Blue Origin: Images and Videos from Our First Flight
blueorigin.com
blueorigin.com
The capsule looks nice; big curved windows and no RCS thrusters tell us that this is not an orbital capsule.
The 1st Stage reuse concept is interesting; the ducting near the capsule connector is quite novel. There are 8 large spoilers that protrude into the airflow to help slow descent. I wonder if these can be modulated to give some kind of stability control?
It's interesting to note that although the capsule landed successfully, they make no mention of what happened to the launcher. I presume that it failed to land, but I didn't see any smoking wreckage in the background of the capsule landing video, so maybe it made it down in 1 piece? I'm sure they would have told us if it had.
Anyway, a good day for the US space industry; Blue Origin finally have something cool to show and have proved that they're not just purveyors of vaporware. I'm looking forward to seeing what else they can come up with.
I wouldn't want to try it with something with a 180 degree turn time of 30+ seconds.
I wonder if any of this is true in real life? Doesn't a spaghetti rocket just explode in real life?
Is it simply easier to build something disposable? Or are there fundamental restrictions like the inability to stop a solid rocket motor?
Secondly you have issues with fuel/oxidisers; cryogenic fuels/oxidisers need to be regularly stirred in low gravity because convection doesn't work the same as it would in the presence of gravity. This is why most RCS systems use non-cryogenic hypergolic bi-propellant fuels or mono-propellant fuels as the systems are much simpler; pressurised tanks, one or two one-way valve(s), possibly a catalyst, a combustion chamber and bell for the simplest of systems.
Using hypergolic propellants solves this problem. The trouble is that hypergolic propellants are inherently dangerous (they'll explode if they come in contact, that's the whole point) and are typically highly toxic. They're OK in small quantities, thus they show up in RCS systems, but making an entire orbital launcher using hypergolic propellants is a massive pain. It has been done, but the result tends to be more explodey than usual.
I think Russia might disagree with you. Wikipedia describes the Proton launcher as "one of the most successful heavy boosters in the history of spaceflight."
The SR-71 used TEB to ignite its engines, as JP-8 was so hard to ignite.
While the rocket is running, the acceleration caused by the motor causes the propellant to pool at the bottom of the tank where the outlet is. As soon as you stop the motor, the acceleration stops and the liquid starts floating around inside the tank. If you tried to restart it now, you would get an unstable mix of propellant and pressurizing gas which might not allow the rocket to startup properly.
To restart reliably, you need to apply a force to the tank to force the liquid back down to the outlet. During Apollo, this was done with many small solid rocket motors called Ullage Rockets. These would fire for just a few seconds just immediately before the rocket was restarted. The force was just enough to get the propellant down to the outlet in time to be sucked into the turbo pumps before ignition.
They also are developing the BE-4 engine that ULA wants to use for their new Vulcan rocket.
The launcher didn't make it back because the hydraulic pressure was lost.
But this is great indeed as you said.
But the really really odd thing for me is listening to the callout in feet and feet per second rather than meters and meters per second. I've gotten quite used to velocity in particular being called out in m/s.
I wish they were a bit more open with the progress they were making.
Perhaps this is related to javert's flag comment?
This seems to be ideal for transport as well? That is, if we're trying to get from Tokyo to NYC quickly, we never want to actually go into orbit, do we?
Spacex might have the control side worked out some years but their capsule is full of fuel you can't expose people to.
I would think the fuel costs even with 100% reusability would make rocket commute prohibitive.
http://www.uspa.org/BecomeaSkydiver/ChooseaSchool/tabid/437/...
If BO can demonstrate that the risks of a flight into space are comparable to other hazards we encounter in life (car driving, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, surgery), they're going to have plenty of people (myself included) who want to go.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
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This post has an illustration that makes the concept clear: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108970-Help-with...
(Note: I'm approximating by assuming no forces other than gravity, which is an extremely good approximation for a ballistic rocket. In perpetually powered flight the trajectory can of course take other shapes.)
My experiments with Flappy Space Program contradict this. b^) It is perfectly possible to miss orbit even after a complete circumnavigation. Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
New York to Tokyo is nearly half that circumference, so the energy required is nearly that of orbit.
Well it's more like a quarter, but even if it were half it would take significantly less energy than orbit.
Yes, if you have a source of lift, and you're within the atmosphere, then you can circumnavigate the globe without reaching orbital velocities. A ballistic rocket generally has no significant source of lift and spends nearly all of its time in space.
> Trajectories are shaped like parabolas, not ellipses.
