11 comments

• Jason

  April 28, 2018 at 3:04 pm

  I wondering why Blue Origin expects to go from New Shepard to a Saturn V class launch vehicle?
• Edward

  April 28, 2018 at 4:58 pm

  Jason pondered: “I wondering why Blue Origin expects to go from New Shepard to a Saturn V class launch vehicle?”

  There have been similar jumps in capability in the past. I’m not so sure that the New Glenn is so very much different than the original Falcon 9, and SpaceX successfully went from a small launch rocket, the Falcon 1 at 500-ish kg to low Earth orbit (LEO), to a large rocket, the original Falcon 9 at 20,000-ish kg to LEO — almost two orders of magnitude difference. Blue Origin is going from a heavy suborbital New Shepard rocket (six humans to suborbital space) to a large New Glenn rocket, taking 45,000-ish kg to LEO. The Saturn V (140,000 kg to LEO) was built at a time when the largest U.S. rocket could only carry 1/10th that payload to LEO.

  Both companies are going (went?) from a single engine rocket to rockets with a similar number of engines — 7 for New Shepard, 9 For Falcon 9.

  I’m not sure just how many steps are needed to go from one sized rocket to another, but it does not seem to take very many.

  Robert,
  It has only been five months since they previously flew their current rocket, New Shepard 3. They averaged about three months between flights with the New Shepard 2 rocket. Between this new rocket and their new design for the capsule, this does not seem to me like a terribly long time between tests. They may have found a few tweaks were needed between flights; Mannequin Skywalker may have taught them a thing or two.
• Robert Zimmerman

  April 28, 2018 at 5:36 pm

  Edward: I admit I am becoming impatient. In fact, I have become very impatient, but not with Blue Origin. When I was a kid in the 1960s we were supposed to be doing this stuff by now routinely. Instead, my generation squandered the opportunity and a half century was wasted.

  I want space exploration now. No more fooling around!
• Richard Easton

  April 29, 2018 at 5:05 am

  I share your impatience Robert. My Dad got approval within a week for his Naval Dpace Surveillance System back in 1958. I think that it was approved in June and tracked its first satellite in August. Things were moving very fast post Sputnik. I recently read that NASA in the 60s was racing to land on the Moon before the growth of its bureaucracy stifled innovation.
• Ed

  April 29, 2018 at 10:58 am

  Did the capsule retro rockets fire upon landing? It didn’t look like it in the live stream, although I would classify the both landings as successful. Congrats to the Blue team.
• Commodude

  April 29, 2018 at 11:45 am

  I have a book about space and astronomy which had the Nova rocket being a follow on to the Saturn V with detailed drawings (as detailed as a kids science book from the early 60s gets).

  The bloat and bureaucracy that has enveloped NASA since the 70s is near criminal.

  Point being, Robert, you’re not the only person who is impatient with these truly rapid advances, I’ve been waiting for this for most of my life, and it’s exciting that it’s finally happening.
• Kirk

  April 29, 2018 at 11:58 am

  Ed, I missed the live stream, but the replay I just watched showed an aerial view of the capsule landing, and the retro firing was more clearly visible than in previous flights. Pausing and stepping frame-by-frame, the capsule’s shadow is still visible below it when the dust from the retro firing kicks up.
• Kirk

  April 29, 2018 at 11:37 pm

  Watching both this and a previous flight, it appears that they throttle down the BE-3 engine 10 to 15 seconds before MECO. (The engine glow reduces in size.) In yesterday’s flight, when this occurred at T+02:11 (12 seconds before the T+02:23 MECO), it was accompanied by a momentary burst of vapor which dissipated within three frames of the video. I wonder if this was an engine hiccup (one of the propellants not throttling in line with the other), a change in operation, or if conditions were such that this transient event just wasn’t visible on previous launches. A similar but much larger and more persistent vapor burst happens at MECO.

  Here is a link to T+02:00 (41:51 in the livestream): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUV53Nn3PhA&t=2451

  Played at full speed, the throttle down vapor burst is still visible and looks almost like backfire, accentuated by a (presumably) coincidental bang in the background audio half a second later.

  (The aerial view showing the last few seconds of the capsule descent and landing starts just after 47:47 in that video.)
• Edward

  May 1, 2018 at 4:14 pm

  Robert Zimmerman wrote: “I have become very impatient, but not with Blue Origin. When I was a kid in the 1960s we were supposed to be doing this stuff by now routinely. Instead, my generation squandered the opportunity and a half century was wasted.”

