Next New Shepard flight is now scheduled for Monday. I wonder what the delay has been about? In 2017, they said they’d be flying people in 2018.
10 thoughts on “Blue Origin”
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Next New Shepard flight is now scheduled for Monday. I wonder what the delay has been about? In 2017, they said they’d be flying people in 2018.
Comments are closed.
Perhaps because there is no pressure and it isn’t important to BO.
Agreed – flying just isn’t that important. I wonder what the designed launch cadence for NS is. One launch every 6 months isn’t that impressive.
Brad’s comment below is a good take but we come back to why is NG taking so long? With deep pockets, there is less pressure to roll revenue but once it is operational, does anyone think the man behind Amazon will be happy with a launch system that is little used or has operational inefficiencies?
Between selling engines to competitors and sinking tendrils in throughout government, it looks like Bezos has a long term strategy, so things might go slow right up until they don’t.
They are so slow it makes the Chinese space program look fast.
Yet light years ahead of SLS.
Indeed. Occasionally friends who are space laypersons ask me “what I think of SLS”…I usually respond “I try not to”.
I think your snark is misplaced. The Chinese had 38 successful flights in 2018.
I’m glad Blue Origin is doing what it’s doing, but the glacial pace makes me miserable.
And they keep plugging away at space station development, their lunar program, and space warfare programs. Being “fast” to an American observer doesn’t really matter because they are moving on their own timeline to reach their own goals and not ours.
I wouldn’t be too pessimistic about the pace of Blue Origin. They seem positioned for a near term acceleration.
New Glenn is supposed to be flying in 2020. That will be a big effing rocket. 45t to orbit with a reusable 1st stage will be very impressive.
The Blue Moon lunar lander is supposed to land a 4,500kg payload on the moon in 2023. That’s as much payload as the Saturn V could manage using the old Lunar Module.
And I suspect the New Shepard is the core for the Blue Moon lunar lander. Blue Moon essentially flying as a third stage of the New Glenn, providing a single stage for TLI which also proceeds to land on the Moon.
Plenty of room within the 7m payload shroud of the New Glenn for a single-stage-to-Moon lander. Take the New Shepard, strip it of aerodynamic control surfaces and add RCS, give it fixed lander gear with the payload arrayed between the legs, add extra insulation to the tanks, add a solar power system up top.
Why else would Blue Origin have equipped a suborbital tourism vehicle like the New Shepard, with a liquid hydrogen fueled rocket? When I first heard of the New Shepard engine, I thought how strange that was. But if New Shepard was intended to test fly most of the hardware and software for Blue Moon, it makes all kinds of sense.
“Gradatim Ferociter” essentially mean “slowly quickly” which makes no sense. The tortis and hare story is popular due to its irony. But reality is usually mundane and less often profoundly ironic. In the situation comparing SpaceX and BO, SpaceX is the hare that never stops sprinting while BO is the tortis who gets so far behind that it can never catch up.