Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Will Soon Begin Selling Tickets For Rides On Its Space Tourism Rocket (cnbc.com) 70
Today, Blue Origin revealed that it will be selling the first tickets for rides on its space tourism rocket called New Shepard. According to CNBC, the first ticket (or tickets?) will go on sale starting next week, on Wednesday, May 5. From the report: Blue Origin did not reveal how much tickets will cost, only saying that more details will come on May 5 to those who submit their name and email on a form on the company's website. "Sign up to learn how you can buy the very first seat on New Shepard," according to the company's website. The announcement's video features Bezos going out to the capsule of New Shepard after the company's test flight earlier this month. It shows him driving across the Texas desert, the remote location of the New Shepard launch facility -- notably at the wheel of a Rivian R1T electric truck, which is emblazoned with Blue Origin's signature feather.
New Shepard is designed to carrying as many as six people at a time on a ride past the edge of space, with the capsules on previous test flights reaching an altitude of more than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 km). The capsule, which has massive windows to give passengers a view, spends as much as 10 minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth. The rocket launches vertically, with the booster detaching and returning to land at a concrete pad nearby. The capsule's return is slowed down by a set of parachutes, before softly landing in the desert.
New Shepard is designed to carrying as many as six people at a time on a ride past the edge of space, with the capsules on previous test flights reaching an altitude of more than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 km). The capsule, which has massive windows to give passengers a view, spends as much as 10 minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth. The rocket launches vertically, with the booster detaching and returning to land at a concrete pad nearby. The capsule's return is slowed down by a set of parachutes, before softly landing in the desert.
No thanks (Score:2, Troll)
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SpaceX has only managed to launch humans twice
Three times now, Demo 2, Crew 1 and Crew 2 for 10 people altogether.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Jared Isaacman seems to have found the link OK. He's booked 4 seats with SpaceX for later this year.
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Sure. Here. [nasa.gov]
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SpaceX has dozens of landing on F9. Dragon Crew has carried people 3 times so far. I will wait for Starship to achieve the same landing record as F9 and use that. Blue origin is behind the ball here.
I think that Spacex is wasting a lot of money on the Starship concept. I think in the end, they'll reinvent the Space shuttle, or something suspiciously like it.
Unless they send robots to Mars to construct nice level landing pads, like they use on earth for F9 and presumably will for Starship.
Re: No thanks (Score:2)
Do you think Starship will not work (that is, it will fail to meet the specifications as far as reusability?) Or do you think it the market has no need for a large reusable rocket?
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It doesn't really matter if the market has no need for a large reusable rocket, SpaceX does via Starlink, and NASA does via the lunar lander program (and I'm sure they're going to end up using Starship variants for other things due to SLS's cost).
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Do you think Starship will not work (that is, it will fail to meet the specifications as far as reusability?) Or do you think it the market has no need for a large reusable rocket?
I think that the concept of landing a large ship vertically on a non-prepared surface is a non-starter. Or a non-ender I suppose.
Now of course, a space shuttle itself needs a nice long runway to land on, which won't be available for a long time either. So I'm envisioning something that would fly partway down like the shuttle, then end up more like bottom thrusters. For my money, that would be awesome, not Buck Rogers.
The thing that bothers me the most about all this we're doing now is that to me, it ha
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Landing on an unprepared surface is utterly irrelevant to the profitability or usefulness of Starship. If it can land on Earth, SpaceX will be able to basically print money. And if you can land the tankers on Earth, that makes getting to Mars so cheap you could just toss a separate smaller lander in a cargo bay if you want to (or ten of them in different Starships, for less than getting to orbit costs today).
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I find it hilarious that people think this hasn't been thought of. There's film from the Apollo era of Grumman doing many tests on the LM's landing gear and weight distribution in various scenarios - horizontal velocity, uneven surfaces, sands and surfaces of varying hardness and density, etc. They snapped some landing gear, and tipped over some test vehicles until they redesigned and got it right.
Why would anyone think that NASA wouldn't require the same of SpaceX 55 years later?
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I tried googling for that film but couldn't find it. I found videos of lunar module testing, but it was all on flat surfaces. Do you have any links to it? Thanks!
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Some of the footage was used in the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" in the 90s. Specifically, episode 5 which is all about the Lunar-orbit rendezvous idea, and the team at Grumman who designed and built the LMs.
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Can I ask why you think a tripod with independently extendable legs wouldn't work to land on a non flat surface?