  I understand completely. I am disappointed that my career did not take me in the direction of the rapid expansion of the exploration of space, as we had all expected back then. As I have said several times, those in the industry became so impatient in the 1990s that they started founding their own companies to do the jobs that we all thought NASA would do, foster, or encourage. Unfortunately, Congress did not work very fast at the expansion into space that we all expected during the early Space Shuttle years, so We the People took space expansion into our own hands.

  I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, starting in the 1960s rather than the 1990s, commercial space programs had started to complement and replace some or much of NASA’s work. Where would we be now if NASA had contracted with early commercial space companies similar to the way they did with the original Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contracts of the first decade of this century, which guaranteed a paying customer to the companies that accomplished the objectives.

  Peter Diamandis created the X-Prize in the 1990s specifically to encourage the advancement of commercial space exploration and expansion; which succeeded brilliantly, but did not result in the expected rapid translation of the original test vehicles to operational spacecraft. Without the success of the Ansari X-Prize, we probably would not have such great expectations from Blue Origin. Ironically, we probably would not be as impatient, either.

  A major difference between NASA’s space program and the several commercial space programs is funding. The lower funding of the commercial space programs means that progress is a little slower for commercial space than it was for NASA in the 1960s.

  However, perhaps the greatest effect on the difference in the speed of developing commercial manned space versus NASA’s, the Soviet, and the Chinese manned space programs is the need for crew safety. With the recent safety record of US airliners, people are starting to expect spaceflight to be similarly safe, and lawsuits are probably going to be large, public, and crippling to the commercial companies. Despite liability insurance coverage, any and all lost crews could result in dramatically reduced business, possibly even for all commercial manned space programs, not just the one(s) that lost a crew.

  Lost crews at NASA and in the Soviet Union did not result in the end of their manned space programs, but a lost customer could result in the end of a commercial space program. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a VP of XCOR about this issue, since a lost crew has always occurred in every spacecraft that flew crews more than a dozen times*, and his response was that commercial space companies were trying to educate the public about the dangers that still exist in manned spaceflight. Will that be enough?

  How we manage the publicity and fallout from lost crews and passengers will also determine the future of commercial space programs. In a way, the loss of Virgin Galactic’s Enterprise spacecraft helped to wake up the public that spaceflight is still dangerous, but many were surprised that a simple human error would be allowed to cause a lost crew member. What if that had happened with paying customers?

  Thus, my expectation is that every company working on manned spacecraft are trying to make them as safe as possible. This is a relatively slow process, especially since any missed safety issues would likely be highlighted in any lawsuits, as we saw with the Ford Pinto. Documenting all risk assessment and mitigation is likely a key part to the design and test of these spacecraft.

  I think that it is unfortunate that this new industry is hampered by factors that did not hamper aviation. As someone noted decades ago, if we had had modern safety expectations and requirements a century ago, we never would have successfully developed a marketable automobile.

  We should also consider that Blue Origin has a test plan that includes additional unmanned flights. These flights are all intended to confirm that the craft behaves as expected or to find unexpected problems. Lets not rush them out of executing that plan, as that could be dangerous.

  On the other hand, they are already flying experiments as a sounding rocket, so progress is happening.

  So, although we are all impatient for commercial space exploration to get started, as we believe that it will expand quickly once it starts, we don’t want it to die just as it gets to the launch pad due to a poorly thought out approach to operations.

  Ed asked: “Did the capsule retro rockets fire upon landing?”

  You can tell that the burn occurred, because the dust cloud kicked up is significantly larger than if it hadn’t. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft lands in the same manner, and it is difficult to see the flame of its very short rocket burn, too.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgV2KW3crw#t=200 (Soyuz MS-02 landing, < 1 minute)

  * Someone once argued to me that my number should be 25, citing the Space Shuttle, even though Soyuz killed its very first crewman and was the first in-flight fatality in manned space. However, the only spacecraft (plural) that didn't kill anyone flew a dozen or fewer times.

  The X-15 flew to space (Kármán line) only twice but still killed a crew (though not on a space flight). SpaceShipTwo, of course, killed one crew member, although it has yet to make it to space.

  The only spacecraft that didn't kill a crew had flown far fewer times than we expect the commercial manned spacecraft to fly.

