Blue Origin Release Flight Videos 180
Reality Master 101 writes "Space start-up Blue Origin (financed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) had a secret test flight on November 13, 2006. They've now released video and pictures of the very successful flight. Looks like they're making good progress." From the page: "We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it methodically."
huh? (Score:5, Funny)
What, you mean $20 million a person isn't low enough?
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WATCH OUT! (Score:2, Funny)
Land on the pad quickly.
Defrosters (Score:2)
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I trust them to know their job more than a random Slashdot poster (me) does, but it looks like they are running out of fuel pretty fast in that way. The tests work well, I wonder though if they can get it actually in orbit.
If it was me, I'd try a different idea. Like.. make the longest rope in the world, then send astronauts to mount it on the moon, and make them pool the capsules from Earth into orbit.
I'm sure it'll work fine.
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Dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous!! [dhmo.org]
Oh, it's dihydrogen dioxide? Carry on then!
half right (Score:3, Interesting)
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Need more ... (Score:2)
Something tells me that this craft as configured would not be capable of achieving orbit from a ground launch. Perhaps a balloon launch would make things more feasible. However, why would you want to come down with such BIG empty fuel tanks that are no longer necessary? There being empty certainly decreases the mass
In any case
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Actually, Blue Origin hasn't stated anything along those lines yet. The only thing they've officially described is that they're planning on operating a suborbital craft (the "New Shephard") which will be twice as large as the current prototype. Of course, it's possible that they might later try scaling it up even more (and probably switching to a different propellant) to try to go for orbit, but that's a long ways away.
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H2O2+Kerosene (Score:2)
Re:Defrosters (Score:4, Informative)
The thing is much bigger than I expected. I would guess with a 2m radius and 4m height. It is quite fat, so I guess they are using spherical or ellipsoidal propellant tanks. The shape reminds me of the Kankoh Maru [astronautix.com] and the shell seems to be made of composites or plastic. I guess the blunt nose makes sense because the thing is suborbital and they do not have a wide cross range requirement like the Delta Clipper [astronautix.com] had.
I am not an expert, but the burn looked too clean, I guess it is a pressure fed mono propellant. Perhaps H2O2 (Hydrogen Peroxide) like someone else said. Much like what Carmack tried to do with Armadillo. I counted 3 x 3 = 9 thrust chambers in that setup.
The man requested someone with experience in cryogenic turbopumps. Even mentioned the RS-68 explicitly. So it seems to me he is going for a pump fed LOX/LH2 engine. It makes much more sense to me than the H2O2/Kerosene rumours I heard before. Why risk it all by going for an engine no one has built before? I mean the only rocket engine with that combo I remember is the one [astronautix.com] in the British Black Arrow [astronautix.com] rocket from the 70s. Beal [bealaerospace.com] killed himself by going with a risky H2O2/Kerosene combo and a filament wound shell.
A LOX/LH2 engine with a variable mixture ratio would do the trick. H2O2 is IMO overrated and finicky. LOX is cheaper than high purity H2O2 and has pretty good density. You have to go for LH2 if you wanna go orbital anyway for the ISP AFAIK (unless you use a lot of stages, which I guess is what they do not want).
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It seems that Blue Origin would have to amend their Environmental Impact Statement if they changed propellants, but perhaps they'd first develop and validate the LOX/LH2 engine design before doing the EPA paperwork.
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Re:Defrosters (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not condensation and frost -- it's steam. As another commenter mentioned, the rocket uses H2O2 as propellant.
2 H2O2 => O2 + 2 H2O
Same fuel problem as "rocket packs" (Score:2)
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How many more do you want? Just because the Black Arrow used a silver wire mesh doesn't make it a requirement. Older designs tended to use hypergolics. Modern research is focused more on thermal decomposition to avoid catalysts. Catalysts can be a pain due to poisoning by the peroxide stabilizers and their tendancy to melt/deform under the heat of decomposition (they need
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And at some point, ALL rockets are "fundamentally similar." Ignite something, squirt exhaust out o
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As god intended (Score:4, Interesting)
And to quote a great song writer "and it will take off and land on its tail, Like God and Robert Heinlein intended."
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The really nice thing about powered landings are that they can be done in an airless environment. You can use the same design to get to orbit, refuel, then go to the moon, mars, asteroids, etc. Just start cranking them off the manufacturing line and putting a fleet in LEO and you're halfway to everywhere.
Bezos hired some of the ex-DC-X people (Score:3, Interesting)
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2007... (Score:2)
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Cooler yet, the early space tourists will bring down the cost for the rest of us.
-- Len
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Crayola sponsored craft (Score:5, Funny)
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Scaling Up? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scaling Up? (Score:5, Informative)
The Environmental Impact Statement they were required to publish last year [hobbyspace.com] describing their suborbital vehicle says that the "stacked vehicle would have a roughly conical shape with a base diameter of approximately 7 meters (22 feet) and a height of approximately 15 meters (50 feet)."
Judging from the photograph with the guy standing next to the rocket, the current test article seems to be maybe 6-7 meters tall, so I guess the final thing will be more than twice as tall.
