Brukhard Heim's ideas to bring some interesting ideas for propulsion once we reach LEO.
What could be sweeter than that?
Re:Can't get to orbit that way (Score:5, Informative)
A mass ratio of 17 (5.9% payload) with RL-10 engines [wikipedia.org] doesn't sound too bad for a start.
Parent
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The really interesting part was where he talked about building a 'near orbital' SSTO craft as a testbed and learning tool for a true SSTO craft.
Comparing that to the Blue Origin craft, makes me wonder if they aren't aiming for true SSTO while using sub-orbital space tourism as a way of defraying the development costs (perhaps with suborbital travel as a future business plan?).
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Blue Origin Design (Score:4, Funny)
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good backgrounder: Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere.
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Keep in mind that cost-effectiveness is the goal, not efficiency. Many slashdotters seem to get the two confused with each other. Considering that your main cost is paying employees, which method results in fewer employees to pay? If you use a ballistic landing it tends t
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Parachutes and skids are chosen for spacecraft because they are light and reliable. A stall landing of a craft with a square chute on skids is pretty benign. The DC-X experience (explosion) shows that high thrust landings on retractable legs is a needlessly unreliable and unsafe.
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Also important for a repeated-flight company like Blue Origin is that a powered landing can touch down at a particular location, while a parachute landi
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It may be tricky, but the math of carrying all that propellant with you is pretty darn inflexible. I've done that math, and I don't know how Blue Origin (and/or Rotary Rocket and/or Armadillo) plans on making it work.
I'm very, very eager to find out. : )
DC-X? (Score:2)
If I didn't know better, I'd think they were planning on launching a "new and improved" scientology [wikipedia.org].
In case you're an aerospace engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
I already checked. They don't seem to be doing a Google style "young talent" hiring search or accepting those with marginally-related experience. If you look through the jobs page, they're generally asking for 10 years experience with some very specific skills (like direct experience with RS-68's or RL-10's). Your chances probably aren't very good if you're looking to break into aerospace, even with an advanced degree. *sigh*
With good reason, I'd wager. I would attribute a large part of SpaceX's rapid pace of development of the Merlin engines to having recruited the same kind of talent directly off of Lockheed and Boeing. They didn't have to figure out many of the details of how to build a working rocket because they people they hired had already built them.
This is probably critical for Blue Origin. Space.com's reported that their current test vehicle is powered by catalytically decomposed hydrogen peroxide. If they're going to achieve the payload and altitude they want, suborbital though it may be, I doubt they're going to get there without a bipropellant; fuel + oxidizer. Just switching to H2O2 + kerosene would double the theoretical specific impulse, or energy they can get per mass of fuel. On the downside, burning a bi-propellant increases the complexity of the engine significantly and complicates throttling, and if they're planning on using turbopumps instead of a pressure-fed system (a scheme their jobs page supports), it gets even more complicated.
Next up for Blue Origin (Score:4, Funny)
(The preceding joke is based upon the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, which make up a core belief in Scientology (OT III, Incident 2))
Testing VTL control... (Score:2, Insightful)
The pod will probably be deployed atop a conventional rocket to shoot tourists into low earth orbit, take some snaps, puke in zero G then fall to earth, chute deploys th
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My favortite part of the video... (Score:2, Funny)
Did they read Fallen Angels? (Score:2)
Phoenix stood in the center of the enormous room. It looked like a giant ice cream cone, sixty feet high, standing on its big end. At the slightly rounded base it was half as big across as it was high. It stood alone, with no scaffolding around it.
The book is available online from the Baen Free Library at: http://www.baen.com/library/ [baen.com]
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Re:slow on the uptake (Score:4, Informative)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/
Parent
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Money.
KFG
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C'mon - when I was in college we used to joke that there was a senior aero course called "Advanced Unemployment Line Mechanics." It's not often a company likely to do cool things happens to fit my background. Let me crow a little. Ignore me if you like. Eveybody else does.