Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[StrandedonEarth]

11 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

I'm sure that it will be surprising to Neil Armstrong and everyone else who landed on the moon to find out that "landing rockets upright was stuff that only happened in comics and movies" before Elon Musk came along.

More specifically, they landed a rocket booster upright under its own rocket power back on Earth after putting a payload into space on its way to orbit. And then they launched and landed it again. It has never been done before, but it will become increasingly commonplace in the future.

[mikegarrison]

40 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

More specifically, they landed a rocket booster upright under its own rocket power back on Earth after putting a payload into space on its way to orbit. And then they launched and landed it again. It has never been done before, but it will become increasingly commonplace in the future.

Yes, that's fair and accurate.

48 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Okay, I will bite. They landed rocket powered craft, moon landers specifically. None of them landed a rocket upright. The difference is not even close to trivial.

What is the difference between a "rocket powered craft" as you use it in the first instance and "a rocket" as you used it in the second instance? Your need to justify your hyperbole is fascinating, but nonsensical.

Edited April 2, 2017 by mikegarrison

[Mitchz95]

Guys, can we please stop beating that poor horse?

[mikegarrison]

21 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Guys, can we please stop beating that poor horse?

Probably not, unless this thread ends up being officially a fact-free zone. But I'm done for the day.

[CatastrophicFailure]

38 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Guys, can we please stop beating that poor horse?

Some people just have to get the last word. Reminds me of Mel Brooks & Leslie Nielsen in Dracula: Dead & Loving it. 

[Camacha]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

What? what is the difference between a "rocket powered craft" as you use it in the first instance and "a rocket" as you used it in the second instance? Your need to justify your hyperbole is fascinating, but nonsensical.

 

I do not know why you are continually looking for conflict, but I have no interest in empty discussions over hollow semantics and judging by the other replies here, nor do other people. Anyone who is not a computer, and recently has not been a computer, will be capable to correctly interpret that "[...] landing rockets upright was stuff that only happened in comics and movies. It was a ridiculous science fiction fantasy [...]" refers to this:

and this:

and not this:

Coincidentally, SpaceX did land this:

The similarities and differences appear to be fairly self-explanatory. The fact that it took about 50 years to get from Stumpy Moonlandy to Rocket McUpright indicates that the difference also is more than trivial. To drive the point home, I will ask what people, even NASA people, will invariably think of when you use the words Moon rocket. Would that be this:

 

or would they rather think of this:

If you are a proper pedantic, you will point out that the term Moon rocket for the latter is a gruesome misnomer, since most of the rocket did not go to the Moon at all! The former craft surely must be the Moon rocket. The pedant will feel very smart, while the rest of the world will understand what the others meant perfectly fine, think unflattering things about the pedant behind his back and cross him off their birthday party invitation list.

55 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Probably not, unless this thread ends up being officially a fact-free zone. But I'm done for the day.

I must admit, you do have a flair for drama.

Edited April 2, 2017 by Camacha

[Vanamonde]

Move along, please. There's no need to sidetrack the thread with an argument about what does or does not constitute a "rocket" and a "powered landing." 

[tater]

The idea has been around since before Apollo flew at all---I mean seriously around, and ideas presented by serious people, like Phil Bono, and DC-X was based in part on his work. Some of the designs were even SSTO, VTVL craft.

 

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, tater said:

The idea has been around since before Apollo flew at all---I mean seriously around, and ideas presented by serious people, like Phil Bono, and DC-X was based in part on his work. Some of the designs were even SSTO, VTVL craft.

 

True, all soft landings outside of Earth and Venus has to use landing engines. 
DC-X is the closest parallel, it has also been other vertical landing ideas but also SSTO and therefore pretty dead ends.
Most first stage / booster recovery ideas has involved wings. 

[tater]

EDIT: not a good video, I had already listened to the other one (awful sound) and assumed this closer video was actually decent, and it is if anything worse. never mind. 

Finally real video of the press conf:

 

 

Edited April 2, 2017 by tater

[TheEpicSquared]

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Finally real video of the press conf:

 

 

Unfortunately you can't hear a word they're saying...  

[Technical Ben]

On 3/31/2017 at 11:36 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

@sevenperforce Welp, whatever the (nonexistent) details, it would appear they're a lot closer to second stage recovery than anyone thought. 

If they do a live stream, with the Muse music playing, as in the "concept" video, I'd buy that DVD...  

 

As for the above video, comments on the YT say the audio master was messed up, and they need to re-upload (I assume mics were on a different channel and recorded separately).

Edited April 2, 2017 by Technical Ben

[Kerbal01]

Elsbeth III back in range of shore AIS, projected to be back Tuesday morning

Stalk here: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=42646.msg1662494#new

[tater]

My bad on the video. I already cranked up the volume on the vertical one I posted before, and listened to the whole thing, so when I saw this one, I assumed the audio was better because the video was, and didn't re-listen to it.

