Blue Origin Makes Space Travel Seem Routine
Keith’s note: Flawless 9th flight for BlueOrigin. If only airlines operated like this. Watch a replay.
Flawless 9th flight for @BlueOrigin. If only airlines operated like this. #blueorigin #NewShepard pic.twitter.com/t0e73wpNXx
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 18, 2018
Congratulations on another success! Go Blue Origin!
And, yes. congratulations. Sure, it is sub-orbital, but it is damn difficult, and hats off to the BO engineers.
Keith-
Now, that headline is just dumb! 🙂
First, as Dr. Astro points out (and more gracefully, too), there are tens of thousands of flights everyday in America. everyone of them in machines that have been used countless times.
Second, and more generally, It’s hard to understand the back-slapping around these sub-orbital companies. Put something in orbit. Bring it back, use it again.You know: from speeds that are very nearly orbital, and altitudes in hundreds of KM, bring the package back to Terra Firma without a parachute?
Finally, NB to Mr. Bezos: Yer rockets are ugly! Just sayin’…
If a rocket works safely, cost effectively, and reliably, I don’t care what it looks like. But given that, I’ve looked at New Shepard up close including going inside the capsule. It has a functional elegance to it. I like the way it looks. Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
Congratulations, BO – 120kms. In other news, last week Elon Musk’s old Tesla passed the orbital distance of Mars.
How do we know – is someone tracking it?
I’m fairly confident in Kepler’s and Newton’s work (at least the physics; Newton’s theology was always a bit odd…) If the initial tracking, including the uncertainty in that and plus what we know about orbital mechanics, says the Tesla is now beyond the orbit of Mars, I’m confident that it is. The odds of something like a large meteor impact destroying it in a few months are very, very low.
Thanks. I thought that might be the answer. In other words no one is tracking it.
I’m not sure how anyone could track it. Even with the second stage still attached, it’s only about 30 meters by 4 meters. That’s awfully small to see from a few hundred million kilometers. It doesn’t have any power, and active transponders are how we normally track spacecraft in deep space.
Keen to see them break Orbit some time !
1) Why fire the capsule emergency rockets at altitude ? I can see this is one case (responding to an in-flight emergency) but I’d’ve thought that off the pad was more critical ? I thought Apollo ejected their emergency rocket quite early in flight ? Maybe off the pad the rockets could damage the main booster ? (then test with an expired booster)
2) It’s nice that BO use young youthful presenters, people who the young pre-engineers can identify with.
3) What was “Old Sheppard” ?
It’s named after Alan Shepard. I suppose you could think of Old Shepard as the Mercury-Redstone that he rode into space in 1961. Old Glenn would be the Mercury-Atlas that John Glenn rode into orbit in 1962.
And Blue Origins has also mentioned plans for a “New Armstrong” without actually saying what vehicle would be or where it would go. Of course, given their past nomenclature, connecting the dots isn’t exactly rocket science.
And, by the way, I wish Orbital-ATK (now Northrop Grumman) hadn’t decided to name their Cygnus spacecraft after astronauts. It’s a single-use, expendable and unmanned transport. I think we could find better things to name after people like Glenn, Slayton, or Husband. (Well, two out of three, I guess we have.)
For a bit of unrelated trivia, in the 1960’s sci-fi series Thunderbirds the five Tracy brothers were named Alan, Virgil, John, Scott and Gordon.
Yes, and their father was on the first expedition to land on the Moon.
They did that last year.
They explained in the broadcast why they fired the emergency rockets at altitude. Now they have tested it so they know how it will work throughout the entire flight profile. They also said they wanted to see how the rockets performed in a vacuum to compare against their calculations.
I’m still waiting for Bezos to try launching with an upper stage and something into LEO.
NS booster seems to have a lot of aero surfaces vs F9 stage 1. Ring fin, drag brakes, wedge fin, elevons vs. just grid fins. I wonder what gives.