All orbits are conic sections: either an ellipse, hyperbola, or a parabola (the limiting case between the two). But a parabolic or hyperbolic trajectory has escape velocity, whereas only an elliptic trajectory is planet-bound. The apogee of the ellipse is locally approximated well by a parabola, which is why for non-orbital mechanics ballistic trajectories are often modeled by a parabola, but all suborbital trajectories are actually ellipses, not parabolas. If the Earth were flat and the gravity vector were constant, then they would be actual parabolas.
Orbital mechanics is very counterintuitive. I recommend Fundamentals of Astrodynamics if you'd like to learn more, or play KSP rather than FSP.
> Well it's more like a quarter
On this you are correct, the map I looked at deceived me. :)
Math:
Reaching the edge of space requires 100 km altitude, or 1,000,000 m^2/s^2 of specific energy, which is 1,414 m/s velocity. Redirect that to a 45° angle and you have 1,000 m/s in both the vertical and horizontal direction, which comes close to maximizing your distance. That gives you 200 seconds of flight, which puts you 200 km downrange.
What happened to the booster?
> “Of course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent,” Jeff Bezos wrote in a blog post. “Fortunately, we’ve already been in work for some time on an improved hydraulic system. Also, assembly of propulsion module serial numbers 2 and 3 is already underway – we’ll be ready to fly again soon.”
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2015/04/30/jeff-bezos-...
And here's the aforementioned blog post, from Blue Origin's own website. It presents a little more information about the flight:
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blog/first-developmental-tes...
A few people alive today have forgotten that, but most people alive today have never known it.
edit: HN, I just typed a long response to a comment below but can't post it becuase I'm "submitting too fast." Cut the crap and tell me about that before I write a long comment.
I'll grant you that culturally and regulatory wise, there are advantages to certain regions in the US. Some of those features are shared in parts of Canada, UK, Australia and other Commonwealth culture countries, where a view of entrepreneurship, risk, and ambition seems to differ with that of say, some continental Europe cultures. But I'd also include China, a politically unfree country in that last, in the sense that, despite "Communism", the country has many regions of wild west of wide eye entrepreneurs and greed.
Like Obama said, you may believe in American Exceptionalism like the British believe in British Exceptionalism, or the French believe in Francophone Exceptionalism, but it's not unique. Canada's not really less free than the US for example. And unprecedented human happiness? Really, with the events of Baltimore (my hometown) going on, you can say this with a straight face?
We live in an amazing amazing time that entrepreneurs can now do what only nation states did in the past. But our current situation is a precarious thing, and rather than be rah-rah about freedom and human happiness, we need to be worried about the environment and a breakdown in our social structure that might be fueled by such amazing abilities.
Automation, software, robotics, et al, are starting to devalue labor, but we have not evolved politically or socially to deal with perhaps, the decline of work itself, as a focus of human self worth or well being.
Those rioters are thugs trashing their own neighborhood for a laugh. SJWs will pretend it is about poverty but blacks who live there understand exactly what is happening and were even trying to protect the police who are majority black.
But I also lived in a mixed race neighborhood and watched how my friends and playmates became "drugged out zombies", most of whom are now either in jail or dead. My own sister is dead from a lifelong addiction to heroin. I made it out.
It's not "social justice warrior" to try and understand how people become trapped in poverty and succumb to gangs and drugs. My siblings were raised by the same parents, but some of them got involved with the wrong crowd, and some didn't. I watched both working class black and white families encounter the same disintegrations.
The right wing or libertarian narrative seeks not to find solutions, but to scold. It wants to say that people "get what they deserve" and so all of the poverty and misery must be justified somehow. If you're poor, if your kids are criminals, well, you have no one but yourself to blame, or them.
Did you ever consider what causes people to become addicts in the first place? Or to join Gangs, or for many black families to be fatherless? Do you have any idea how hopeless it is to get a career off the ground if you've got an arrest record? Especially if you've got a felony where a white offender got a plea down to a misdemeanor?
Baltimore wasn't always full of drugged out zombies. When I was 10 years old at the beginning of 80s, I used to walk halfway across town to the Inner Harbor by myself without fear. There was a sea change that happened, and it wasn't become the people who lived there suddenly became assholes, deadbeats, criminals, and bad parents. That all happened over many years from external factors.
We need to understand how these external factors undermine our social capital and learn how to reverse it, otherwise you'll be living in a walled fortress in the future trying to avoid Zombies.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/swiss-reign-sup...
This ignores the history of capitalism, which is more important than the factors you mention. And capitalism was a philosophical and legal development.
> But I'm afraid the 'unprecedented human happiness' you cite is only readily available to an elite few.
