Jeff Bezos successfully lands back on Earth
dailyrecord.co.uk
dailyrecord.co.uk
Congrats Bezos, nonetheless (he gets a Nancy Pelosi clap, at least).
Now, that may be true of Musk also in a way, but there is certainly less news about it.
https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1413521627116032001
Bezos is a hyper-competitive, winner-takes-all narcissist. Of course it's about him.
That being said, let's not pretend Musk or Branson are particularly different in their essential makeup. Heck, Musk literally bought the right to be called Tesla's founder. If that isn't the action of someone deeply self-involved and vainglorious, I don't know what is.
Bezos appears to be just a lot more petty.
This is a milestone for that company, but not a milestone for much else: it really looked useless. Let's hope they will extend their technology for something bigger than this.
Maybe I don't have their vision, but this kind of space tourism seems like a dead end. Not useful enough to replace planes, not powerful enough to actually go to space. Maybe a testbed for space technologies?
I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for a truly safe platform for shuttling people and payloads from earth's surface to outer space.
Space is the final frontier, and we are literally just getting started. The more groups that are working on the problem, the better!
Most likely I am. It seems like the logical progression would be increasingly bigger rockets to actually round-trip regularly to, say, the Moon, or a space station. Elon Musk has always made clear his final goal of colonizing Mars, while Branson and Bezos seem to have less defined goals.
I suspect that Bezos is following a little bit of the same playbook with Blue Origin that he did with Amazon. Amazon isn't just an online retailer. It's also an open marketplace for independent sellers. Additionally, all of the technology behind the scenes (the AWS platform) is being resold and used by countless other companies (generating a huge chunk of Amazon's revenue).
By focusing on building these reusable components (with no single defined goal), I suspect that Bezos is envisioning a space "road" which will be utilized by third parties as they see fit. If you notice, they even use this "space road" terminology on the marketing for New Glenn.
If a private company wants to start their own mining base on the moon, for example, they could simply pay Blue Origin to ship their building supplies there. They could then play Blue Origin to shuttle their people there.
If Blue Origin can actually provide a safe and reliable "toll road" for third parties to get to space, they will make billions/trillions in the long run off of it.
Edit: I just found something interesting to support this theory. Apparently Jeff Bezos recently stated that "We Need to Move All Polluting Industry Into Space". Now just imagine how much money Blue Origin would make from shuttling all those third party materials and people to and from space...
https://youtu.be/PGl8MRJheiA?t=7844
Despite all the criticism about whether suborbital is to be consider space or not, I find this to be incredibly exciting time to be alive.
On another note, the footage of these landings from either Blue Origin or Starship totally remind me of something out of the original Thunderbirds show when Thunderbird 1 is landing.
https://youtu.be/tGMppsrZoJw?t=153
Or maybe even something from Neill Blomkamp.
That's quite interesting.
While noting that methane and higher hydrocarbons can also be created from thin air and water...
The point is that a rocket launch itself is zero emission and that LOX and LH2 may be produced using renewable energy, for instance.
The point remains that a launch is zero emission because of the fuel used. In turn it is perfectly possible to produce that fuel 'cleanly'.
I mentioned this because I thought that this was interesting as, IMHO, it shows that space launches are not necessarily ultra polluting.
Is any hydrogen-using rocket currently fueled with something other than hydrogen from natural gas?
I totally get that it's interesting that it's possible that rocket launches might not be ultra polluting someday, but so far, ...
So assuming an evolution and not revolution in technology, how long until the first civilian orbits earth? 10 years?
My suspicion is that Amazon is angling for a suborbital (Earth-to-Earth) delivery platform with "space" tourism as a side gig, while Branson is going full hog for "space" tourism and Musk is focusing on delivery to orbit. Of the three, going to orbit is definitely the most interesting and technologically advanced, and the others are just meant to get investors excited.
It’s not that cheap but many people go on vacations for a similar price every few years.
Of course, that is a step up from these sub-orbital flights. They are related though. Progress in sub-orbital tourism will help pave the way for orbital tourism and beyond.
Many signs are pointing to the space ecosystem and related technologies growing and developing in an incredible way in the coming decades, after multiple decades of relative stagnation.
By the time this materializes, only the rich will be able to afford it, because only the rich will have $10k free to spend on anything. Everyone else will be gigging in the wasteland for autonomous corporations, up to their knees in radioactive iodine, for subsistence wages in femtobitcoins.