It depends on the center of gravity. The tripod legs are also simply having the effect of making a larger diameter object. If you look at say, the Falcon 9, it becomes pretty obvious that it needs a flat surface to land on. So while the CG is lower than the candle might appear to have at first, being at some level of fuel depletion, and the engines at the bottom, they still need a flat surface.
If we have a starship landing on Mars the problem becomes worse. These long things are going to be stuffed with
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The shuttle took ages and billions per flight to refit for flight readiness. It also glide landed. . The goal of starship is to use propulsion to land with aero braking where atmospheres support it, increasing its envelope of heavenly bodies it can land on (earth has too strong a gravity field to propulsivly land alone without braking in its dense atmosphere). Starship has almost no characteristics of the shuttle.
So far it doesn't. But so far, it's having some issues. Bringing in a humongous spaceship from orbit to land vertically on an unprepared surface is going to be quite a trick. The closest we've done with humans inside is the Lunar Lander, which was designed to land on fairly irregular surfaces, and didn't have to deal with atmosphere.
As for the cost? We'll see how it works out - Shuttles were 450 Million per flight. We don't know how much Starship will cost.
Re: No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's a little early for pessimism regarding Starship, it has some clear advantages over the Shuttle:
- Modern computing and sensors. SpaceX is known for a love of sensors and cameras. They put them everywhere and pipe that all into a central computing system which they have matured on Falcon 9. This is just modern technology vs the 60s/70's. That alone puts it ahead, and they use a triple-cpu self verifying system vs slower radiation hardened systems. It's a bit like how nowadays you can strap 4 propellers and a flight control system to many objects and turn it into a drone, the sensors and tech is just all there and cheap.
- Just overall simpler design, it's a tube the some domes and a nosecone. The dreaded heat tiles are also looking to be standardized.
- Cheap build cost due to using stainless steel. The primary reason they have had so many prototypes and crashes thus far is that they can build them fast and cheap, they seem to be on pace for 1 a month.
- They already are almost through development of possibly the most impressive rocket engine yet designed, the Raptor being a full-flow-staged-combustion design, one of the most efficient known with lot's of hours of test time behind it. It's still got issues to work out with being on a rocket vs a test stand but the fact that they have them working at all and have built 60+ of them so far is already a huge step.
- It took SpaceX more than 10 attempts to have a successful landing with Falcon 9 and the Starship maneuver is more complicated to be sure, but they already have had success with the elements thought most difficult, namely the flop to vertical swing maneuver. If they hit a landing on one of the next two prototypes that's already a huge milestone.
- As for cost, closest figure we have gotten is "four times as much as a Falcon 9" which is estimated at $54m, so around $220m, and that is build cost for a prototype not launch cost (which, if you are one to believe Musk, is estimated at $1m per launch, or $10 per kg. Not that anyone should believe those numbers)
We can all dislike Musk, I do personally, but you cannot deny SpaceX is a company that has proved just about every doubter wrong at every turn. From ISS deliveries, to booster re-use, to human rated capsule launches to satellite broadband. If they've done all that in a mere 10 years why not this?
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There's a time in the history of literally everything where it didn't work, right up until it does.
They had a rough go of landing Falcon 9 at first too, and now they do that routinely. Like a couple times a month or more.
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There's a time in the history of literally everything where it didn't work, right up until it does.
They had a rough go of landing Falcon 9 at first too, and now they do that routinely. Like a couple times a month or more.
This is better than that snarky stuff you posted earlier. Disagreement is great, it allows us to refine our thinking. Some times I'm right, sometimes wrong. But here we go.
Landing the F9 first stage is a lot different than landing an entire loaded rocket, with enough fuel to escape the lunar gravity well, return to earth and land again, with souls on board. Which is why I'm concerned, and why I don't consider landing the near empty first stage of a Falcon 9 the same thing as landing a starship, or whateve
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Shuttle refit+flight was about $800mln so he wasn't that much off. Part of it was covered from commercial launches, which I'm not sure if are covered by the 195-210bln figure.
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Their development process is *vastly* different than that of NASA, which resulted in the Space Shuttle. First a dozen different agencies made a wish-list of what the shuttle is supposed to be able to do, then NASA worked very hard to implement them all, implemented all the possible ones, left half-completed stubs of the impossible ones in, and the complexity grew so much the core concept got completely lost. Plus the "one size fits all" meant carrying massive amounts of dead weight in each flight in which i
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No. Were you seething when reading? The tone of the reply suggests so.
