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- johnnyzero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11That's one more of NASA's fingers being unwrapped from it's iron grip around space flight. Cheers and good luck.
- drmobutu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Were they secretly testing this last month, near Chicago?
- jschrab, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Hey, if you are going to serve more than 4 to 6 people, that's what you need!
- nandcc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6bad ass, thats all
- Manhigh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6NASA has no grip around spaceflight. Others are free to partake. The more the merrier.
- monergism, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants won't help
- seanpauls, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6did you miss the vid of the launch and land???
- nicnic77, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Only 7 comments? It's a Rocketship!!!!!
- zoomie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Anyone is free to partake, provided they have enough money for R&D. I'd be willing to guess that NASA encourages and cooperates with private sector ventures like this.
- socalrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Did I miss it somewhere, did it say what it was they used to fuel it? There were no flames like you would see with a normal shuttle launch.
- spacester, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Propulsion: Concentrated Hydrogen Peroxide and Kerosene. Not cryogenic, and of course the specific impulse is lower than LOX / kerosene.
SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) is a fool's errand IMO. Do the math - the payload fraction is just too tiny to make anything work economically. Certainly not with H2O2/kerosene.
This is a prototype for a suborbital vehicle, but I can picture a direct descendant atop a much larger, similarly shaped vehicle to make a two-stage orbital system.
The appeal of vertical takeoffs, among other things, is that you minimize gravity losses, the energy lost when you accelerate in a gravity field. The shorter the time spent binding your energy to the orbital path the lower the losses, and the losses also go down as you gain altitude. So going straight up can be more efficient in that sense. My understanding is that Carmack at Armadillo is thinking along these lines. - jaksauce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Also MSNBC's coverage:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/01/03/26062.aspx - 0crabby0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It resembles the DC-X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X - 0crabby0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Blue Orgin is using hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin - aallan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yeah, Blue Origin hired a lot of the DC-X guys after NASA canned the programme.
- sanman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is that a rocket in my underpants, or was I just happy to see this launch?
- odmonk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The show was "Salvage 1", with Andy Griffith as a junkyard entrepreneur who builds a slow ship to the moon.
- avsa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin_New_Shepard
this article needs updating by the way. Any digg wikipedians? - zoomie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This reminds me of an old 1970's TV series about a small group of people that built a space vehicle and routinely launched it from their junk yard. The name show escapes me at the moment.
- frankzeg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Actually as someone who does advanced launch vehicle design for a living I can tell you that achieving SSTO and return with an economically viable payload and practical design falls in the category of VERY hard. When people "design" such a vehicle they ALWAYS short some vital element in order to get their design to "close". That sort of behavior gets you a silly ass thing like the DC/X ( an exercise in showing that very expensive rocket engines can get an object to hover for a few seconds) which was at least cheap or a multi-hundred million dollar boondoggle like X-33 which was fated from the outset to failure - ten minutes of calcs in excel would have shown you that. That is if you know what questions to ask- and trust me the Skunkies were not interested in those questions.
What is possible is delivering small payloads to LEO using a single small rocket stage which is not recovered. You still have a "booster" which functions while you are in the combustible part of the atmosphere. Forget about scramjets and other heavy, expensive vaporware- six modern combat turbofans can do an admirable job of gettting you well on your way out of the atmosphere and you can recover those with parafoils and mid-air recovery. A modified Centaur vehicle ( more Rl-10's) can then do most of the rest of the work and IIRC you get about 1000 lbm to LEO. Centaur is expended but overall cost is pretty low- the question: is there any market? History says no, not really- not enough to justify development unless you are a billionaire who needs a cool hobby.
If you don't care about making orbit (apparently most thrill-tourists don't) you can take the above contraption and lift a LOT of stuff into a parabolic trajectory. Heavy things will fall out of the sky though. But you can actually buy this hardware and skip the tedious development process. I'm not saying development isn't fun but it has the habit of being unpredictably expensive.
