Blue Origin - Booster Reuse - New Shepard

[larmor]

I can't believe i'm posting a clickbait link, but seems pro spacex and lists all the differences b/w spacex and BO:
There's a major difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin that makes them incomparable - Yahoo Finance

fwiw, i don't think there is any congratulations needed for BO suborbital accomplishment. The physics for a larger orbital spacecraft are more tricky, and if you can't get to orbit, won't be able to park satellites for internet distribution which would only facilitate more amazon purchases...

Need to redirect Elon towards photon teleportation--for secure satellite internet comm and towards the EMdrive to get to Mars. I think its time to hand the cars over, and presumably they have all ready built the M3 since TM mentioned it was being developed in parallel....

 

[woof]

Didn't SpaceShipOne do the same thing...hit "space" (100 km) and returned. And they did it three times, once with short turn around. And that was manned.

 

[larmor]

Didn't SpaceShipOne do the same thing...hit "space" (100 km) and returned. And they did it three times, once with short turn around. And that was manned.

Race for black sky video: about spaceshipone
https://youtu.be/XUT7FCFykkw

 

[Papafox]

Didn't SpaceShipOne do the same thing...hit "space" (100 km) and returned. And they did it three times, once with short turn around. And that was manned.

Woof, You have a good point. All the components of Spaceship one, the mother ship and the space vehicle, returned safely to earth and were reused. I think what B.O. was doing was trying to land a booster sooner than SpaceX. People on this thread have already discussed how much harder what SpaceX is doing compared to B.O. Take, for example, the amount of fuel that remains in the booster as it returns to earth. SpaceX comes back with only a small amount of the fuel (10% or something like that), and much is needed just to stop the forward movement and then guide to the landing area. What amazes me is how little fuel is available for the final deceleration of SpaceX's Falcon9 booster. That thing is plunging out of the sky and then suddenly makes a very quick deceleration and lands. B.O.'s effort was practically lollygagging along in comparison. Did you see the shape of the B.O. booster? It has lots of aerodynamic drag in areas towards the top of the booster than can help it descend in a more stable fashion. That drag would reduce payload in a real space launch. Congrats to B.O. for nailing a landing, but what SpaceX is trying to do is many times more difficult.

What can be said about the Silicon Valley crowd, including Elon Musk, is that they're journeying away from the standard internet and software ideas now and using their brilliant minds to reinvent how the world works. Tesla, Apple, and Google are all involved in changing the way people drive, SpaceX and B.O. are working to greatly reduce the cost of space flight, SpaceX and Google are going to make a big impact with their inexpensive communications satellites, and Tesla is on track to revolutionize the world's electrical grids. We live in the time of an American business renaissance. It's cool to watch it, invest in it, and benefit from the products.

 

[physicsfita]

What I haven't understood is why SpaceX wants to return the booster back to the Cape. I would think, at least for a long-range plan, that landing it at some mid-Atlantic island downrange would make more sense -- it would require much less fuel, which would mean more fuel could be used to lift payload. Is it because there's no suitable location even vaguely near the booster flight path?

 

[malcolm]

Meanwhile the project teams working on ULA's Vulcan and Airbus's Adeline are thinking: "damn, why didn't we think of that?".

A cheap sub-orbital demo from either of them would have been more damaging to Spacex since that REALLY would be unexpected.

 

[HVM]

 

[RDoc]

What I haven't understood is why SpaceX wants to return the booster back to the Cape. I would think, at least for a long-range plan, that landing it at some mid-Atlantic island downrange would make more sense -- it would require much less fuel, which would mean more fuel could be used to lift payload. Is it because there's no suitable location even vaguely near the booster flight path?

Well, there aren't any mid Atlantic islands.

 

[mknox]

As to your second thought, this has been mentioned quite a few times, but thought I would help clear it up for you, parachutes weight a decent amount. They would need to first slow the rocket down somehow (the thing is going like Mach 30 when it separates or some such craziness) so this requires either heat shields or engine thrust (parachutes won't work here) once they clear the upper atmosphere again and come in, then you would be ideally slow enough to finally pop a chute. The problem is that you have been holding these chutes as dead weight through almost the entire trip being worthless... Not even helping you get back into the atmosphere or remotely on target that all has to be something else... which costs even more weight. Chutes are even more counter productive than saving some fuel to land (which itself was thought to be counter productive).

Yeah, I just meant that flyback boosters and parachute retrieval had been explored before and it seemed (to me) like a good idea. As another example, the early Saturn-Shuttle proposed a winged flyback version of the Saturn S-1C stage and Boeing had proposed parachute recovery of the S-1C on more "conventional" Saturn V launches. Perhaps the reasons you cite are why they never came to fruition.

 

[Model 3]

Well, there aren't any mid Atlantic islands.

