Everyone’s been paying attention to the “race” between Virgin Galactic and XCOR (a story that got more complicated yesterday), but Blue Origin apparently had the first successful private flight to a hundred kilometers since the X-Prize was won, over eleven years ago. It will be interesting to see when their next one is, to see what kind of turnaround capability they have. It’s now clearly possible that they’ll be offering passenger flights sooner than either of the horizontal approaches.
[Update a few minutes later]
As someone over at Arocket points out, this wasn’t just the first trip to space since 2004, but the first-ever vertical landing of a ship that had been to space (even if SpaceX lands a Falcon 9 first stage, I’m not sure what its apogee is). It was a big milestone.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, on rereading, it’s not clear that the booster went all the way to space, just the capsule, so maybe that hasn’t happened yet.
[Update a while later]
Jeff Bezos issues his first tweet ever.
[Late-morning update]
Jeff Foust has the story now, including the Q&A with Bezos.
[Update a few minutes later]
And here’s Chris Bergin’s story.
[Early-afternoon update]
I think it's safe to say that this was the first fully reusable vehicle to go into space under its own power and land vertically on earth.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 24, 2015
Also worth noting that many of these space "firsts" were "first non-government entity." This one was a first, period.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 24, 2015
And if SpaceX hadn't had their launch failure in June, it's very likely that they'd have beaten Blue Origin for that first.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 24, 2015
[Update a while later]
Ashlee Vance has an amusing take on the pissing contest between Musk and Bezos.
BTW, it seems to be confirmed that there was only a 120-meter difference in apogee between booster and capsule, so it definitely made it into space.
[Update a few more minutes later]
For those new to the topic, I wrote an explainer about orbits and suborbits a little over a year ago.
I’m beginning to think a deeply throttleable engine is required for VTVL landings returning from an appreciable velocity. Not sure SpaceX will stick a landing with an engine that can’t go T/W 1, but I think you really need to hover and correct before making a final landing.
Question for the peanut gallery: Did DC-X land with T/W > 1?
Weird, comments won’t render the less than sign. This sentence should read SpaceX will stick a landing with an engine that can’t go T/W less than 1
It’s interpreting it as the beginning of a tag. You need to do it as a character like this, < (type it as <)
Ah, thanks for the tip. <
Gotta have the semicolon, too. & l t ; all four characters are required to see a < in your comment.
Yikes. Banner day for me. The preview renders < with just <.
Meh, it’s no big deal; most people don’t write HTML so they have no reason to know that.
If the booster gave the capsule enough momentum to go into space, then it seems very likely that the booster also flew into space. The capsule has no propulsion system that I know of.
BO did achieve something wonderful yesterday. What SpaceX is trying to achieve is more difficult due to the Falcon 9’s first stage travelling much faster (both vertically and horizontally) and also having to attempt landing on a moving target for now. This isn’t to belittle BO’s achievement in any way. If I worked at SpaceX, I’d be encouraged by BO’s success.
That was my question, whether the capsule has any propulsion.
I know the crew capsule has a launch escape system. Not sure what it does for RCS. I asked Blue what the booster apogee was via Twitter.
While I don’t know, I suspect the capsule uses cold gas thrusters in the RCS. Simple, cheap, and safe.
According to a CBS story, the booster rose to just 400 feet lower than the capsule.
Right, saw that on Twitter. Hopefully it wasn’t from Dan Rather.
I’ve tried several times to write out an error budget for sensor and timing errors to make spacex landing work with Thrust greater than 1,5* Weight and its a dicey proposition, add wind and unknown aerodynamics like the rocket equivalent of helicopter descending with power vortex ring state…. and either the legs have to absorb a lot of delta v or it does not work. Things like the the descending with power will vary by an order of magnitude depending on the wind, ie will be really bad in zero wind, almost not noticeable in 20mph winds…. as the disturbed air will be down wind instead of under the vehicle.
Elon needs to spend some time with an experienced helicopter designer/pilot…
Or maybe an engineer who built his own peroxide VTVL lander? 😉
“Lossless convexification of control constraints”. It’s what SpaceX is doing in their control algos.
Paul B. fascinating work you are doing with the 3D printed engine over on A-Rocket. Good luck with the Dec. 5th test…
Huge kudos go to the Blue Origin team on this major accomplishment.
P. Sanchez I do wonder the same thing. It seems to provide an important option when it matters most. There did seem to be some lateral translation used to “nail” the landing where T/W was essentially 1. The Blue Origin booster comes in quite hot. Even at 1000 feet. Coming in hot helps when traversing layers of atmosphere though.
Remember that SpaceX hacks around the deep throttling problem somewhat by having a multi-engine cluster. IIRC they only restart three of the nine engines for landing?
So is the idea for New Shepard to become an upper stage, or is it a reduced-scale prototype, or just a technology development testbed?
The New Shephard form factor (albeit a scale up version) will be the 1st stage for their orbital vehicle. Not sure what the upper stage will look like, but it will use an expendable version of BE-3 with a bigger nozzle designed for vac operation.
The Falcon 9 first stage lands with just a single engine.
The Falcon 9 uses three engines for the hypersonic retro-burn and a single engine for the landing attempt.
Sorry for the OT, but this is relevant to the KSR thread last week, and that thread is stale.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUl4XLEVEAA95Lj.jpg:large
In 1941, it was determined that travel to the Moon was impossible.
I have to wonder what kind of assumptions went into that study. Fuel? Number of stages used? probably no lunar orbit rendezvous. Likely a few other assumptions that Saturn-Apollo didn’t follow.
Unlike SpaceShipOne, Blue took significant government money. Consider that SpaceShipOne actually had a pilot aboard too and you get a feeling for just how far we haven’t come in 12 years.
It’s actually easier to build a vehicle with a pilot on board.
Re: Pissing Contest Between Musk and Bezos
Fantastic! How I’ve dreamed for this day….
Young people reading this: There IS a future in an aeroSPACE career!
The people doing handsprints over this are the engineering faculty in every college aerospace department in the country…