Bezos Knocks SpaceX For Something Bezos Has Not Done Yet
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX returns to flight and pulls off dramatic, historic landing, Washington Post, (Owned by Jeff Bezos)
“On Monday, SpaceX’s first flight since its Falcon 9 rocket blew up in June, Musk topped his fellow tech billionaire and space rival [Jeff Bezos], by landing a larger, more powerful rocket designed to send payloads to orbit, and not just past the boundary of what’s considered space. It was a much more complicated feat that was celebrated as another leap forward for Musk and his merry band of rocketeers.”
SpaceX’s Falcon Rocket Finally Sticks the Landing, Wired
“A few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos inaugurated his Twitter account with the surprise announcement that his space company, Blue Origin, had launched and landed a rocket after suborbital flight. But SpaceX managed to deliver 11 satellites to orbit, which requires an order of magnitude more thrust, and land its rocket. SpaceX’s booster is coming a hell of lot faster, and its landing much trickier. So Elon Musk’s got this one. (For now.)”
Exactly, Keith!
SpaceX deployed not one but 11 satellites (employing multiple timed deployments) using a high performance booster on its’ maiden flight.
If this wasn’t enough of a challenge, they proceeded to return the first stage from space in an operation that involved multiple thruster usage in addition to a synchronized burn of 3 of that stage’s 9 main engines; resulting in a precision landing at a designated landing facility.
Get back to us Jeff, when you get around to putting anything in space. You haven’t even achieved your commercial sub-orbital goals; let alone putting not one but multiple payloads into orbit. Your booster return demo while commendable, pales on so many levels compared to what we witnessed tonight and is only further dimmed by your “congratulations” message!
Yup, Bezos needs to quit throwing shade and start launching to orbit before saying Word One to or about SpaceX.
What do you mean? Jeff welcomed him to the club of landing suborbital booster stages, which is what Spacex did. He didn’t mention orbital stuff anywhere.
Even ignoring the fact that Falcon 9’s first stage lofted a 2nd stage and 11 satellites, it’s apples and oranges.
Just look at the size, height reached, and maximum velocity achieved.
It’s like a record in track.
If Bezos just broke the 3 minute mile with a time of 2:52, he welcomed Musk to the club when Musk also broke the 3 minute mile by running it in 15 seconds.
Hopefully when Blue Origin recovers a first stage booster from an orbital launch for the first time, Musk sends him a similar “Welcome to the club,” tweet.
Bezos is not exactly known for his class.
Bezos called the Falcon 9 a “suborbital booster”. OK, granted the booster itself does not go into orbit, but it delivers payloads to orbit, so that would qualify it as an “orbital booster”, I think.
The Falcon also coasted to an apogee of about 200km…double that of BO’s Shepherd
Maybe someone could clear up the nomenclature. If a booster has to itself go into orbit to be called an “orbital booster”, then I doubt very much that Blue Origin will ever launch one that does so and returns totally or largely intact to earth.
It’s too bad that Bezos chose something other than the high road. His qualifier- that the fist stage is sub-orbital- while true on the face of it somehow equates the F9 first stage with his little toy rocket.
Disingenuous at best.
Can someone discover and report on how close to the ‘landing target’ the first stage came? Just looking at the pictures makes me think it was a matter of just a few feet!!!!
Well, so much for trusting reporting. I just watched a video by the Wall Street Journal about the flight, and it said that Blue Origin (actually they just said Jeff Bezos) had performed a “similar flight” last month but this was a more difficult accomplishment because the Falcon 9 “is taller and thinner.”
:/
Thinner?
Not the same ballpark… not even the same sport!
Someone on Twitter posted a graphic showing both Falcon 9’s first stage and Blue Origin’s suborbital stage next to the Statue of Liberty (for scale). Guess which one is taller than the statue and which one is about “knee high”?
Apples and oranges for sure.
Also note that SpaceX broadcast the entire event live on its web site, while Bezos kept the whole mission secret until after it successfully landed. Reminds me of the early days of space, when American launches were televised live even if they blew up, while Soviet launches were done in secret and announced only after they were successful.
Bezos knows the difference. I fail to believe that he’s that uniformed about it. Therefore, I can’t help but wonder why he’s pretending to be.
Bezos wasn’t first at this either-McDac’s DC-X performed suborbital hops and landed on its tail 20 years ago. In fact some of Bezos’ workers worked on DC-X. The Falcon’s 1st stage flight was a real live return to launch site soft landing after delivering its payload to the predetermined required trajectory, altitude and velocity-a far more difficult and more useful task than a short hop for test purposes.
I think you guys are just Elon fanbois. Both rockets are suborbital, and did the same thing, and Jeff is being nice about it. So the Falcon 9 first stage is bigger? Is that it?
They don’t even come close to doing the same thing.
Let’s see… F9 is much bigger, going much faster and topping out twice as high as the Blue Origin’s. Then F9 booster has to perform a complicated maneuver to flip over and point back, reversing its course and boost back towards the Cape. Then at the precise time, fire the engines multiple times to slow down, while maintaining the proper vehicle attitude & course, with pin-point accuracy to land on the freaking X spot. Blue Origin popped up to 62 miles with a single engine, with lots of fuel margin to land back close to where it took off from. A nice accomplishment for Blue Origin, but nowhere near what F9 just did. Best of luck to both of them. They are precisely the kind of private investment we need in the field.
By your reasoning, SpaceX did this in 2012 with their Grasshopper.
“By your reasoning, SpaceX did this in 2012 with their Grasshopper.”
By that same reasoning, Blue Origin did it in 2006 with Goddard.
Neither Goddard or Grasshopper crossed the Karman line to qualify as having flown into space, though.
“Both rockets are suborbital, and did the same thing”
No.
One carried a payload on its way to Earth orbit. The other did not, and is not capable of doing that.
What’s important is not that one was first or the other was bigger. What’s important is that within the space of a month two different American companies executed successful powered recovery of launch vehicle boosters. For the Shuttle boosters reuse was possible, but too expensive to be practical. For these rockets economics as well as engineering were considered from the start. From this point on, any LV that is not only reusable, but reusable with little or no refurbishment cost, is obsolete.