New Shepard's 8th test flight [video]
blueorigin.com
blueorigin.com
With Virgin Galactic getting back into test flights after losing Spaceship 2, the possibility that non-astronauts might be making suborbital flights seems so much closer.
I share the suggestion with other commentators here that using metric units might be more useful, even if your target audience (the tourists that fly) might not understand them, is a good one. Even if they don't understand them, tourists will recognize when something looks "Just like NASA does it" and that will instill confidence.
The dynamic range on the BE-3 is particularly impressive. I don't believe anyone else's restartable rocket engine has a similar range of operation.
I can't wait to hear when you guys start taking applications for passengers.
I'm fine with this, but I'm not fine with mixing imperial and metric units. The worst was NASA Space Shuttle launches where they used statute miles for downrange distance with some nautical miles here and there for good measure.
I'm guessing they use SI units internally for engineering.
Blue Origin's booster seems to switch to a different control logic at ~30ft up, from a rapid descent to a slow controlled touchdown procedure. Meanwhile, SpaceX has a very smooth touchdown that seems to use a single control logic. I'm sure that the SpaceX approach is better for fuel consumption, but the slower Blue Origin landings seem better for spectators!
I love watching the physical effects of somebody's code, and I'd love to hear more about the decisions that led to this behavior.
Blue Origin might eventually encounter just that problem with New Glenn.
https://www.google.com/search?q=spacex+grasshopper+video&num...
Blue Origin's booster, as far as I know, doesn't have this limitation (not that it seems to cause SpaceX too much trouble).
It seems like BO's engines are smaller and/or have deeper throttle capabilities, so they actually do hovering and controlled descent.
Blue Origin only uses one engine for New Shepard, so it's actually proportionately much larger than the Merlin engines on Falcon 9. The reason they can hover is that New Shepard is fundamentally a MUCH lower performance vehicle than Falcon 9. This allows them to land with a larger fraction of their launch mass, decreasing the amount of throttling required.
The single BE-3 engine used by New Shepard can throttle from 490KN to 89KN, about 18%. The 9 Merlin 1D engines on a Falcon 9 first stage can throttle to 39%, but 8 of them can be shut down during landing for a total throttle capacity of 4.33%. The fact that New Shepard can hover with 18% throttle but Falcon 9 can only do a suicide burn with 4.33% should tell you everything you need to know about the relative performance (and use cases!) of the two rockets.
Blue Origin could design the most elegant solution to their problem without a lot of compromises.
SpaceX always intended reuse but originally they were going to recover boosters with parachutes. They already had a full flight manifest depending on engines designed for mass production and thrust to weight, not throttle ability. So they had to work with what they had which was a rocket that could not hover. They turned the limitations into a benefit because the hoverslam is more fuel efficient which is far more critical for their service than it would be for Blue Origin.
I know that engineers have obviously done that math on this, but I still find it incredibly counterintuitive that they are not at least shaving off some velocity with any chutes or other aerodynamic surfaces (except of course there are the grid fins, but afaik those are primarily for steering the ballistic trajectory in the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, and don't significantly alter the terminal velocity relevant to how much fuel you need for a hover burn).
Obviously the terminal velocity of the stage is still pretty fast but compared to the speed it starts at it's much smaller.
Every kg in fuel you need to burn to land, you need to lift off the pad. From what I found through some Googling, a F9 booster uses a little under 1,000kgs to do the hover burn. I would imagine some lightweight aero surfaces would be more weight-efficient at decelerating the rocket than the 999th, 997th, 996th, (nth) kg of fuel.
A parachute would also be next to worthless for landing a fully-loaded BFR on Mars.
SpaceX takes the iterative approach and is designing their vehicle for Mars landings now to get practice, at the expense of being able to carry a bit less to high-energy orbits (which they've largely negated with Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 upgrades) here on Earth.
I'm a big SpaceX fan and they've got a big lead in terms of actual launches and recovery experience, but don't count Blue Origin out.
Edit: I also found it interesting that they chose to show the closeup of the capsule landing in "slow motion".
Edit 2: Seems they have just added the full live stream video vs. just the polished edited version I was commenting on earlier.
Launch 1:09:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=69m50s&v=ZUV53Nn3PhA
Launch 38:41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=38m41s&v=ZUV53Nn3PhA
(Edit: Note that it's an earlier launch from December. They've pulled the livestream video of this launch, which is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUV53Nn3PhA .)
Before that things didn't always go so well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
SpaceX were going to land Dragon 2 with rockets and it looks like NASA wasn't interested. Parachutes are still the safe, proven option.
With orbital class boosters potentially being landed every couple of weeks and Blue having flown their vehicle multiple times I would guess future vehicle generations will benefit from that experience.
SpaceX's BFS is going to combine a second stage and crew/cargo vehicle. If successful, competition might be pushed in the same direction.
It's simpler to just separate near apogee and land with parachutes.
Also, safety.
