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New Shepard: Bezos claims success on second spaceship flight
- andys627 11y agoVideo I think is from yesterday... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo
- adwn 11y agoDirect link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo The landing footage begins at 1:40.
- epalmer 11y agoThe video speaks volumes about this accomplishment. The landing is spectacular.
- ChristianGeek 11y agoThe landing IS spectacular. The girl at the end trying desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get her champagne bottle to pop is irony at its finest.
- matt_morgan 11y agoThe one thing you know about her, apart from her struggling with a champagne cork like we all do sometimes, is that she is not a "girl."
- JshWright 11y agoI don't think that was intended as the diminutive term you seem to have interpreted it as. "Guy" and "Girl" are commonly accepted 'casual' terms for men and women.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoPedantic: Guy vs Gal, Boy vs Girl. I wonder: do they always come in pairs? Dude vs Dudettte?
- danellis 11y agoCommonly accepted by men and women, in fact. I laughably see men complaining that it's degrading to adult women while hearing my female friends happily embrace it as part of their identity.
- kybernetikos 11y agoThere's no reason why a man might not be allowed to have a different opinion to a woman about what is and is not degrading to women, in the same way that finding a black man who says that 'nigger' is a part of his identity that he embraces doesn't affect my view that it is a degrading slur.
- ChristianGeek 11y agoHer gender is irrelevant to the irony.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoIn the English language we generally do not use genderless pronouns to refer to humans.
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- gchokov 11y agoCheck the latest Elon Musk's tweets about that.
- nicpottier 11y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk
- mozumder 11y agoI think the big advancement here is the "reusable space rocket landing" part, not the "getting to space" part.
- unavoidable 11y agoYes, but if your rocket is smaller and nimbler because you only designed it to go to an altitude of 100km, isn't it easier to land?
- butwhy 11y agoSo.. they beat spacex?
- krisoft 11y agoThis is a suborbital flight. SpaceX tries to recover the first stage from orbital launches.
- wolf550e 11y agoAs Elon Musk wrote [1]: It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit. 1 - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/669129655597731841 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/669129655597731841
- andygates 11y agoOf course, going slower means less acceleration, which means less high-G discomfort for paying passengers. A vertical hop makes perfect sense for meerkat-mission tourism.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 11y agoWell, SpaceX landed their Grasshopped rocket after going up a kilometer. Then Blue Origin landed the New Shephard after going to space but not into orbit. And soon SpaceX might land their first stage after it goes to space and also pushes the second stage halfway to orbit. But in a sense SpaceShipOne had already done the same thing the New Shepard is doing and in another the Space Shuttle went all the way to orbit and back.
- sandworm101 11y agoSo this was just a vertical hop? It would seem that SpaceX remains in a totally different league. By only going vertical, this is a very limited "spacecraft", more akin to the Virgin spaceplane than SpaceX's launch vehicles. For proper access to space, rather than tourist hops, everyone wants to see a reusable launch vehicle --> a craft to actually boost something towards orbit rather than an altitude record. That means returning to some sort of landing after huge downrange progress. So while this is an impressive achievement for space tourism (roller-coasters for billionaires) I still see SpaceX's efforts as the more revolutionary.
- creshal 11y agoIt's a demonstration vehicle. The company is planning to scale it up: http://www.space.com/30543-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-florida-rocket-launches.html http://www.space.com/30543-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-florida-ro... Essentially, it's the same goal as SpaceX' Falcon9, just a different approach (prove reuseability first, then make an orbital rocket). We'll see which turns out to work better in the long term.
- sandworm101 11y agoI don't see the same goals. SpaceX never talked about about this sort of suborbital tourism. The problem with "space" tourism as a source of funding is that nobody has ever made a go of it. There are only so many people capable of dropping 200,000$ on an hour-long thrill ride. And only a very few of those are young enough (say under 60?) to enjoy a 5g return to earth. It just isn't a reliable source of funds ... but it does get the press coverage needed to trap naive investors.
- damoncali 11y agoPretty sure nobody would enjoy a 5g return to earth...
- chinathrow 11y agoDepends on how long 5g needs to be endured.
- oska 11y ago/r/spacex discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3u2gwm/apparently_blue_origin_flew_a_rocket_up_to_100_km/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3u2gwm/apparently_b...
