April 16, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold, in three parts. All three segments tonight are almost entirely about commercial space, with the third segment a special one that John and I taped today following today’s decision by NASA to give SpaceX the lunar landing contract.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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Embedded below the fold, in three parts. All three segments tonight are almost entirely about commercial space, with the third segment a special one that John and I taped today following today’s decision by NASA to give SpaceX the lunar landing contract.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Jim Cantrell is back again. I hope they take a very different approach with this rocket company. Hopefully not a phantom.
Bob, your statement, “it’s going to make the … space station orbit pretty crowded …”, made me blink.
From Douglas Adams, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…”
;)
Icepilot: I was being metaphoric. I very well know that there is plenty of space in space for a lot of space stations.
Khan Noonien Singh
“Commentary on the conditions in Space”
https://youtu.be/5vwHLMs04XA?t=13
John Batchelor asked, “why don’t we see a lot of cool crashes from Bezos’s company the way we do from Musk’s?”
Robert’s answer is good. There may have been a lot of problems that we didn’t see in the early years.
The main reason that New Shepard no longer has spectacular crashes is that it is in verification phase of development, a phase in which spectacular failures are very bad, and Starship is still in basic technology proof of concept phase, when failure is to be expected. The methods and technologies for New Shepard are fairly well known but for Starship they are still being explored. They are in very different phases of development. New Shepard should be close to its final design, but Starship is still finding out how to do completely new maneuvers and techniques with new concepts, technologies, and methods. New Shepard should look routine, Starship should not, yet.
Super Heavy is designed to operate similarly to the Falcons, so it should not have spectacular failures (unless they do a test to failure pressure on their first test article). That technology is reasonably well known.
Another difference, similar to Robert’s answer, is that when New Shepard had a spectacular failure on its first booster landing, Blue Origin was not forthcoming of the video of the crash. SpaceX does not have large areas of real estate to keep the general public away from its tests, so much of what SpaceX does ends up being seen by the public. Operations at the Boca Chica site are so popular that there are even people making videos of the manufacturing process and of moving hardware from one location to another. SpaceX’s processes (assembly, integration, test, as well as the construction and operation of ground support equipment and assembly buildings) are the most watched that I have ever known.
Although SpaceX is very willing to suffer spectacular failures in order to advance their technologies, they do not go out of their way to have them. SpaceX sounded very glad that their first high altitude flight succeeded in its first pitch-over at altitude. They are skipping three test articles in order to go straight to the next major iteration of their design, which suggests to me that they were expecting some failures learning how to perform that first pitch-over maneuver. It is because they learned so much so fast that has enabled them to skip three test articles.
New Shepard is far enough along that they are verifying that their hardware, software, and procedures really do what they want them to do. They are likely not making major changes between test flights but are making iterative changes to their final methods.