Jeff Bezos's Space Company Reveals Some Secrets

An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Bezos's commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, has kept its plans secret to better compete with rivals such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. But in order to build its launch facility in West Texas, it has revealed some details of its future operations: Blue Origin's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) will carry three or more passengers on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet above sea level. It will launch vertically and land vertically, and will use hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellants. It will operate autonomously under control of on-board computers, with no ground control. Blue Origin plans a maximum rate of 52 launches per year."

Re:What an increibly underwhelming site

[Gulthek]

Pipe dream. Like the Red Hat Center (now the Center for the Public Domain) for Mr. Bob Young.

Re:Cue the unmanned spaceflight mob

[eln]

Since the only real use for this sort of suborbital flight that isn't already adequately served by other methods (like high-flying aircraft) is tourism, unmanned flights wouldn't really work very well in this case.

Cart, horse

[Princeofcups]

I don't know. To me this is like the Wright brothers announcing their new airline and airport before ever flying at Kittyhawk.

jfs

So the question is...

[It doesn't come easy]

Would you take a ride on this thing?

Government Regulations...

[HopeOS]

The Wright brothers probably did not have to file environmental impact statements or calculate mean casuality per launch or estimate the damage of an explosion for insurance purposes or...

Jeff Bezos brought his evironmental impact statement to a conference once; it's about the size of a metropolitan phone book. It has sections that state that their rocket will not cause floods or hurricanes, will not change the flow of any rivers, will not interfere with the mating habits of local desert lizards, and on and on.

Present day aerospace development is regulated to the point of near inactivity. At least, the developers are still allowed to kill themselves in the process or nothing would get done.

On the upside, recent legislation has made launching easier. Finding a launch site with an appropriate window and a minimum of EPA hassles is still tricky.

-Hope

Re:Space company?

[cheesybagel]

Before Carmack started playing with rockets, there were plenty of VTVL prototypes and designs. DC-X, SASSTO, etc.

Carmack's first attempt used an H2O2 monopropellant engine. This one uses H2O2 as oxidizer and Kerosene as propellant. It is not the same thing by a long shot. To be honest, I would have used O2 instead of H2O2 for the oxidizer (like Carmack is finally doing now). H2O2 is more expensive and decomposes into H2 and O2 easily. Too much trouble considering what it is worth. The only real bonus is that H2O2 is not cryogenic.

Re:Why?

[LurkerXXX]

Were you never a kid? Have you never wanted to see the earth as a blue ball with a thin layer of hazy atmosphere against the black of space? Have you never wanted to experience serveral minutes of uninterrupted weightlessness? Lots of folks would love the chance to experience that. Unfortunatly probably only a rich few will have the chance at it from these companies.