It’s scheduled for less than an hour from now.
[Update late morning]
As noted in comments, it seemed to be a spectacular success. Recovered both capsule and booster (they had been downplaying expectations for the latter). This is a huge milestone, and bodes well for commercial flights of humans into space in the next year or so.
Seems to be in a hold at T minus 1:13 and they are deciding whether or not to scrub for today.
Don’t know the reason why they are considering a scrub
So it doesn’t destruct. (bah-doom, boom!).
Ok they just now reset the clock to T- 14 minutes.
So it looks like a test is still possible
Looked totally successful. Escape was good. Booster got to space and then softly landed.
There was a time when the crew capsule seemed to be oscillating back and forth and I couldn’t be sure if the escape engine had shut down. But the drogues came out and everything settled out.
That oscillation would have made for quite an exciting ride! (assuming the inhabitants were still conscious)
Seeing that capsule tumble reminded me of what has been bugging me about SpaceX’s Mars rocket. The SpaceX ship is designed as a lifting body. In order to stay stable on Mars atmosphere entry, the center of mass must be forward of the center of lift. However, the final phase of flight shows the craft spinning around to land on its tail. For that to work, the center of mass must be aft of the center of lift. Otherwise, the atmosphere would yank the craft right back around and it would nose into the ground. With the fuel tanks aft and almost empty, where’s the CoM in relation to the CoL?
Hey everybody . . . move aft — now!
🙂 Sort of like the crash dive scene in Das Boot (only they tumble into the bow).
Didn’t see the retrorockets on the capsule. Did they fire? The telemetry showed 16 mph at touchdown, would have been a bit rough.
I didn’t see them either, so I wondered the same thing. The commentator said that the retros slow you from 15 to 3.
So if they didn’t fire, then the test was not 100% successful.
I was wondering about that, too. Then again, at 15 mph, it may have been a very quick puff.
If you watch a few Soyuz landing videos, you’ll see that the retro rockets there fire for an extremely short period of time. This looked like a Soyuz touchdown to me.
Scott Kelly compares landing in a Soyuz to going over Niagara falls in a barrel – that’s on fire. But the best description I’ve seen of a landing is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l7MM9yoxII
One of the cosmonauts describes the “soft landing” as a collision between a truck and a small car – and he’s in the small car.
I’ve heard it alleged that the Soyuz originally didn’t have retro rockets, that the stroking seats were considered enough. It was only later that the retros were added for “much more comfort.” That all strikes me as BS. Does anyone know the real timeline?
Flawless test, both capsule and booster survived. A well deserved retirement awaits the PM.
Actually, there was a lot of dust upon impact. So I can’t say whether or not the retros fired. I didn’t see any initial flame, but then the dust didn’t quite look like what I would expect if an object plopped onto the sand at 15ph
Eric, where were you reading the speed? In the upper right hand corner of the screen? There might have been some lag between the actual speeds and the display on the screen. In fact I just watched the video again and the speed seemed to me to go to zero just before you saw the dust cloud.
So to be honest I have no idea of the retros fired at all. I saw no flame (and expected to).
I looked at a video dated June 20:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grdr9BskPYo
and compared that landing to the one today. They look the same to me. So maybe the retros did fire.
I cannot say one way or the other.
Gregg, I saw it live on the Blue Origin website. There really didn’t appear to be any deceleration, unlike the booster which actually hovered briefly before landing. I guess they had extra fuel to burn off.
Certainly very possible that the telemetry was not well synchronized.
Any landing where your asshole doesn’t end up in your mouth probably would have been judged a success had this been a real use case scenario.*
Dave
*Just sayin, a few brused ribs would be nothing in comparison…
That’s for dang sure. But if the retros did not fire, the technical goals were not met 100%. This doesn’t mean it wasn’t awesome, because it WAS! 🙂
True but it would be bad for business.
Looking at the video, the abort rocket fired at a displayed speed of 473 MPH. That sounds too slow for Max-Q but the display could be wrong. Perhaps the New Shepard hits Max-Q at a slower speed than other rockets.
I’m very happy the rocket survived the test and will be retired to a museum.
Keep in mind that New Shepard is a suborbital rocket, in my mental model, that can easily result in a lower Max-Q than an orbit-going system.
My issue with the test is that the booster flew its flight profile just fine, which means the capsule just chickened out.
I was able to watch it at work and it was a thriller. I was concerned about the oscillations at first but I realized that they happened when the solid motor was tailing off. The capsule was probably decelerating at that point. Presumably they had instrumentation in the capsule to measure the forces that passengers would have felt.
In SpaceX’s pad abort test, Dragon 2 also flipped around pretty sharply when the trunk was jettisoned.
Yes, it did and continued while the drogue chutes were deploying. It might not be as bad as it looks. For all we no, it’s no worse than riding on the Slingshot carnival ride. I’ve done it and it was fun with a peak of 4Gs and some tumbling.