I sure wish that all these billionaires would just stop and ask " why am I doing this?". Because I don't think a one of them would consider designing their own business jet to replace those Gulfstreams. There are clearly experts out there who know how to make such an airplane. No one doubts that. But somehow they imagine they can cobble together a team to make a real difference in rocketry or space exploration. Dudes! Pick up the effing phone and call some folks who have done this before and know the ropes. For the money that is being squandered on roller coasters that don't have tracks WE could get you most of the way to the moon and set the stage for Mars. And I don't mean NASA's bewildered design efforts- those are just for jobs and political show, not for real exploration. There are modern concepts that truly can make a difference in the future. No rabbits need be pulled from hats. Believe it. All you have to do is add money.
BTW ditch the peroxide- we did 25 years ago and never have regretted it ONCE. You have no idea what you are in for if you persist in dinking with highly reactive, metastable oxidizers. One letter: $. - morrisp6, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3BBC News coverage as well.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6230245.stm
is it just me, or for a founder of amazon, does the Blue Origin website look a little rushed, and not a great deal of time spent on it ?!? i suppose building a spaceship is rather more fun to be fair :) ! - cptn_cardboard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2That was better than cool, it was eerie.
- avsa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1that doesn't look aerodynamic at all. But I am no rocket scientist neither
- carve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah- you could reenter backwards. That'd probably help a lot (although DC-X was designed to reenter nose first). You'd still need TPS- just not as much. You could also use parachutes until the last second, and then just give a little squirt on the rockets, but I don't think that is their plan. You still have the other problems of needing a more robust sturcture, a less conventional shape, reusable throttolable engines that can maintain 450s isp from sea level to space, and the added risk of vertical landing.
SSTO is possible- not even all that difficult. Making it reusable AND with a significant payload is the hard part. I always thought a good idea would be to throw away all the tankage and just recover the engines and guidance section, which is where most of the money is. That'd be much easier and cheaper. - Nar1117, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah thats pretty cool... I wonder when they will be doing their first orbit launch?
- DanaG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just for reference, here's a link to Jerry Pournelle's "Getting To Space" page http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/gettospace.html .
Jerry, Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, and Max Hunter were part of the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy that convinced Vice President Dan Quayle to sponsor the original DC/X project.
Jerry is of the belief, and backs it up with the equations, that VTOL SSTO _may_ be possible. The design is on the edge on what we can build today. His point is that we can't know until we build a full scale, or almost full scale, test vehicle. DC/Y, the successor to the DC/X project was suppose to be that vehicle. However, NASA got it's hands on it, called it the X-33 and for various reasons it was doomed even before the contract was awarded to Lockheed-Martin.
Oh, and don't bother complaining about the layout of his website. He'll simply say "This is a content oriented site. This is not a course on web design." - sanman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wow, this was amazing -- especially for a private company. So what fuel was used by the older DC-X, anyway? I remember feeling sorry to hear about how their prototype exploded when it toppled over on touchdown, just because some poor fellow accidentally forgot to connect a pneumatic line to extend the landing gear. I bet that poor guy must have felt awful.
If the Goddard test vehicle is that big, then I'd shudder to think how big the full-sized production model will be. It's meant for Earth-to-Orbit, and then return with powered landing, right? Wow, wouldn't that consume a lot of fuel compared to, say, using a parachute?
Hey, what's that cool, funky-sounding hum for, anyway? What's making that noise? - aallan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1CrunchGear isn't impressed,
http://crunchgear.com/2007/01/04/amazons-bezos-shows-off-egg-shaped-spacecraft/
but as I said in my comment over there they're missing the point. Unlike the Scaled design this could be pushed all the way to a real single stage to orbit design, and looking at Blue Origin's pages at the sort of people he's looking to recruit (people with heavy lifter experience) my bet that's what he's heading for...
More at,
http://www.babilim.co.uk/blog/2007/01/first-launch-for-blue-origin.html - zoomie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@odmonk - Thanks...not knowing the name has been bugging me for the last couple hours.