That's just not true. The American sense of life is a happy one, unlike the British or continental European sense of nausea, dread, anti-semitism, nationalism, requiring one's brother to be one's keeper, and so on. Unfortunately I think the American sense of life is mostly gone in the east coast cities.
What utter nonsense.
Oh, here's another one: Tall poppy syndrome. That unspeakable evil is not present in the U.S. I was horrified to hear about it.
I'm not religious, but given that the context of that quote, being your brother's keeper is not that bad a plan. Better than murdering them.
To be simultaneously jingoistic about the USA while wagging a finger at Europeans for nationalism and bigotry reminds me of another bible quote. First cast out the beam out of thine own eye.
There are a number of good places to live in the world, and the United States is one of them.
My hopes were in Ron Paul, but this great American will never be let make the much-needed changes to truly justify the "democracy" label!
What you're seeing are actions by the police that would have previously gone unreported, or otherwise not been widely exposed to a large population via eg social media.
Obviously the NSA reference is spot on. As would have been a point about incarceration and SWAT deployments.
It's also worth noting that the war on drugs is finally beginning to end. That is an improvement, and will lead to less police brutality almost by default as pot is fully legalized across the US, and other drugs start to be de-criminalized in favor of treatment.
Corporations are far more regulated and controlled today than they were as recently as the 1960s or 1970s. The EPA didn't even exist until 1970. If you think corporate interests are running rampant today, you really would have hated the first 150 years of US corporate history.
And of course the US has been militarily aggressive since WW2, with Korea and Vietnam being larger military actions than Afghanistan and Iraq. Not much has actually changed there in 70 years.
Tell me a place in the world where I can live without being treated, in principle, like a sacrificial animal, and I'll tell you it's good to live there.
Use the back button to get back to the page you posted it from. The text is still there in the text window. Copy it.
That is, the text is probably there. HN seems to be better at preserving it than many other sites, but I don't guarantee that this will work.
I don't want to go back, leave the tab open, and have to remember to try again in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on.
Today, I actually did the dishes and the laundry, and still could not post the long post I was referring to, so I just closed the tab (gave up). At that point, you either close the tab, or you put it on your todo list, and I am not going to clutter up my todo list with stuff like that.
I remember Elon Musk ridiculing Jeff Bezos sometime back. The only thing I knew about Blue Origin by then was they are making a new engine for United Launch Alliance to replace their Russian RD-180 engine on Delta rockets.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, having been around even longer than SpaceX, just had their first ever test launch, of a sub-orbital rocket.
It's cool that they're doing this, but I wouldn't call it impressive (yet! maybe it could get there) and certainly doesn't seem to counter Musk's ridicule.
Edit: just confirming your memory of ridicule: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/26/elon-musk...
"If [Blue Origin] do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
But, the one thing that looks impressive to me is that, the way they are handling the rocket with a single engine, which is similar to spacex's grasshopper.(also assuming they will make a vertical landing soon)
However, SpaceX is using off the shelf russian engine designs, if I recall correctly (possibly off the shelf engines in the early days?[1]) Blue Origin, on the other hand, seems to be developing its engines from scratch.
SpaceX's strategy certainly should have gotten it to market faster, and has. Blue Origin's in theory should give it a technology lead (engines designed now rather than 50+ years ago.)
It appears that in the 2020s we'll see when both companies (I believe) start launching heavy lift vehicles. SpaceX will have more launches under its belt then, but maybe Blue Origin will have caught up?
[1] I remember reading a blog post that the Merlin engine was based on a russian design, but I can't seem to find evidence of that now. Maybe I'm mistaken.
That was Orbital Sciences with their Antares rocket, which uses refurbished Soviet-era Kuznetsov NK-33 engines (1960ies to -70ies).
As far as I know, SpaceX designed their own engines. They did so relying heavily on what is known from earlier NASA and Russian engines, but that is true of everyone these days.
Wondering whether that may be a visual illusion, something to do with the flight profile (light vehicle, lower altitude) or just me.
So basically a rocket like the Falcon 9 will appear to be traveling much slower than a much shorter rocket like the New Shepard for the same reason a 747 on landing approach looks like it is traveling much slower than a 737 traveling at the same speed.
[1] http://www.astronautix.com/craft/newepard.htm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Comparison
I'm not trolling. I have no judgement about that either way. But it is strikingly phallic.
I saw a video of it being lifted from a horizontal to a vertical position and it looked like a penis getting erect [1].
I think if a sex toy was made out of this design, it would be more agreeable to its users than one modeled after the Saturn V or a Falcon.
Maybe you have issues with penises. By telling others to grow up, perhaps it is you who are uncomfortable with penises, since you'd prefer this be ignored?
Actually the video reminded me of Austin Powers.