Suck it, Elon – Jeff Bezos' New Shepard space rocket blasts off, lands in one piece

Re: Nouveau riche?

>I'd prefer to spend it on fast cars, booze, and fast women (

If you have billions of dollars, you'd struggle to spend it all that way, even if the cars were high class, the booze high performance, and the women triple-distilled.

You're correct that this didn't make orbit, but then it was never meant to. Still, baby steps and all that.

Re: Nouveau riche?

But seriously, this is not space, it's not even close. It's just above the Kármán line, a fairly arbitrary distinction, going fairly slowly by satellite standards. Go and do something useful with your money.

But this is exactly how road transport, and later air transport, finally took off (if you'll excuse the pun).

In both cases the rich eccentrics were the ones who started, with small steps, and eventually what they were doing progressed until it became of interest to more staid businesses, at which point some serious money started to be invested and it became more and more commonplace, and more accessible to the general populace.

The trouble with space travel is that it started with a politically driven effort to score points which was very dramatic, but very shortlived, and therefore skewed our perception. What you are seeing now is much more "the norm" it's just we've had our expectations raised by what's gone before.

The successful VTOL, especially the "L" bit, is a major step forwards. Elon must be grumbling to himself today that he didn't get there first, but a bit of healthy competition will benefit everyone.

Re: Nouveau riche?

Begging your pardon, but

(a) a sub-orbital hop up to space is a decent first achievement, especially given that

(b) they're recovering the booster, and

(c) Blue Origin ARE planning on getting into orbit, if you bother checking their website.

I can even see utility in there being a company with he capability of offering sub-orbital hops - could be useful during astronaut training. Currently astronaut training is lenghty and experience to try to ensure, as much as possible, that the ones who get launched into orbit are pretty likely to actually function OK once they get up there and not be incapacitated or bug out in long periods of weightlessness. Having something in between a few seconds of weightlessness in a plane on a vomit comet trajectory and actually being up at the ISS for several weeks could help weed out borderline cases.

Also useful for civilians thinking of holidaying in orbit too, of course (bear in mind that Bigelow are thinking about creating an orbital hotel of sorts). Better to have a quick taster of what it'd be like before booking that week or month long stay, so you'll know whether or not you're likely to cope or be miserable beforehand, no?

Re: Nouveau riche?

To seriously enjoy your new found imaginary wealth try Fast BIkes, Old Booze and Slow Women\Men

I have a fast bike that I enjoy riding quite slowly

I was once offered some very old very expensive Brandy, It was nectar

As for the third item,,,,

Re: Nouveau riche?

Ummmm, this was a test. Do you for one second think that NASA also fired their rockets all the way to the moon from the start? Hell no. They did baby steps just like Blue Origin is right now and like SpaceX did in the beginning.

And this is not space tourism either (which you seem to be conflating this with). This is proper aerospace work.

Wasn't it one of the early SpaceX tests that was far more fake looking a year or two back - it literally came down absolutely vertically. This one definitely had something of a wobble, you could see it correcting.

However I was very impressed just how fast it landed, no gentle descent, just drop it and pull on the hand-brake at the last moment!

Oh never mind, turns out you accidentally signed up for a free trial 3 years ago and have unwittingly been paying ever since. Welcome aboard.

Re: What was Cristiano Ronaldo doing on board?

Alan Shepard got there first.

Re: Lacking context here

It is monetized. The engine design has been purchased by the United Launch Alliance. Effectively the usual suspects - Boeing, etc have conceded that Besos has done a better engine design than them.

We will see on the actual landing mechanics - I suspect that will be monetized as well. The rocket showed some very impressive stabilization capabilities.

The difference between Bezos and Elon is that Bezos as a habit monetizes by component not e2e - every single piece of the Amazon puzzle can stand on its own starting from the backend (which is now AWS) and to the logistics. This is no different - it is being monetized by component.

Re: Its the wrong way to get off this planet

i would hope that someday some eccentric rich person puts a Gauss-gun type mass driver up the side of a mountain near the equator and pointing east. that could give a payload a substantial boost, maybe even allow a rocket to reach orbit with one less stage.