There are two significant differences between this spacecraft and Apollo CM: Apollo CM landed on water, while New Shepard lands on land and Apollo CM used a crushable piece of hull for final landing shock attenuation (that's why its landing attitude was slightly skewed), while New Shepard seems to use landing thrusters (a' la Soyuz).
They also tested an emergency escape from the booster near maximum dynamic pressure https://youtu.be/ESc_0MgmqOA?t=51s
I guess they could work on the polish of the video.
I have become quite used to the insane production value levels that spacex has. I have asked myself how many people is involved in just the filming/streaming of spacex launches on multiple occasions.
Compare to the nominal landing at 1:14 in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSDHM6iuogI
But, if you let the ground stop you, you end up with all of the energy transfer in a few milliseconds. Because the time is so short, the force spikes to crazy high levels. This breaks equipment and people. The rockets firing spread out that force over a longer period of time.
For example (all numbers made up):
Time the ground takes to stop you: 25ms
Time rockets fire before touchdown: 100ms
Landing capsule weight: 2000kg
Impulse needed to stop capsule: 7.15264m/s * 2000kg = 14300Ns
Assuming in both cases the force is evenly applied over the time period...
Force from the ground stopping you: 14300Ns / 25ms = 572,000N
Force from the rockets + the ground: 14300Ns / (100ms + 25ms) = 115,000N
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/16821/what-is-the-...
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/STS120La...
Also, the whole commercial advertisement format of the launch is far too contrived. Hearing the host describe the capsule window as gorgeous cheapens the entire thing, it's like I'm watching home shopping network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l7MM9yoxII&feature=youtu.be...
That's a little like comparing a F1 racer to a wheelbarrow, isn't it? Both are immensely useful for specific things, and would fail miserably if applied to the other's thing. New Shepard is cool, and I'd love to hop in it some day, but it's doing a little up-and-down suborbital hop. The two launchers have totally different purposes, and are constructed in entirely different ways as a result.
This is almost entirely driven by the fuel used - liquid methane is about 6.5 times more dense than liquid hydrogen.
With no restriction on ground transport, the New Shepard can be as thick as engineering deems is necessary.
Can you show me some references to this?
My understanding is that there is a tension between two goals.
The first goal is to maximize aerodynamic efficiency, which means minimizing frontal surface area.
The second goal is to minimize non-fuel weight, which means minimizing the surface area to volume ratio.
It's not obvious to me that the Falcon 9 would be better off shorter and wider.
Lots of people have done the calculations. Poke around the Reddit Spacex forum and NSF forums, lots of discussions there.
> The first goal is to maximize aerodynamic efficiency, which means minimizing frontal surface area.
The fairing is already wider than the first or upper stages, so increasing those stages to the fairing's width would actually improve the aerodynamics.
Well, NS was designed for re-usability from the start, while F9 had only re-usability plugged-in later as an experimental feature. SpaceX's priority was to get to orbit ASAP in order to be commercially viable.
I bet BFR will look much studier than F9.
People work pretty damn hard on these things that you piss on without a care.
Most of us are rooting for Blue Origin to succeed despite the fact they worked together with ULA to try and block spacex access to a pad in florida (total BS!).
Seriously, build the orbital rocket then Nasa SHOULD give you space or make spacex provide space if needed - but the claims of need between 2013 and 2018 for the nasa pad seemed totally bogus.
If someone is talking exclusively about themselves, why is this considered uninformed?!?
How about: Blue Origin and SpaceX are as different as apples and oranges, the one is doing space tourism and may at some point become a player, the other is serving up a sizeable fraction of the worlds launch capacity at a pace that seems to be picking up every month. As soon as Blue Origin becomes Blue Orbitals a comparison would make sense.
Then again, HackerNews does have the stereotype of criticizing things in ways that show a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic being discussed…
Rocket Lab has - at this point - as much or even more credibility than Blue Origin has in spite of the more modest goals and the huge disparity in funding. At some point Blue Origin will simply have to deliver, sooner is better than later.
Just because SpaceX is doing something much harder than what Blue Origin is doing, that doesn't make it easy or trivial. Even getting a rocket that size to space is incredibly difficult, and not that many nations have done it. The fact that they're doing it, with a (soon to be) crewed capsule, which lands vertically... that's mind blowing.
The fact that SpaceX has a ton of success doesn't raise the table stakes. Basically, no one else (except SpaceX) is doing what Blue Origin is doing, nor have they done it in history. That is tremendous. I am very, very happy for Blue Origin, even though I'm rooting harder for SpaceX. Respect all around.
This is very true. More than one person I know commented on how strange it is that SpaceX rockets go 'sideways'. They think going 'up' is the prelude to going into orbit.
Can't wait to see the orbital stuff. What blue origin is showing currently looks reusable. Curious if it will scale, some of this is easier at lower scale.