- vassvdm 11y agoElon's reaction (quoted from Twitter): "Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL on their booster It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit."
- jacquesm 11y agoI don't see Blue Origin claiming 'orbit' anywhere so I fail to see why that bit needed any clearing up. It is the L bit that SpaceX seems to have had some problems with to date. Musk could simply congratulate Blue Origin and leave it at that.
- simonh 11y ago>Musk could simply congratulate Blue Origin and leave it at that. If you actually read his tweet, copied in full in the post you are responding to and in the article, you'll see that he did exactly that. Ok, fair cop. It looks like he didn't do just exactly that. The article I saw only gave his first tweet. My apologies.
- jinst8gmi 11y agoThere are at least two tweets. The first one to congratulate, followed by the "clear up" tweet. I assume parent is referring to both, not just the first in isolation. Either way, a vertical landing is pretty neat.
- jacquesm 11y agoI did actually read his tweets. And I won't put into question whether you did but it's not just one tweet, it's three tweets: https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk
- brazzledazzle 11y agoIf it were a neutral third party I'd agree, but presumably they're competitors.
- Shivetya 11y agoThe video was really exciting to watch. It does appear they come back much more rapidly than Space X but this might be due to video editing. I also did not notice visible attitude thrusters, was it all done via that main motor gimbal?
- hydrogen18 11y agoThey talked about brakes, I'm assuming its a combination of some gimballing and some brake modulation. Brakes can't be terribly effective at low speeds however.
- Symmetry 11y agoI'm sure SpaceX will land their Falcon 9 sooner or later but I think this goes to show that being able to hover makes things a lot easier. Real rockets can't be set to any throttle like in Kerbal Space Program, most can't throttle at all. The Merlin's ability to throttle down to 70% is impressive, and the BE-3's ability to throttle down to 25% is very impressive.
- sandworm101 11y ago"Throttle" is a term for rocket engines, not rockets. Being able to throttle a single engine to 25% doesn't matter so much if you can instead shut down 3 of 4 engines and throttle the remaining. For a single-engine booster, 25% is still way too much thrust if you are shooting for orbit. A modern booster is 90+% fuel. So the empty or near empty returning booster will need an engine running at around 10% of launch thrust at the moment of landing. That's pretty much what SpaceX is doing by shutting down 8 of 9 engines and throttling the last to 80ish%.
- vectorjohn 11y agoIt's not pretty much what SpaceX is doing. Even down to 1 of 9 engines and throttled as far as they can (they can go to about 70%), it has too much thrust to hover. So the amount a single engine can throttle is indeed important. SpaceX plans to solve it by extremely accurate timing so they don't need to hover.
- borplk 11y agoElon Musk and Jeff Bezos competing with each other? That's great!
- danielvf 11y agoI noticed a major difference in the landing sequences of the New Shepard and Falcon 9 first stage. The Falcon 9 first stage, if I recall correctly, is incapable of either hovering or slowly decending. The engine has simply too much power. A Falcon 9 first stage, stopped mid air has two choices, keep the motor on and go up, or turn the motor off and fall - and I don't think the motor has too many extra restarts available. Because of this inability to hover the Falcon 9 first stage, SpaceX is attempting to have the rocket's vertical velocity reach zero at the exact moment the rocket reaches the pad. This is why when you watch the grasshopper or other SpaceX landing videos, you always wonder for a split second if the rocket has just smashed into the ground. In order for this to work, all nine axis (three each of position, rotation, and velocity) must be brought to zero at exactly the same fixed time. This is insane level control theory here. Now this type of landing is theoretically possible - and I think it has been tested on the grasshopper at lower speeds, but it scares the willies out of me. There's almost no room for error nor for the chaos of the universe. New Shepard on the other hand, comes to a hover about 100? feet above the pad, moves horizontally to be above the pad, stops, then lowers itself down. This is tremendously simpler since the rocket only really cares about one or two set of axis at a time, it does not have to be nearly as precise, and you have time to fix anything that's not lined up. I'm still curious to see if SpaceX can pull off their landing style, or will instead change so that their first stages will be able to hover.