- Hackw0rth, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Cryoengines on it - interesting. Anyone know how efficient these things are? I mean, efficiency isn't exactly a hallmark of rockets anyway, but it's always been kinda hard to beat the weight-to-power ratio of the exploding stuff. This was a test for 245ft, I'm curious how much fuel they're looking at to reach escape velocity and actually get that sucker into orbit. Call me old fashioned, but the frozen spot on the landing pad makes me a bit curious.
Still, this is super cool - nice to see 3rd parties stepping in to the space market... - sanman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hmmm, I wonder if this prototype could later even lead to a lunar landing module? You have to admit, Virgin Galactic wouldn't be able to land on the moon with a Spaceship One lookalike. Think about it -- just like Bigelow said, people don't want to just go upto space for a second, they want to hang around there. And the most interesting place to go that's nearby is The Moon. Plenty to see there, including mountains, valleys and craters. You could build a lunar Disneyland, where people would flock to for a million bucks apiece.
- arpad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here's the youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGWk_rfq_bM
I didn't realize that HTP (High Test Peroxide to all you T-stoff fans) and kerosene didn't produce a visible flame. Neat. - Warptaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was just watching the first steps of the baby panda bear in atlanta, then the launch of Jeffs new rocket. Good day, good day! I really hope Jeff gets together a right kind of a team and the deities up there smile favorably on blue origin! I realize that the problem with a similar rocket design was that the cryogenic tanks made of compound materials cracked. . I hope they get around that! Good luck! God bless.
- aallan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My guess is that their success is down to the DC-X, as the rumour is that they picked up several of the key people from the Delta Clipper programme, if you've done something once then it all becomes a lot easier. But yes, I was impressed as well. Although the second test flight in December was, potentially at least, less successful. See,
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2006/12/02/16849.aspx
As for the SSTO vs. multiple stages argument, that debate has reached almost religious proportions. I don't think we're going to know until someone goes out and builds one, or fails and keeps on failing. However you don't have to cover the "entire" rocket in thermal protection, especially with something the shape of the Goddard. You go in ass-backwards like we did with Apollo, although these days you make use of something a good deal better than the ablative shielding that the Apollo used. With respect to powered landings you have to remember that the Russians do it, in a much more limited way, with Soyuz. At one metre above the ground, solid-fuel braking engines mounted behind the re-entry module's heat shield are fired to give a soft landing to the capsule. However I don't see any reason why the initial breaking of an SSTO version the New Shepard couldn't be done with parachutes, keeping the engines for a final controlled landing. - sanman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1real men with shortcomings don't wave champagne bottles
real men with shortcomings build big bad mofo rocketships to boldly penetrate the heavens
WOOT!! - avsa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1there goes the lame comment:
If you see the video on the camera pointing down you can see the ice forming on the ground! Wow, a ice powered spaceship that looks like a flying saucer. That's cool news.. - carve, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Great test flight! They are moving FAST! It is also very suprising that the achieved such a difficult task perfectly on the first try (look at SpaceX- these things usually fail the first few tries).
Very admirable- this may make a very attractive suborbital vehicle. Unfortunately, a vehicle like this would never make a practical orbital vehicle, which I think is their ultimate plan. The most efficient rocket engines (LOx/Hydrogen) have a specific impulse of about 450 seconds. This means that at lift off, their fuel fraction needs to be 92% (i.e. 92% of the total liftoff weight is fuel and oxygen) to achieve low earth orbit. The remaining 8% is what you have to work with for the rocket itself, the recovery system, and the payload. Now, this is doable in a disposable rocket, but it just isn't practical in a reusable system. The most paired down disposable rockets can have a ~96% fuel fraction, but they only have to last one flight. The DC-X prototype, (a vehicle similar to this, but with higher performance, from the mid 90s) had a fuel fraction of 52%. This vehicle also has to withstand the stress of reentry and landing and the fatigue of thermal cycling and multiple flights, and have more durable reusable engines, so it'll be heavier. Also, hydrogen tanks are big, and we have to cover the ENTIRE rocket in a thermal protection system, greatly increasing weight. Not only that, but we have to have more complicated, finely throttelable rocket engines and secondary fuel tanks, and the fuel for them, to power the landing. The landing is also more risky than a simple parachute because all of the complicated systems must work perfectly at the last instant- higher risk of failure, and no time to sort out problems. Finally, after all that, whatever margin that is left will be your payload. It might make an interesting reusable first stage of an orbital rocket, however. - aallan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think the more relevant snippet from Carmack was:
"When we saw the weight listed in the papers filed with the FAA, I thought that the only reason to build a suborbital vehicle that large would be if you intended to also boost upper stages for orbital work, but it doesn't look like the shown design would be appropriate for that. Maybe it is a subscale version of an SSTO, or a nearly-SSTO upper stage intended to be boosted by an even larger straight-up-straight-down VTVL."
