Comment by JanSolo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JanSolo | Hacker News Reader

Crew capsule and booster both went up, seperated, came down and landed nominally. In fact, they made it look easy; everything worked as they predicted and there were no suprises.

A couple of points of interest:

1. The Crew Capsule pitched around quite a lot after it left the booster. This would have been quite 'exciting' for any passengers but was easily survivable. SpaceX had a similar problem in their Dragon LES test a while back. Indeed, the BO Capsule looked much more stable under parachutes than the Dragon did.

2. The commentators mentioned that the booster had flown and landed 5 times and would be retired to a museum. 5 times!? There was so little drama in the launch and landing that I expect they could probably launch it another 5 times with few problems. This is what a reliable system looks like. Good job!

3. The gantry tower at the West Texas launch site had what looked like walkways for accessing the Crew capsule. Does that mean crewed tests are imminent? Very exciting!

This is a fantastic result for Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin team; I'm hoping that their new orbital booster is as reliable. If it is, SpaceX and ULA will have some real domestic competition. At last!

In reference to your first comment, the Soyuz capsules pitch and roll a large amount too. With the crew capsule here, as long as the passengers are still alive at touch down it gets counted as a win. After all, would you care all that much about discomfort if it meant getting you away from an exploding rocket?

Hi-jacking top comment to point out that the actual launch is at 1h:06m.

1. I'd be interested if they have instrumented crash dummies inside for this sort of thing. I'd imagine they'd get some whiplash, but that's a lot better than blown up.

3. Not necessarily. Their first flight had the same tower. Presumably for engineering access to it when it's stood up. https://youtu.be/rEdk-XNoZpA?t=17s

If you're properly restrained, you can survive absolutely massive g-forces. John Stapp survived 46g on a rocket sled; Indycar and Formula 1 drivers regularly walk away from >100g crashes. Assuming they're using a proven seat and restraint design, the capsule's own sensors should provide satisfactory data on survivability.

Just to put some perspective on this, you are likely unable to survive >9g when experiencing it for more than a few moments, definitely so if you lack proper training for high Gs (there's a few techniques that help to avoid harm). The higher the G forces, the smaller the acceptable time scale is. In a crash, you will only experience such forces for a few milliseconds. Well-trained fighter pilots can handle ~9Gs for a few seconds. Apollo reentry had like 6Gs for ~50sec (take with a grain of salt, very rough numbers), which is brutal but manageable.

And – no matter what the designers/operators say – in a roller coaster, you will never experience more than 1.5Gs for more than a fraction of a second. If you ever thought you experienced G-forces comparable to a rocket launch, you haven't, unless you had the chance to test/train in a centrifuge.

The booster was not rated to survive this emergency situation, and it was entirely possible that it would crash and explode during this test. I'm very happy that it survived to be retired!

> This is what a reliable system looks like.

Unlike SpaceX, BO doesn't publicize things as they happen, so it could have been the third attempt also.

Though having more money to play before launching commercial sats helps

To be fair, reporters were on site and they were broadcasting a live stream.

They used to be like that but over the last year they've switched to announcing all their flights in advance and live streaming them.

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