Re: Its the wrong way to get off this planet

The obvious way to get off the planet is to go to the edge and jump - if only reality was more accommodating

Re: Its the wrong way to get off this planet

"So, come on, how will we do it easily and cheaply?"

If I were a betting man, I'd guess on the materials science guys making a space elevator possible before the quantum science guys perfect either (a) the teleport or (b) the antigrav module.

Re: Its the wrong way to get off this planet

Maybe there will be a way once we really figure these out.

Another idea would be short-time time travel. No, really. Earth moves all the time, and pretty fast, too. (Rotating around itself, revolving around the sun, the solar system is moving, our galaxy is moving, the universe is expanding - it all adds up. Or not, given the vectors.) Given that your device will move you in time only (and not both in time and space) all you'd have to do was jump back in time for a short bit and - presto, you're in spaaace. The same could be achieved if your device would allow you to 'sidestep' in time, i.e. enter a seperate/subjective loop for a bit, just long enough for the earth to move away from you. So mo mucking around with escape velocities, let earth do all the work!

Could someone who's up for the math for planetary movements do some quick back-of-the-beer-mat calculations, please? (This is El Reg, there must be someone who can do this. I'll be the guy who bulids the launch pad, promise.) Off the top of my head I'd say anything between 30 seconds and 2 minuties should to it.

Re: Neat!

It is neat! It's spookily sci-fi looking and a pleasure to watch.

Re: The space joyride market seems crowded..

<wanders off, muttering and wondering how this will improve humanity or help space exploration.>

It really is laughable reading some of the commentards on this thread. Their echoes could be traced back through history... listen!

"That Christopher Columbus, who does 'ee fink 'ee is, sailing off all over the place, waste of money, what use is it?"

"And what about that Captain Cook, eh, wasting the Royal Navy's money, can't see the point, we've discovered everything that's worth finding"

"Stupid steam Joyrides, have you seen them rich toffs paying good money to ride around on that circle that Richard Trevithick's built? What's the point of that then?"

"I hear George Stephenson's offering rides on his new steam tramway thing between Stockton and Darlington. I mean, what's the point? Who wants to go to Darlington anyway?"

"I'm glad they've brought in that new Locomotive Act, having someone in front with a red flag will just show those idiots who think horseless carriages will ever amount to anything. What a waste of money!"

"Have you heard about that Wilbur Wright bloke? He's supposed to have invented a flying machine thing, he's showing it off all round Europe. Can't see the point myself, it's not like it's useful for anything"

"They ought to ban those barnstormers, whizzing about everywhere in their airyplanes, why would you pay money to go up in one of them things, it's not like they're any use for anything really"

"What about Harry H. Knight and Harold M. Bixby then, they've put up $18,000 for some crazy stunt to fly across the Atlantic. What a waste of money!"

etc.

Re: The space joyride market seems crowded..

-<wanders off, muttering and wondering how this will improve humanity or help space exploration.>-

Use it as a launch base for LOHAN?

Re: The space joyride market seems crowded..

> "...SpaceX will be successful. The other two.. not so much as there's a limited number of millionaires..."

Over 10 million people.

Say 10% could swing such a joyride financially, and out of those, 10% might seriously consider it, and of those, 1% decide to do it. That's 1000 paying customers.

Say it's successful, so successful they cut the price in half due to efficiencies of scale. The applicant pool will expand quite a bit, and another halving will open the floodgates. Woohoo!

It all hinges on their future safety record tho.

Re: The space joyride market seems crowded..

Virgin and Blue Origins vying for this.

And Virgin Galactic, of course.

The NTSB report into the accident[1] was released in July. I seem to have missed it in the press. And I'm quite surprised at the outcome[2].

Vic.

[1] The press release is available here

[2] The breakup was caused by the co-pilot unlocking the booms too early - at transonic speeds - and the subsequent loadings caused the booms to feather - leading to catastrophic breakup. But Scaled Composites were criticised for failing to anticipate that this might happen and guard against it.