As a NASA launch services engineer I must say.... (Score:3, Insightful)
What they should do is get business partners who already know how to build rockets and offer them incentives to partipate. NASA's vision right now is not on target but that is not a failure of NASA engineers but a failure of management. Draw the engineering teams into this that already have experience. Don't do it half-assed.
And before the NASA bashers get their RSS feed and feel the need to talk about how stupid NASA is...yes NASA has problems but between Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, ATK, the Russians, the other numerous companies who build and integrate rockets and have spend billions upon billions on launch vehicles, this current effort is honestly a waste to me. It's great to see people wanting to innovate, but wanting and doing are not the same.
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
If you want to innovate, get on board advanced propulsion or space elevator projects. sub-orbital is not hard...warp drive to the next galaxy is hard.
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One might even say all NASA seems interested in is transferring government money to Orbital, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, et al. without anything to show for it. *cough*X-33*cough*
Maybe they need to be embarrassed into some actual innovation instead of more business-as-usual.
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Just remember one thing though. NASA is a public agency. This means that they are incredibly afraid of PR problems that occur when their vehicles explode with people on board. Granted that this will hurt a private corporation too. But not until it actually happens. Do not expect double and triple redundancy in the efforts of the private firms to provide an elevator ride just a
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As a governmental agency, the last thing NASA should be interested in is directly competing with private industry. If cheaper spaceflight helps NASA's mandate, fine, but no federal agency should be involved in what is, essentially, a commercial venture.
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With a Republican in the White House, I'm shocked that someone would say that!
You don't think the war in Iraq/Afghanistan *really* costs *that* much, do you?
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Have you seen the national debt figures since Bush came in? That deficit was gone _before_ 9/11.
>> You don't think the war in Iraq/Afghanistan *really* costs *that* much, do you?
> Which has what to do with NASA?
Someone made the point of funneling money from NASA into aerospace companies. The same funneling that happens with war equipment contractors is the link. Sorry if that was too subtle.
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Jeff Bezos is no stranger to recruiting good talent. Before Amazon, he worked at DE Shaw & Co. [deshaw.com], a premier quantitative finance firm known for ridiculous recruiting practices. Bezos will find people of the skill level he needs and compensate accordingly.
Re:As a NASA launch services engineer I must say.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is nothing but tinfoil hat nonsense created by the space fanboi crowd to explain why a magic wand hasn't been waved and provided them with masturbatory fantasies.
The reality those companies have every incentive to chase profit making opportunit
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Re:As a NASA launch services engineer I must say.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
To quote John Carmack, "Rocket science is not as easy as amateurs think it is, but it's not as hard as the professionals think it is."
NASA is only part of the problem. The other problem are the Lockheed's, etc, who think nothing can be done for less than a billion dollars. They have zero incentive to reduce the cost of space -- why should they? The
Ahem, making the same mistake as Delta Clipper (Score:2)
Four Legs (Score:2)
6 is better (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember this is going to weigh a lot more than the lunar lander and will land on earth, with it's much stronger gravitational pull, both those factors multiply the stresses on the gear and even with services these are designed to be reused, microfactures will creep through and joints will stick
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Oh. Right. I hadn't thought of that. I thought they were pushing for three legs... stable tripod and all that. Six does make a certain amount of sense. Well, I'm sure the slide-rule boys will do the whole risk vs weight vs cost vs strength thing, and come up with the right number of legs.
A question about energy (Score:5, Interesting)
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For that matter, tether this thing to a balloon, take it to high altitude and do a drop launch. High safety margin (if something goes wrong you have a long time to deploy shoots or dictate your will to a lawyer on the ground), much less fuel consumption.
But, alas, not as glorious and sci-fi looking (the only two reasons I can think of for VTOL).
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The idea is, if you can make the launch vehicle completely, or almost completely, reuseable (and no, the shuttle is not reuseable, the shuttle is remanufacturable, there's an expensive difference), then the
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The problem is that the extra weight needed to carry the wings for the two spacecraft you mention (the shuttle and SS1) will add more weight to the craft, and thus need extra fuel anyway. The space shuttle's wings were only designed how they were so that the shuttle could carry satellites back to earth - so it is possible to make a much lighter configuration, but I imagine it would still only be on par with a VTOVL vehicle at best, and in reality probably still worse in terms of fuel.
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The Space Shuttle does not come in under power (Score:2, Insightful)
The Space Shuttle doesn't use all of it's fuel, as it needs to come in under power...
The space shuttle glides all the way in. It does not come in under power. The only propellant it burns on its way in is for the deorbit burn.
Note that the cost of the propellants is a very small portion of the overall launch costs, and therefore having to carry extra fuel is not a big factor in the economics. In fact, it makes sense: you are already carrying the engines, all you need is some extra fuel, and guidance.
-O
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Some might recall that, moments before Columbia's ultimate demise, the shuttle's reaction control system was struggling/fighting to maintain proper entry attitude ag
Wings don't add weight if the craft is a wing (Score:2)
Wings add weight only when they're tacked onto a craft as an afterthought.
If the craft *IS* a wing by design, then they add no weight at all.