[Kerbal01]

Might be of interest to those who have reddit accounts: 

 

[Hannu2]

On 31.3.2017 at 2:31 PM, mikegarrison said:

Come on, dude. You simply can't compare the cost to orbit for kg of satellite versus half a dozen human beings. That's ridiculous.

Therefore I mentioned Dragon crew capsule. After it is ready, Falcon 9 can send crew with much lower costs and will be more safe.

There are some very special purposes after that, which can not be done with Dragon, but they are not practically needed. Why everyone would want to pay half billion dollars per flight and couple of billions per year fixed costs to have ability to send people to LEO but not to ISS for several weeks? Ability to return satellites have also been useless.

They may be different things but they are things which are compared when space missions are planned. There are always much more proposals than actual missions and super expensive Shuttle specialties can not compete with more practical and cheap missions. Therefore NASA made contracts with private companies to develop manned and unmanned rockets to routine missions and retired Shuttles.

[wumpus]

On 4/2/2017 at 0:05 AM, tater said:

The idea has been around since before Apollo flew at all---I mean seriously around, and ideas presented by serious people, like Phil Bono, and DC-X was based in part on his work. Some of the designs were even SSTO, VTVL craft.

Plenty of threads have pointed out that SSTO (on Earth, with available fuels) is inherently non-serious.  It is at best a bait and switch, getting funding for SSTO and slipping an extra stage in when you need to get to orbit (or bring any reasonable mass to orbit).

[sevenperforce]

7 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Plenty of threads have pointed out that SSTO (on Earth, with available fuels) is inherently non-serious.  It is at best a bait and switch, getting funding for SSTO and slipping an extra stage in when you need to get to orbit (or bring any reasonable mass to orbit).

I'm torn on whether I prefer "near-SSTO plus a small expendable second stage" or "near-SSTO plus a small recoverable parallel booster". Perhaps the former for cargo, the latter for crew.

Unrelated...

Thinking back about possible mini-ITS concepts for a single fully-reusable second stage integrating Crew Dragon with the Falcon 9 s2. Not that SpaceX would pursue it, of course; just as an idea.

It occurred to me: by the time the second stage fires, it's out of the atmosphere...so engine thrust doesn't actually have to be along the long axis. What if you had a cluster of aerospike engines oriented perpendicular to the long axis of the vehicle? The burn to orbit would take place with the vehicle oriented normal to prograde. This way, the same engines (or a subset of them) can be used for propulsive landing.

[tater]

1 hour ago, wumpus said:

Plenty of threads have pointed out that SSTO (on Earth, with available fuels) is inherently non-serious.  It is at best a bait and switch, getting funding for SSTO and slipping an extra stage in when you need to get to orbit (or bring any reasonable mass to orbit).

Yes, I am aware of that. I said, specifically, "the idea has been around..." (VTVL spacecraft). The idea of VtVL was, however, serious. Phil Bono wasn't a slouch.

I should have quoted the post I was in fact responding to:

On 4/1/2017 at 2:31 PM, Camacha said:

Just yesterday I was thinking how I, someday, would have to explain to young people that landing rockets upright was stuff that only happened in comics and movies. It was a ridiculous science fiction fantasy, until someone who made his fortune during the tumultuous beginnings of our internet put down his foot and actually did it. They will take it for granted, while it will probably forever be a miracle to us.

The above puts my statement into context. I was saying that it was not just SF and fantasy to discuss VTVL rockets, that serious people were working on the issue.

Also some of the "SSTOs" designed were in fact 1.something stage designs (the Douglas Icarus design had drop tanks, basically).

That said, the Boeing design was not unserious, but like the early 1960s designs it was white paper serious (published in the AIAA journal), but not "cutting metal" serious. It was a concept for 128 tons or more (the large monstrosity was 450 MT to LEO I think). Of course, later, DC-X was in fact cutting metal serious (also not SF).

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by tater

[tater]

 

Anyone in Colorado Springs should drive by the Broodmoor. That's the driveway in front of the convention center... get a reservation at the Summit and have dinner next to a rocket  (great cocktails there, too).

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by tater

[dino1984]

Any update on fairing? Did they recovered some or they just smashed into ocean in more-or-less controlled way?

[Kerbal01]

1 hour ago, dino1984 said:

Any update on fairing? Did they recovered some or they just smashed into ocean in more-or-less controlled way?

Go Searcher brought it in yesterday morning, more or less intact. 

 

[dino1984]

Why they are not sharing any info on it via official channels (even twitter)?

[sevenperforce]

3 hours ago, DarthVader said:

Go Searcher brought it in yesterday morning, more or less intact. 

 

AFAIK only one of the fairings was brought in. It's a bit banged up from what we've seen. 

I, for one, am waiting eagerly for the full landing video to be released.

[tater]

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/32915200224/in/photostream/

 

 

Edited April 4, 2017 by tater