What happened to the Azores? :O

 

[HVM]

What happened to the Azores? :O

In 250-300 km distance of the Cape? (Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship's holding position)

Even more clickbaiting link:
"Elon Musk just pointed out a big problem with Jeff Bezos' historic rocket launch"

vs.

"Blue Origin beats SpaceX to the world’s first reusable rocket"

(lol fanboy fight)

 

[ggr]

What I haven't understood is why SpaceX wants to return the booster back to the Cape. I would think, at least for a long-range plan, that landing it at some mid-Atlantic island downrange would make more sense -- it would require much less fuel, which would mean more fuel could be used to lift payload. Is it because there's no suitable location even vaguely near the booster flight path?

The amount of fuel left after the second stage is released is quite small (<10%), and so the stage now doesn't need much thrust. Most of that is used to kill off the orbital velocity and slow the re-entry, which is the same no matter whether the target is the Cape or the ASDS (barge). I'm guessing the difference would be less than 1% of the total fuel load, so the increase in payload would be negligible. (Also remember that the weight of the payload is what it is, they don't add mass to the satellites to use up the available payload! So many launches don't have full tanks anyway.) But the main reason for wanting to come back to the Cape is for rapid turn-around. They're thinking way ahead, and want to turn boosters in a few days.

 

[chickensevil]

What I haven't understood is why SpaceX wants to return the booster back to the Cape. I would think, at least for a long-range plan, that landing it at some mid-Atlantic island downrange would make more sense -- it would require much less fuel, which would mean more fuel could be used to lift payload. Is it because there's no suitable location even vaguely near the booster flight path?

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zp15b_P5ERVk.kQXYPcLW76sw

That was the downrange hazard map for the DSCOVR Launch. If you will notice... there aren't any islands out there. Maybe, just maybe, Bermuda would work, but they would have to go out even FURTHER than they normally do to make that work and it likely isn't feasible. If you are going to redirect the rocket back down to earth and you have the choice of going forward twice the distance, or coming backwards to origin, it is likely easier to just come back to the Cape when you are probably going to expend just as much fuel.

 

[woof]

What I haven't understood is why SpaceX wants to return the booster back to the Cape. I would think, at least for a long-range plan, that landing it at some mid-Atlantic island downrange would make more sense -- it would require much less fuel, which would mean more fuel could be used to lift payload. Is it because there's no suitable location even vaguely near the booster flight path?

I was under the impression the long term plan was launch from Texas, land downrange in Florida. ASDS is temporary.

 

[rabar10]

Also note the the SpaceX first stage has not attained orbital velocity at the point of second stage separation -- that's what the second rocket stage is for That said, it is at around 80-100km in altitude and traveling around Mach 6 at stage sep. (Low earth orbit requires around Mach 20 or so.) Rifle bullets travel at around Mach 3, for reference.

 

[physicsfita]

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zp15b_P5ERVk.kQXYPcLW76sw

That was the downrange hazard map for the DSCOVR Launch. If you will notice... there aren't any islands out there. Maybe, just maybe, Bermuda would work, but they would have to go out even FURTHER than they normally do to make that work and it likely isn't feasible. If you are going to redirect the rocket back down to earth and you have the choice of going forward twice the distance, or coming backwards to origin, it is likely easier to just come back to the Cape when you are probably going to expend just as much fuel.

Ok, I had Bermuda in mind when I asked the question. Without doing calculations, my intuition was that pushing on to Bermuda would be more efficient (do a refire after separation to get a ballistic trajectory that would take you there -- you would then only need to come to a stop without having to do reverse thrust to land at the Cape), but I can be readily convinced that a return to the Cape might be a little better. I'm sensing a term project for my class ... hmmm ....

 

[chickensevil]

I was under the impression the long term plan was launch from Texas, land downrange in Florida. ASDS is temporary.

They plan to launch from all three sites at some point. Each site allows for a better angle for specific orbits. I want to say, and I could be remembering wrong that the long term plan is long range shots at the cape, GTO in Texas and other orbits in CA.

 

[Lump]

Blue Origin Relaunched the Rocket it Landed in November

 

[scaesare]

Congrats to the Blue Origin folks.

They do have a bit of a "Hey, look at me too!" feel about their presentations (and tweets), however.

 

[ecarfan]

Sub-orbital launches and recoveries do not impress me in the same way that the recent SpaceX first stage recovery does. There are orders of magnitude differences between what Blue Origin has demonstrated and what SpaceX has actually accomplished.
What Blue Origin is demonstrating seems only applicable to the space tourism industry, and is not useful for launching payloads into orbit.
Bezos is not going to get to Mars in the foreseeable future. Elon likely is. Bezos may get rich tourists to the edge of space for a few minutes, and if I had the money I would love to make that trip, but I don't have that kind of bank account. I am confident that in my lifetime I will watch a SpaceX rocket lift off and head to Mars. My wife and I will be traveling to Florida to watch that launch!