- sehugg 11y agoHovering wastes energy though. The most efficient (theoretical) landing would be an instantaneous impulse that brings your velocity to whatever your landing gear can support. The Falcon economics might not support anything less efficient (than the hover-slam technique).
- vonklaus 11y agospacex is a company that has an insane level of dedication to product and extremely lofty aspirations somewhere near the very edge of what is currently capable by humans and allowable by physics. From purely a process standpoint, I think that trying to tightly control 3 axis to this degree of precision is a daunting task. The need to do it this way could be entirely built into the architecture of the system, but from a "first make it work, then make it work better" stand point, the ability to hover or throttle trajectory would be an easier step one. Outside of this single piece (reusability) and all of the vectors surrounding it, the rocket still has other challenges (e.g no launch since last failure is concerning) which need to be overcome. SpaceX is scaling too fast and is doing an amazing job at complex coordination, however they don't seem to have the talent bandwith nor the time to tackle every problem 100% and the way they have structured reusability makes it really difficult to be successful even at ~98%.
- yavramen 11y agoIs this is the first attempt by Blue Origin? The first one turned to be successful?
- gchokov 11y agoAmazon Prime next-day deliveries to the International Space Station just got one step closer...
- asavadatti 11y agoThat would be amazing given that a (orbital) day on the ISS is about 90 minutes.
- fixermark 11y agoSort of. There's a significant difference between breaching the Kármán line and matching velocities with the ISS (as any player of Kerbal Space Program can demonstrate ;) ).
- jacquesm 11y agoExcept for the whole 'matching trajectory' bit.
- ColinWright 11y agoThe same thing is being mentioned in several places elsewhere, but to put some numbers on it: Orbital velocity is in the vicinity of 7500 to 8000 m/s. At that speed your KE is 1/2.m.v^2 which is about 32e6 Joules/kg. Orbits are, conveniently, at about 320 km, so your PE is m.g.h, or about about 3.2e6 Joules/kg. In other words, the energy to get to orbit is ten times the energy to get to the altitude of orbit, and this exercise only got to 1/3 of that. So the energy involved was about 1/30 of that required to put something in orbit. It's still a fantastic achievement, and an important - nay, critical - step on the way to properly reusable rockets, but it does lend some perspective to it.
- cmsmith 11y agoComparing one- and two- stage rockets is a bit of a handicap, since no one (yet) is talking about landing a single-stage-to-orbit rocket. The best numbers I can find say that the Falcon 9 stage separation is at around 80km and 2km/sec (2.8 MJ/kg of total energy), and the Falcon 9 has so far failed to land under power.
- ColinWright 11y agoYes, there are lots of subtleties about staging and so forth, but lots of people are talking about that elsewhere. I just thought I'd put some number to the simplest possible case so people can see the magnitudes we're talking about.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoThat's neat. But what I see on video is Bezos landing a rocket and Musk blowing up a rocket. I understand the technical differences, but in terms of media, this is a pure win.
- rakoo 11y agoWhat I see is Musk supplying the ISS, and Bezos doing a PR stunt. Let's try comparing those on more than just media, shall we ?
- ogezi 11y agoThe spacecraft did not exit the atmosphere, but this is certainly a prepossessing feat. Congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin.
- ogezi 11y agoThe spacecraft did not exit the atmosphere, but this is certainly a prepossessing feat. Congratulations to Bezos and Blue Origin.
- ctdonath 11y agoLooks like they'll be taking passengers soon. Expected ticket price? Waiting list time?
- tertius 11y agoBy the looks of the capsule hitting the ground I'm not emptying my checking account just yet.
- dtparr 11y agoWhat about it hitting the ground bothered you? It apparently touched down at 4.4 mph which is a little slower than if you stepped off an 8in. platform. Basically find a standard staircase and slip off the bottom step and that's a touch less jolt.
- Scramblejams 11y agoThe rocket touched down at 4.4 mph. The capsule looked like it came down much harder than that.
- dtparr 11y agoAh, thanks. I was focused on the rocket landing and misread the parent.
- saganus 11y agoMaybe they didn't really need the capsule to touch down at a lower speed since it can withstand this, so they save a bit on cost with smaller parachutes? Not really sure if this item alone would make any difference, but if they do plan on putting humans instead, I too would hope it doesn't land as hard as the capsule seemed to.