Internal structural buttressing is required whatever the shape of the craft, even if it's spherical, because weight considerations mandate that walls be thin so you can't rely
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I can understand vertical take off but why do a veritcal landing?
Vertical landing versus horizontal landing is one of those big debates. The argument for vertical landing, as I understand it, can be summed up as "airplanes are bad spaceships, and spaceships are bad airplanes." In other words, trying to make a ship do both means it's poor at both. Look at all the problems the Space Shuttle has with protecting the wings from damage, for example.
Actually, I read an amusing quote from Bob Truax that said
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Keep also in mind that most of the take-off weight is fuel - the ship is much lighter when landing than when taking off.
It is also designed to use cheap fuels propellants, so it could be cheaper to add more fuel than to add wings (and more fuel, as the wings would be dead weight during most of the flight and they would require additional propellant to take them up wi
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Keep in mind that fuel (especially something like the hydrogen peroxide they're using) is absurdly cheap compared to everything else. Most of the money on launch ventures goes to paying employees, so you want to do everything possible to reduce how many support personnel you have. Fuel is probably on the order of 1% of your total costs.
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Furthermore, there's a lot more that can go wrong with a VTOL craft (engine trouble, fuel leak, etc, etc). The shuttle, OTOH, can glide in unpowered (assuming it has enough fuel to complete it's deorbit bur
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Ultimately for a venture like Blue Origin, what matters is the cost per person sent up. If you use, say, wings or parachutes regularly they might be able to squeeze on a few extra people, but how would that effe
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I believe the vertical landing is simply to pass FAA regulations for test-vehicle short hops. The vehicle isn't a space-ship, yet, but Blue Horizon still wants to test it. The logical low-weight descent is to use a parachute, but the parachute method can't really control the exact landing site. The FAA doesn't want to approve large objects landing randomly.
Gradatim Ferociter? (Score:2)
All Google seems to know is that some
Lunar Lander (Score:2)
Collective nouns and subject-verb agreement. (Score:2, Informative)
I hate to be a grammar cop, but unless you are regarding the members of a group individually, then the collective is singular, not plural. What the headline implies is that Blue Origin is a group of independently acting people, some of whom have released their own flight videos. I doubt that's the case.
that's ADOOOORABLE !!!! (Score:2)
"space startup" (Score:2)
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I think that's pretty much how the "New World" was colonized, wasn't it? A bunch of richer-than-God private individuals footing the initial bill to create startup companies importing, say, exotic foods (tea, rum, tobacco)?
I can't say the rate of return for a space-tourism venture would be on
Somebody help me with links and info! (Score:2)
Not impressed. (Score:2)
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Trans: "This is gonna be super safe. Trust us. Just don't expect miracles."
Where do you get the idea that they're promising something "super safe"? All I got from that is that they're trying to warn people that they're trying not to rush things.
"to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go"
Trans: "And as soon as we can find a market and get the launch costs to the break-even point..."
Huh? They've already have a market. Just look at the numb
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You might want to read one of the links off of Wikipedia - note: clicking 'Yes, I'd sign up and fork over $200,000' on an anonymous web-based poll on a mailing list somewhat unsurprisingly does not equate to a "reservation".
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You might want to read one of the links off of Wikipedia - note: clicking 'Yes, I'd sign up and fork over $200,000' on an anonymous web-based poll on a mailing list somewhat unsurprisingly does not equate to a "reservation".
I was actually referring to the people who've already put down money for a reservation.
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I'm not sure it helped, but at least you're nominated for Cynical Poster of the Month award. I hope you attend the show to take the prize, but as always, the competition for that spot on Slashdot is really tough.
Re:looks like fat DC-X (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget [wikipedia.org]
"According to Steve Garber, the NASA History website curator, the final cost of project Apollo was between $20 and $25 billion."
$20M isn't what it used to be (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: $20M isn't what it used to be (Score:2)
I don't think that there's a plan to send tens of thousands of ordinary Joes into space. On the other hand,
Aren't we overestimating ... (Score:2)
I believe you are overestimating the desire of billionaires to take a brief rocket ride to the edge of space only to be immediately pulled back down. Then there is the risk factor. Anytime you're dealing with rocket fuel, there is a serious risk of going BOOOOM!!!!
Billionaires may be rich. But do you think they're stupid? Besides, billionaires get to their status by getting SOMEONE ELSE to pay for it. Like say
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I mean like I just got my WinNT installed and haven't upgraded the media player. Yah yah I know, I'm dumb but why don't they accommodate MEEEEEEEE.
Shaddap whiner. You're ranting about your install's current state, not the site.
'One-click' video not heard of, here... (Score:3, Funny)
Too bad the poor fellow who put this page together couldn't have taken a leaf outta their book. Maybe he's afraid of the patent holder going after him?
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I take it you didn't watch the video [blueorigin.com]?
Gas core reactor rocket (Score:3, Insightful)
As for a tail first landing, that is the best way to go when landing on airless, or nearly airless targets such as the Moon, or Mars. Not only do you not have to worry about atmosphere density or maintaining flight speeds (how many runways are t