I think he's right, this isn't a prototype sub-orbital vehicle, Bezos is going for an full blown SSTO, or at worst a two-stage craft. More at: http://www.babilim.co.uk/blog/2007/01/first-launch-for-blue-origin.html - dudad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sweet. Looks like a place I might just apply for a job.
- Caerbannog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0John Carmack's take:
"I have zero inside information about Blue Origin, so my comments are strictly from the peanut gallery here. It’s HUUUUGE! I honestly think they are making a mistake doing a development vehicle that big, because it is going to cause much more anguish when it eventually crashes."
More here: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=340
(also linked above, sorry about that) - MrDiggle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Hopefully this will be the first nail in NASA's coffin.
- jabella, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0for a few years now I've been following the Armadillo Aerospace team's coverage of their rocket endeavors. they started working on x-prize vehicles, but now have changed focus a bit. their (now) monthly updates are great reads and give a lot of insight into what it takes to get something off the ground.
for anyone who doesn't know, armadillo is run by john carmack, one of the founders of id games (doom, quake, etc...)
john c also had things to say about the new blue origin news:
http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News - DeaPeaJay, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I don't understand the appeal of vertical takeoffs. It seems to me to be more logical to start from a plane similar to Burt Rutan's Spaceship Two. It seems like it would require a lot less fuel that way. But then again, I'm no rocket scientist
- letthisbemywrit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Videos seem pretty weird. What type of propulsion system is it using? Seems efficient.
- BullTaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@zoomie - There's also the March 21, 1970 Green Acres broadcast with Family Affair's Jody (Johnny Whitaker, of Buffy, Jody and Mr French fame) playing Dinky Watson a friend of Eb's, who builds a spaceship in his backyard and brings back beeping moon rocks to further lessen your torment.
- monergism, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1They are hiring - I wonder if we see future videos after that phase is complete.
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That sentence is awful.
Space Tourism is a great idea. Being a pioneer in the movement must be rewarding. - spacester, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1> That sentence is awful.
I agree. And I wrote it! I never did like it, but they only give you so many characters, and I wanted to be first to digg this, and well, you get what you got. Sorry.
Wow, how fun! My story is popular! My first real effort.
As an aside to the main story here, I had read that a person can't make the front page without having a big network of friends, and making deals to digg each other and whatnot. This is a counter example: all I did was submit a story and watch it. Others posted soon after me but mine was first and first to be popular. So way to go diggers! That's how it's supposed to work, right? It's only the space front page so far, but the point stands, right?
I've been advocating space tourism all millennium! :-) Blue Origin was initially a disappointment because they seemed to set their sights too low and too slow. But that's a pretty impressive first vehicle, and they've been at this long enough to conclude that that prototype vehicle is the tip of the iceberg of their planned rocketship fleet. (I also do mangled metaphors)
Reading between the lines here, they seem to be pursuing the slow and steady approach in order to capture the true mass market in suborbital tourism, er space adventure participation. The future interested person will have a choice of an expensive Virgin Galactic space plane ride at the top end of the market or a less dramatic ride into the black on a BO vehicle.
There are a lot of other players in the market. This is gonna be so much fun to watch develop. - neodystopia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0John Carmack pwned!!!
- Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2That champagne bottle Bezos is opening is entirely too large...
- Harbinger67, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1still, I think you're making up for being...a tool
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