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Comment by hackujin | Hacker News Reader

Straight up... straight down. No orbit. Nothing to see other than "tourist" flights for people who want to see what space is like but without weightlessness.

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To judge a suborbital launch for having not made orbit is to criticize a Ferrari for having not reached 30,000' above a test track. The goals are different, and the metrics are different.

Blue Origin is moving through a planned series of test flights necessary to bring untrained astronauts into space on their own custom hardware with an improved margin of safety.

Comparisons with SpaceX will again become reasonable when either a) One of the companies launches a person into space, as both aspire to do, or b) Blue Origin begins an orbital campaign.

Congratulations, Blue Origin. You crushed it again today.

They aren't going to space! The thing barely makes it to to edge of the atmosphere. How long are you gonna keep apologizing for them? There's literally no technical innovation here.

No payload. No orbit. No value.

I'd say any sort of reusable booster is technical innovation. They had test payloads. And no one is apologizing for anyone.

I'm sorry, it's not technical innovation. If someone invents a horse and carriage when the automobile is already in existence, the horse and carriage is not innovation. The poster who has been downvoted out of existence is correct.

If there‘s any freefall involved there will be weightlessness, orbit or not.

> while the booster drops back down, kicking in the landing gear and rocket-powered breaking system to land on the ground, unscathed. The capsule, meanwhile, using a pair of parachutes to coast back to Earth

Nope. No weightlessness at all.

I’m sure there’s some period between booster cutoff and the parachutes. They’re not sending the chutes out while the capsule is still on the upward part of its parabolic arc.

The capsule experiences ~3 mins of freefall/microgravity/“weightlessness” - in fact, they’ve already flown payloads that depend on this.

https://www.blueorigin.com/news/news/first-commercial-payloa...

I can experience that jumping out of a plane and for way longer than 3 minutes.

No, you can't. You'll feel the force of air resistance (drag) as soon as you exit the plane, increasing until you hit terminal velocity and 1g.

I think you misunderstand weightlessness. The Blue Origin capsule got to about 75 miles altitude and low earth orbit starts about 100 miles, while Earth's surface is about 4,000 miles from the center of gravity. In other words, the force due to gravity is essentially the same for all of these. Weightlessness is falling, that's it.

It's time to stop with the dismissals in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Will it be a profitable business?

You could bootstrap the future of space flight simply by starting with a small profitable company.

It hasn't exactly worked out for XCOR or Virgin Galactic, what will Blue Origin's edge be?

A huge reserve of capital and the long-term vision necessary to do every piece right.

XCOR filed for bankruptcy. That’s not profitable.

Virgin Galactic isn’t a profitable company either. They could be, of course.

My point was that you can start with a small company with a well-defined goal and product then continue to grow the vision, as long as you remain profitable.

Yeah I don't disagree here, my point was that Blue Origin's particular goal and product bootstrapping from space tourism has already been tried and more or less failed. Whereas Musk's/SpaceX's goal is to get a Mars colony going, they started with something different than space tourism and it seems to be working out.

Virgin Galactic hasn’t failed yet. Someone was killed so they’ve been extremely cautious.

Bezos is a good business person. It’s quite possible he’ll run thin margins and grow the business.

No need for that, Jeff Bezos is funding Blue Origin with 1 billion each year by selling Amazon stock.

Getting to orbit is a big step. You can look at the history of SpaceX and Rocket Lab to get a grasp of what it takes -- hard to imagine a sub-orbital tourism company getting there without an injection of capital. Which, btw, is how Rocket Lab did it: they started with sounding rockets, proved that the knew what they were doing, then got a big round to go orbital.

You could have said the same about the first couple Mercury flights. It is a progression leading to orbit.