- 7952 11y agoThe capsule used rockets to arrest its descent at the last moment, which made the landing look more violent than it probably was.
- dfar1 11y agoThat landing was pretty amazing! I was expecting parachutes.
- softbuilder 11y agoIt came in so fast though! With the fuel it still has on board it's one malfunction away from a cruise missile.
- Already__Taken 11y agoThis is super cool, in case any of their engineers read this thread congratulations. To jump in with the inevitable SpaceX comparison. Worth noting is you see the Blue Origin booster: fall, slow, hover, correct any drift, descend then land. The SpaceX booster cannot hover, it has more thrust than it weighs.
- alienasa 11y agoFurther point of clarification, the SpaceX booster has more thrust than it weighs because it is capable of delivering payloads to orbit, which the Blue Origin booster cannot do.
- ggreer 11y agoAll rockets have more thrust than their weight, otherwise they would not get off the ground. Hover ability comes from having a rocket engine that can throttle down enough to match the weight of the almost-empty rocket. Blue Origin's BE-3 can throttle down to 20% of its design thrust, possibly lower.[1] SpaceX's Merlin 1D can throttle down to 70%.[2] Apparently, even with only one of the nine engines firing, it's enough to lift the almost-empty Falcon 9 first stage. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BE-3 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#Merlin_1D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#...
- throwaway000002 11y agoI'm far from being an expert on such matters, but why doesn't SpaceX attempt to lasso the upper part of the rocket on landing? How about a super big soft pillow? At the very least spread out some huge arms to aid stability?
- Bjartr 11y agoThey're trying to build a system that will work for a mars landing where there will be zero infrastructure on the ground.
- throwaway000002 11y agoWow, that is crazy ambitious. Why aim for the problems of today when you can solve the problems of tomorrow. SpaceX, by now, should have enough people with strong applied math backgrounds to tell them, given a formal specification of the control systems on the rocket, whether what they're even trying to do is possible (within probability bounds). I'd be interested in seeing their calculations. I just hope they're not throwing more computation at a problem that's totally dependent on how fine they can a) sense their position and momentum, and b) do something to adjust it.
- lmm 11y agoThey are very happy with the calculations - they've given presentations to this effect already, and they've successfully landed the "grasshopper" test vehicle. The issues with their previous attempts have all been mechanical problems (running out of hydraulic fluid the first time, stuck valve the second time, a structural failure earlier in flight the third time).
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoFrom that description, it sounds like there's barely enough rocket there to succeed. A sample size of 4, no statistics yet possible about whether its getting better or not? Anyway, its amazing how many stuck valves have derailed grand plans. The rover rocket static test had that problem (nuclear engine for Mars mission back in the 60s(?)) and killed that program.
- Twirrim 11y agoBetween SpaceX, Blue Origin and co it is great to finally see such competition and progress in the space sector. As the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said: I'm a dreamer. I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.
- adam12 11y agoElon's Grasshopper from 2 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4 The New Shepard went much higher though (100.5km vs 744m).
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoIs this what happens when an Engineering company decides to go to space? The video (https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blog/historic-rocket-landing#youtube9pillaOxGCo https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blog/historic-rocket-landing...) of the booster coming down like a freight train, igniting, arresting velocity and correcting for yaw, then landing on a dime was absolutely uncanny. This thing reeks of technical competence and flawless execution.
- alanctgardner3 11y agoWhat part of sending things to space isn't "Engineering"? Are you implying SpaceX, ULA, et al. are just winging it sending things to the ISS?
- Symmetry 11y agoThe New Shepard is just getting up to space rather than all the way to orbit. If you'll recall SpaceS's Grasshopper was just as uncanny in it's landings. Now, the New Shepard has a harder job since it's going to space so it's much more impressive than Grasshopper that they succeeded. But by the same token a Falcon 9 first stage has much thinner mass fractions to work with and has to deal with horizontal velocity so landing one of those is much more impressive still.
- HCIdivision17 11y agoThis illustrates the almost unfathomable scope involved here. Each accomplishment is at least an order of magnitude or more harder than the last, and each one is truly impressive on their own. Yet each shadows the last! Pretty cool times for space; I'm stoked for what comes next!