I am curious about the claim of a feather soft landing - there is pretty much nothing lighter than feather light, even an airplane landing is harder. That's a big accomplishment if true (and looks like there should be at least a jolt of some sort just eyeballing. Props to the team for getting it so light.
Why are we so intent on dismissing the little players here?
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823615 and many others besides, some of them well before SpaceX was even officially on the books.
(2) Jeff Bezos is not a 'little player', he goes out of his way to invite comparison (in a positive sense) between SpaceX and Blue Origin.
(3) I'm super happy that SpaceX exists and I sincerely hope that Blue Origin will shape up and starts to put stuff in orbit rather than to play the 'space tourism' angle. It seems rather frivolous to start off with manned space flight when you normally speaking cut your teeth - and derisk your design - using many useful unmanned launches until you get it all to work reliably and safely. Going 'up and down' does not seem all that impressive, even though of course it is plenty complicated but it is all relative to what others are doing.
(4) I can't stand hype. And to me Blue Origin is hyping for all it is worth. For now they're Armadillo Space on steroids time will tell how they will fare. Until then these test flights test stuff that matters but not nearly at the level that Blue Origin makes it out to be.
Finally, to avoid stepping on sensitive toes: nothing in this comment is meant as disparaging to employees of Blue Origin, SpaceX, Rocket Lab, ULA, Ariane Space or any other group of people that are working to get mass of this planet, the more the merrier regardless of how much a project works out or not I wished I was younger and had more of a physics background so I could contribute. So I'm relegated to watching this development and it is the most excited I've been since I was 4 years old and saw the first man on the moon. I don't think I've missed a launch in the last year or two.
You may not know this, but the user you're responding to has historically been one of the more prominent SpaceX fanboys on the internet. (Formerly most active mod of /r/SpaceX)
(edit: okay, maybe you do know this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449298)
>(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823615 and many others besides, some of them well before SpaceX was even officially on the books.
Nobody's questioning whether you supported SpaceX then. But don't let your past cheerleading of the now-frontrunner preclude you from supporting the promising newcomers now. Space is big enough for many players.
>(2) Jeff Bezos is not a 'little player', he goes out of his way to invite comparison (in a positive sense) between SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Good. If SpaceX is his role model, he's sure to set his sights high.
>(3) I'm super happy that SpaceX exists and I sincerely hope that Blue Origin will shape up and starts to put stuff in orbit rather than to play the 'space tourism' angle. It seems rather frivolous to start off with manned space flight when you normally speaking cut your teeth - and derisk your design - using many useful unmanned launches until you get it all to work reliably and safely. Going 'up and down' does not seem all that impressive, even though of course it is plenty complicated but it is all relative to what others are doing.
Blue Origin just completed an absolutely massive rocket factory in KSC's Exploration Park. Their (ambitious, oxygen-rich staged combustion methalox) orbital-class rocket engine will complete testing this year, bound for use both on their own SHLV-class orbital New Glenn as well as ULA's Vulcan in 2020. Meanwhile, with New Shepard they've perfected their hydrogen BE-3 (to be modified for vacuum work as the BE-3U) and will soon gain experience with flying crew. That's more meaningful than you let on — crew capsule development is a very long process. Dragon started development in 2004, 15 years before it will fly crew. New Glenn will start with dozens of unmanned payloads — crewed flights aren't expected until 7-8 years down the line. (And they'll presumably still need to develop their own orbital capsule.)
https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/972507214845014016
>(4) I can't stand hype. And to me Blue Origin is hyping for all it is worth.
SpaceX is built on hype. Hype precedes accomplishment, by nature.
>For now they're Armadillo Space on steroids time will tell how they will fare. Until then these test flights test stuff that matters but not nearly at the level that Blue Origin makes it out to be.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. Armadillo is one of the most profoundly impactful companies in all of spaceflight history — there's a direct line from Carmack's VTVL work to SpaceX's booster landings. Nobody disputes that Blue Origin is many years behind SpaceX, and their "top-down" approach can be criticized and contrasted with SpaceX's "bottom-up" approach, but their accomplishments so far should not be understated — they are at least as impressive as SpaceX's Grasshopper and F9R work. And they're low single-digit years away from leapfrogging every competitor besides SpaceX into low-cost partially-reusable heavy-lift flight.
Otherwise we'd probably all still be using Internet Explorer.
There's no chance that anyone can monopolize the launch market because of the way it's structured, with lots of governments wanting independent access to space. What you want is at least 2 low-cost providers.
Falcon 9 is built on the imperial system, as are Atlas and Delta. SpaceX is only switching to metric with BFR.
Getting them mixed up sounds potentially risky. :/
Definitely would expect they've added some automatic safety checks around that, which is quite do-able in NX from memory.
I don't want to minimize what Blue Origin is doing here; they've got a good test vehicle, smart people, lots of funding, and ambitious plans, and they will no doubt be very successful, but what SpaceX does with the Falcon 9 on a regular basis is orders of magnitude more difficult and impressive.