Re: Fail!!

And you know the vehicle's operational envelope how, exactly?

It doesn't matter if the thing was spinning like a catherine wheel, as long as it can correct for the actual motion vectors and convert them into the result you saw (and don't give a fuck about, which suggests you don't understand what you saw!)

Of course, it's possible that the landing was on the hairy edge of the thing's ability to correct for, and just lucked out. But unless you know what those limits are, your comment is specious.

Re: Sub-Orbital

Sub-orbital was good enough for Shepard, Grissom and Ham, I'd be good enough for me... Seriously though, if I had the money I'd do a sub-orbital first and deceide after that whether I'd save up for that ISS trip or not.

Re: I really don't want to be a doom monger

but that descent looked well shaky

I thought it looked excellent.

It landed bang-on target, bang-on speed.

There were a few high-load maneuvres on the way down - but that is absolutely to be expected. This is an unmanned first stage, so it doesn't matter if it gets thrown about a bit; what matters is that the landing is both safe and fuel-efficient. It appears to be so.

Vic.

Re: I really don't want to be a doom monger

...but that descent looked well shaky.

It's a beta rocket.

It won't be steady until RTM + Service Pack 2 at the earliest.

Re: BE-3 engine demo

You were part-right. The BE-3 is one of the engines in the running to replace the RL-10 on the second stage...

Re: What about further afield?

tbh it does look a bit like the MAV in The Martian movie.

Re: What about further afield?

>Could you land on Mars with one of these

Trickier - there is bugger-all atmosphere so you can't use any of the aerodynamic surfaces to steer, you have to do it all with rockets.

>then take off again to

Easy peasy lemon squeezy

>get back to a mothership in orbit?

Get back to - yes, catch up with - no

You could get to orbital height and see the mothership zoom past at Mach30

Re: Luner Lander...

Concorde had all the Black Arrow money.

But it was developed out of an ICBM programme, and funding had been steadily dwindling. To visit the rocket test sites at High Down, Isle of Wight and find yourself in a old military fort and you can kind of feel that it was all a bit heath robinson compared to the massive efforts by the superpower nations. The concrete test pads are impressive to stand in though.

Where would we have been now if it had not been cancelled? Well some of the tech fro Blue Steel, Black Knight and Blue Steel went into a euro project that developed into the Arianne launchers. The place that built the Prospero satellite carried on making satellites and has become part of Airbus.

Re: Oh boy. Yet another sounding rocket.

Upvote for remembering that. Also, just checked the Wiki page for it, tickled to find that some of the engineers that worked Clipper are on with Blue Origin now.

Bezos and Musk weren't first to anything, including the concept of reusability. Wake me when they figure out what it actually costs (inspections, repairs, servicing, paperwork) to convince customers that it's ready to go again.

Re: Humbug

TB2 went up into space in one episode too.

Re: Err... no!

Grasshopper never got near Space. Although the F9-R that replaced it probably could have done.

Re: Wankers, all(most) wankers

Absolutely.

I never failed to be surprised by the total lack of imagination and technical knowledge showed by the commentators on this site - allegedly a technical site at that.

I can only imagine they spend too much time trimming their hipster beards rather than learning about this sort of thing, about the what the various companies are doing, the technical challenges and so forth. All the information is out there, it's not difficult to find, and it's not difficult to understand (most of it anyway!)

Re: NASA gave us the 'Vomit Comet'

Looks like more of a Chunder Wonder to me.

Re: Race for the 1% Market

Boilerplate.

Hermes Conrad: Okay, captain, this is just a standard legal release, protecting Planet Express from lawsuits in the event of the unforeseen.

Leela: [reading] "Death by airlock failure... "

Hermes Conrad: Mm-hm.

Leela: "... death by brain parasite... "

Hermes Conrad: Yah.

Leela: "... death by sonic diarrhea... "

Hermes Conrad: Oho, you don't want that.

Leela: Look, I don't know about your previous captains, but I intend to do as little dying as possible.

Hermes Conrad: Ohohohohohohoho... Sign the paper.