  Shenzhou has flown 6 manned flights; Vostok flew 6; Mercury 6; Voskhod 2; Gemini 10; SpaceShipOne 3 to space, but a total of 15 manned flights, including the 12 test flights below the Kármán line. So, maybe the number should be 15; I'll think about it.
• wodun

  May 2, 2018 at 3:05 am

  Sometimes we need patience. Could what SpaceX and BO are doing been done during the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, or even 90’s?

  I believe we are seeing what appears to be rapid advancement today because over the past decades various technologies have been progressing in different fields and it is only recently companies have been able to bring them together and apply them to the space industry.

  So, while it appears like a slow pace for space, it has really been steady, speedy, and incremental advancement across many different fields. It has taken time for these advances to take place and they couldn’t be master planned for or created by any one organization.

  We live in a time of many amazing creations and discoveries. This is because people and organizations are free to pursue their own desires, to solve the problems they think are important. This leads to serendipitous cross pollination of technology and ideas.
• Edward

  May 3, 2018 at 4:49 pm

  wodun asked: “Could what SpaceX and BO are doing been done during the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, or even 90’s?”

  Excellent question. I believe that the supersonic retropropulsive entry was not well understood back then. Indeed, even NASA was interested in the data from the early Falcon 9 reentry tests, during which interesting lessons were learned.

  For those who like to read science papers, the introduction to this paper tells us that supersonic retropropulsion was investigated in the 1950s:
  http://ssdl.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/papers/conferencePapers/IEEE-2008-1246.pdf

  However, rocket scientists in the 1960s through the 1990s believed that a first stage could not successfully survive a return to Earth after its burnout. It wasn’t until SpaceX’s rocket scientists (or engineers) thought that they might be able to do it that anyone took the idea seriously, and it was mostly just those at SpaceX; everyone else was skeptical.

  Blue Origin’s return from 100 km altitude is not as stressful on the first stage, but no one had made reusable sounding rockets, either.

  I suspect that these reusable rockets were only developed because commercial companies were looking for an advantage over other rocket companies. Even in the 1990s, many in the industry believed that if the price per pound of payload could be reduced to around $2,000 from the $10,000-ish that it was back then, there would be far more customers for launch to orbit or beyond.

  Had commercial space started in the 1960s, the commercial companies would have had incentive to do what they could to reduce their launch costs in order to beat the competition and to increase the customer base. As it is, Bulgaria has said that the low price tag of a Falcon 9 launch is why they were able to afford their first satellite, BulgariaSat-1. I have heard similar statements from other satellite operators. The low cost and targeted orbits available from smallsat launchers, such as Rocket Lab, is also a reason for an increase in interest in small satellites. Although there are already far more companies building this type of small-sized launcher than the expected market can support, there are many entrepreneurs and investors interested in getting into this launch market.

  Instead, the space industry was monopolized by the government with a centralized control, much like a socialist country would do it. These days, we are seeing a decentralization of the control, where individual companies, not the government, make their own decisions on what to do and how to do it, muck like we would expect from a free market capitalist country. We are now getting more of what we want, not just what the government wants.

  Although several technologies have only recently come to a maturity level that allows them to be used now, I think that had the space industry been commercialized earlier then some of these technologies and others would have been investigated much earlier and to a greater degree in order for the competitors in the market to advance over their competition.

  Instead, we ended up with governments running the space show for five decades and giving us only what they wanted, not what the rest of us wanted. Government had become such a monopoly (and monopsony) that in order for commercial space to get started in this century, NASA had to create the COTS program, because few of the companies were going to survive — and none would thrive — without it.

  Banking had more innovations once government reduced its overregulation and allowed a greater amount of competition. Telephone service increased and prices fell once government allowed competition in that industry. Airline prices plummeted after deregulation of that industry, and rather than the airlines skimping on safety, as many had feared, the airlines realized that, due to the increase in the number of flights (due to the increase in passengers) there soon would be weekly headlines of accidents unless the airlines got serious about safety. Rather than US airline safety becoming worse, it became significantly better.

  These days, the US military is buying telephony services from commercial communications satellite companies. The US weather service and NOAA are beginning to purchase weather data from commercial satellite companies. Commercial Earth observation satellites started being launched at the beginning of this century, with IKONOS. These are things that commercial space could have done long ago, had commercializing space been a priority back then. Instead, all these industries are struggling against government competition.

  What is done is done, and we will never know what technologies commercial companies would have developed between the 1960s (or ’70s, or ’80s) and now, and we will never know how far into space humans would be now. However, I am certain that we would have been further along on the path to the Moon and to Mars than we are now, and that as with the airlines we would be farther along on the path of spaceflight safety.