- treblig 11y agoSpace noob here: why is it that just after liftoff, the rocket swings out to the right, and corrects. Is this intentional? https://youtu.be/9pillaOxGCo?t=55 https://youtu.be/9pillaOxGCo?t=55
- rrrrrraul 11y agoshooting from the hip... a) gust of wind; b) planned engine gimbal
- leroy_masochist 11y agoJust watched the video....I think it's pretty lame that Jeff Bezos has no idea how to spray champagne out of a bottle.
- legohead 11y agospraying champagne out of bottle is lame, anyway. someone did that at my wedding, it got on my hair and my suit. it was on me all day. it's sticky.
- leroy_masochist 11y agoIt's certainly lame if someone does it to you at your own wedding without you asking for it! I'd be pissed too.
- pilatesfordogs 11y agoInvesting in space is great for humanity in general but what's gonna stop this industry from going the way of the airlines? Is this gonna turn into a price war ?
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoHopefully...
- JshWright 11y agoNew Shepard does not compete with Falcon 9 (or any 'real' launcher). It made a vertical hop to 100km, with a very light payload. It didn't come anywhere close to orbit (which is what Falcon 9 does). Obligatory: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
- butwhy 11y agoI find it quite amusing that Bezos does this and what's everyone's first reaction? Let's find out what Elon has to say!
- sharkweek 11y agoTwo billionaires trying to revolutionize space flight - it's pretty damn fascinating
- saneshark 11y agoDoes anyone know why it is 5x the effect of gravity for reentry? I would think it would just fall back into the Earth's gravitational pull after its thrusters are turned off. Or is it because it has an arcing path, and thrusters are deliberately not turned off during reentry so that the rocket spends less time burning up in the atmosphere? Anyone know? It's not clear to me why it would be 5x the effect of gravity on reentry.
- aparent 11y agoThis comes from deceleration of the capsule due to air resistance as it enters the atmosphere.
- david-given 11y agoIt's not attaining anywhere near orbital velocity, but it's still going pretty fast. All that speed has to be shed somehow, and they do that through atmospheric drag. The deceleration is high because the atmosphere gets thick pretty quickly, so you end up losing all that speed quickly, which means a high acceleration. They could use the rocket to slow down --- but to do that, they'd have to carry fuel up, which makes the whole thing much larger. It's vastly more efficient to let atmospheric drag do it for you for free.
- VLM 11y agoSomeone else can provide the math, but if due to the tanks being mostly empty you can burn anything from practically 0 to 5 G thrust, intuitively you burn the least total fuel by flooring it to 5G at the last minute. Consider the alternative of burning less than 1G of acceleration, you'll fail to slow down although you'll descent acceleration will be somewhat lower. At exactly 1 G it'll keep falling at a constant speed till it runs out of fuel, then impact. Or if you're asking why performance is so much more spritely at the end of mission, unlike boats or cars the fuel in the tanks is like 95% of the mass of the rocket, so something that barely waddles off the launch pad with full tanks weighs practically nothing at landing when the tanks are nearly empty.
- scentoni 11y agoThe Delta Clipper was historic. This has been a followon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
- InclinedPlane 11y agoStill historic. But incrementally so. The DC-X flew to 3km, the New Shepard launched its capsule to 100km.
- Rathan 11y agoGreat Job! Amazing rocket that 'LANDS'.
- Swannie 11y agoI used to be enough to get lots of big boats: Larry Ellison; Oracle: http://www.superyachtfan.com/larry_ellison.html http://www.superyachtfan.com/larry_ellison.html (including his Americas Cup yachts) James (Jim) Clark; Silicon Graphics, Netscape: http://www.superyachtfan.com/sailing_yacht_athena.html http://www.superyachtfan.com/sailing_yacht_athena.html Paul Allen; Microsoft: http://www.superyachtfan.com/paul_allen.html http://www.superyachtfan.com/paul_allen.html (3 very large vessels) And more recently: Larry Page; Google: http://www.superyachttimes.com/yachts/details/333 http://www.superyachttimes.com/yachts/details/333 Now you need a rocket! OK, Paul Allen did go there first, as far as I can tell.