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No. Were you seething when reading? The tone of the reply suggests so.
I was laughing. Your post read like a preacher's sermon.
But if you want ot have a serious conversation, I would really like to know of those variants that Musk keeps his eye on - because I run into a dead end finding info on all of the devices that Musk is going to use in his core concepts.
This is all cool to watch, but the Rocket is the tiniest part of the whole project. We see Rockets, not much else other than talk.
If we are going to have self sustaining colonies of 1 million people on Mars by
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The two initial variants are the crewed Mars lander, and tanker to refuel it in orbit. SpaceX signed a contract for a Moon lander (no return to Earth, just Moon surface - lunar orbit travel), and a cargo version to put big payloads in space.
Musk usually delivers - but never on time. His promises of features are all good and true, but his promises of schedule are invariably bullshit. So forget every prediction of "by year 20XX". That thing will happen but absolutely not by that year. Regardless, the schedule
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Musk is much, much more tolerable if you stop getting mad about his insane promises on insane schedule, and instead take the features at face value but multiply the times by 3.
As noted before, my problem is not with Musk. From what I have seen of him, he is a likeable guy - not a common thing in a world where the visionaries are people like Edison and Tesla. He's even doing some good. As you note, he is prone to bullshit.
My issue, as it has always been, is with the cultlike adulation that has developed around him. My problem is with the people who actually worship him.
What he - and yes, Bezos are doing - is the logical extension of rocketry beyond just NASA, ESA and Roscos
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NASA isn't "evil", but it is a problem. They are exceptionally conservative, they have certain mindset, certain way they believe things are supposed to be done, and they are very adverse to alternate approaches. And they have the money. In effect they are stifling innovation by demanding things be done their way - the way, as shown by SLS, very inefficient and slow. It would be great if NASA stuck to developing rovers, probes, and so on, and when making orders, request spacecraft or launchers that have a ce
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Gee, you don't think that might be why they call these "prototypes" do you? I don't remember seeing a crew gantry at their launch site, or any kind of hatch on the thing either, so it just might be that they know they aren't safe yet, and are still testing basic functionality.
Who cares what it looks like, as long as it accomplishes what it's supposed to? They aren't trying to sell them like cars where looks matter to the buyer, they're going to sell them like wrenches - it's a tool meant to accomplish spe
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Gee, you don't think that might be why they call these "prototypes" do you? I don't remember seeing a crew gantry at their launch site, or any kind of hatch on the thing either, so it just might be that they know they aren't safe yet, and are still testing basic functionality.
Who cares what it looks like, as long as it accomplishes what it's supposed to?
Go back and re read what you wrote. If you don't find that you are claiming that the Starship is doing exactly what Musk wants it to do, You dear reader, need intervention from your cult.
Spacex got a shot across the bow a few weeks ago, as one of their devices in your own words, "Accomplished what it's supposed to do."
I see. The Starship was supposed to explode in mid air, raining debris down on the locale.
This is where y'all are so enamored with Ol Muskie, that you take what was obviously a failure
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You seem to have a serious problem with understanding the idea that when you want to try something new, you build it and test it, knowing that the first attempts will probably not work, the next series of attempts might work based on what you learned from the first, etc. And more often than not, when you are trying something that departs from "the norm", it doesn't work the first time. Or the second. Or the fifth. So you learn from the failed attempts by having it instrumented to the fullest ability you
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You seem to have a serious problem with understanding the idea that when you want to try something new, you build it and test it, knowing that the first attempts will probably not work, the next series of attempts might work based on what you learned from the first, etc.
I understand completely how research goes - I only had research as a career for over 30 years. A lot of it spent on propulsion systems of high energy density and temperatures. Not rockets, but thing occasionally went boom, and I had extra hazardous insurance for a large part of that.
Now unlike a mature technology like rocket engines, we were doing something that had never been done before. But let's get back to Spacex.
Of course there are failures. As we always said, "BOOM!..that's research." What we
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So yes, there are irrational people out there that actually believe the timelines that Musk gives. Any rational person knows to multiply that by a factor of x, where x >1.1.
Arguing with the irrational is a useless exercise - you won't convince any irrational people with historical example or proven fact, because they are irrational.
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Yeah, because landing a rocket on a boat in the ocean counts as a "nice level landing pad" right?
