Clark Lindsey has collected the tweets from this morning’s session at the #NSRC2013.
Bottom line — they still won’t announce anything resembling a schedule. “We will fly when we are ready.” As opposed to everyone else, who will fly before they are…
15 thoughts on “Blue Origin”
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What will the New Shepard / Next Shepard be good for? I keep thinking lunar SSTO.
The same thing all Blue Origin hardware is good for: dicking around on Bezos’ ranch.
I attended that session and my take is that Bezos is more serious than many give him credit for. Free rides for experienced sub-orbital researchers is a good way to gauge customer requirements and establish some operational cred, if Blue follows through. The program seems to be paced by Bezos’ discretionary cash flow, deferring reliance non space customer revenue until it’s ready to go, no explicit marketing or pre-sales.
Is this that old joke, “How do you make a million in space?… First you start with a billion…”
Something like that. It’s possible that Blue Origin is Jeff’s really expensive hobby. Time will tell if Blue pulls out of its nose dive and starts generating revenue. Amazon’s cash flow won’t last forever at it’s historic rates. Blue could be a gamble for continued growth.
The vehicle itself will be a VTVL rocket RLV, using a single 100,000 lbf lox/lh2 engine. First version will be a suborbital lower stage, with a 3-man capsule on top. Later version will be a reusable orbital second stage. The capsule has its own built-in escape rockets, a good thing if you’re doing VTVL single-engine. Liftoff mass is presumably ~80,000 lbs, give or take a bit, given the stated engine thrust.
One thing it could be good for aside from 3-seat suborbital is, lofting an expendable upper stage that might put a couple hundred pounds into low orbit. If Blue Origin cared enough to develop the upper stage, that is – so far there’s no sign they’re interested.
Given a stated payroll of 200 people, I’d say the program is a bit beyond “discretionary cash flow”, but yeah, that doesn’t mean the same thing for Jeff Bezos as it does for the rest of us. Agreed that the program does not seem to be in any visible hurry, but then very little of it is visible. And one common thread in this industry is, EVERYTHING takes longer than you planned.
While the plan is to derive the second stage of the orbital vehicle from the reusable suborbital vehicle, Erika said that it would not initially be reusable. This sounds a lot like the SpaceX plan to develop a reusable capsule and first stage before tackling reusability of the second stage.
That makes sense – the requirements for reusability are very different for an orbital second stage than for a suborbital first. Thanks, I’d missed that in the coverage.
As an engineer, I have dreams of an utopian work place where the boss doesn’t want daily schedule updates. Oh it would be sweet to take time and solve the problems correct the first time. I could just imagine my boss saying, “Solve this problem as fast is technical rigor will allow.” 😀 Naw that could never happen…
That place is called a “major research university.” You do have to keep up a flow of “work product”, and yes, there are still deadlines, but nothing like the insanity of product development.
On the other hand you have to teach (did I say “have to” teach, are we not educators and scientists and research engineers who want, forget that, love to teach?).
But to invoke Yoda, meet your classroom sections you must. You have to be hospitalized-level sick to get someone to cover your sections (or you have to exploit the TA’s). I taught a section once when I had the Nora Virus — did have to stop once to leave for the Men’s room . . .
I’ve found that a certain amount of deadline pressure can be a useful focusing element. I’ve worked under impossible deadlines; the stress is unhealthy and the product can suffer. I’ve worked under no deadlines and had the results slip one week-per-week for months while I allowed myself to pursue interesting distractions. Max healthy productivity lies somewhere between.
That place is not Blue Origin. We worked as if everything was an emergency and the survival of the world depended on us. Along with monthly company-wide meetings to report to Jeff why we were so far behind.
It really did seem more like Blue was a hobby for him, and we were his pet engineers. I became disenchanted, although a lot of the folks there are very talented and are very happy there.
I find it amazing how many space advocates advocating private space activities aren’t able to break the “government” mindset.
NASA does things in public with press releases for every minor event to build public support so the tax money keeps flowing. As a result space fans have come to expect openness from space firms.
Private venture by contrast prefer to keep research and development private until ready for their commercial launch, which BTW in the business world, means releasing a product to the market that is ready for the market to buy not a rocket launch.
So why would you expect Blue Origins to release any plans or show any data than is required by law for purposes of regulations before the product is ready for its commercial launch? Personally I am surprised they even sent someone to NSRC2013.
They almost certainly did it as a favor to Alan Stern, as they did the last time.
Rand,
That makes sense, just as Robert Bigelow tends to make most of his big announcements through his good friend George Knapp, a LV reporter, since he dislikes the media otherwise.