Do you really think they aren't going to test landing on uneven surfaces before they put someone in it to do so? Don't you think that NASA would have asked about that one before selecting it for sending humans back to the moon and writing a multi-billion dollar check?
We're all lucky you're here to remind the literal rocket scientists about that one, I guess. That was close!
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Yeah, because landing a rocket on a boat in the ocean counts as a "nice level landing pad" right?
The landing legs are all on the same plane. That is rather different than each leg bing on a possibly different plane, perhaps one that even shifts. as it settles.
Do you really think they aren't going to test landing on uneven surfaces before they put someone in it to do so? Don't you think that NASA would have asked about that one before selecting it for sending humans back to the moon and writing a multi-billion dollar check?
We're all lucky you're here to remind the literal rocket scientists about that one, I guess. That was close!
Wow - I touched your sarcasm button, didn't I. Well now, since you usually aren so snotty, I'll ignore that and save my vitriol for more deserving peeps.
They darn well better test landing out. One of the first issues will be that center of gravity thing. A Starship landing vertically on the moon or even Mars will not have a low center of gravi
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Came here to say something like that. Leaving happy.
A glorified roller-coaster? (Score:4, Insightful)
And this guy is moping because SpaceX got the moon contract?
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not even, it is a glorified elevator at most.
20 years after and they didn't even got to orbit, just up and down and barely above the karman line.
Selling tickets is not the difficult part (Score:4, Insightful)
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... even the "Fyre" festival managed to do that part just fine. It's newsworthy when they actually begin to shoot tourists into space.
Well, they do need to bring them back down again. Preferably alive.
Otherwise, it'll be newsworthy alright.
Ironically, WaPo would be choking to death on their own tongues.
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... and even more newsworthy if those tourists come back with the ability to tell people about it. And I don't think we really give out points for replicating flights from 1961 when we're only a handful of years from landing on the moon again, do we?
Achieve orbit and get back to me.
Still Waiting.. (Score:2)
Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin rides in Tomorrowland that never happened. I'll just stick to the mad tea party ride instead, at least it's not going to cost me a damn E-Ticket.
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Srsly? ..I see lots of ways to sign up to learn more, but no ticket sales.
https://www.virgingalactic.com... [virgingalactic.com]
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https://investorplace.com/2021... [investorplace.com] and they've delayed testing again. #OutOfBusiness
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If they manage to get capital out of incredibly wealthy people for joy rides, and use that capital for advancing the cause of lowering the costs of access to space, then we all get some value out of that capital that we probably would not have otherwise if it's just sitting in some rich guy's account, or he uses it to buy some who-gives-a-fuck meme culture ephemera with a shelf life of about 12 minutes as an NFT.
Two very different business models (Score:3, Insightful)
SpaceX vs. Blue Origin. A lesson in two very different business models. Seems like only one so far has taken the subject matter seriously and actually produced a practical product. Everyone else just seems to be in it so as to have a shiny toy to show off.
Still pretty cool (Score:2)
Yeah BO is taking it's rightly earned time in the barrel these last weeks but this is a pretty cool development. Even being able to go on a 10 minute trip above the Karman line is pretty neat and frankly it really does seem like BO has this system working pretty well. They've kept it simple and it looks to have paid off vs the more esoteric method Virgin has been using. I know I would feel more comfortable riding on New Shepard vs the Virgin Orbit flyer.
Once they have a 5-10 of these things operating at
You get what you pay for. (Score:3)
Only if... (Score:1)
Pan-Am / Virgin Galactic perhaps (Score:2)
Definition of vaporware (Score:2)
Blue Origin HOPES to start taking passengers to space at a cost that the tickets will cover. We all know it will cost much more than anticipated to make this a reality. But how much more? Can the company survive long enough to make good on the advance ticket purchases? Maybe.
As we programmers know, the journey from "unit tests pass" to "ready for release" is a long, expensive one, often with unexpected pitfalls. The journey from "test flight" to "commercially available" will also be long and risky.
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or half-ware? They may take you one way only?
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Suborbital, What's the point? (Score:2)
I've never really understood the point of these suborbital hop companies. Even most people with plenty of disposable income have to scoff at the idea of spending well over a $100k for a few minutes of weightlessness. Hopefully in the same time (~15 years) that these companies have spent developing craft to take a handful of people for a half hour trip SpaceX can develop a human rated Starship to take well over a hundred people on an orbital trip for days/weeks for the same/less cost.