Bezos' Blue Origin's first live Webcast a no-explosion yawnfest In spite of the SpaceX hard landing last week, successful booster landings are becoming almost routine, but if you haven't already watched Blue Origin's successful test over the weekend, it's at the bottom of this story. Jeff Bezos' outfit also dropped its crew capsule on two parachutes, having deliberately “failed” the third …
Great!
But it still looks like it should be starring in Barbarella ;-)
The landing is interestingly different from the SpaceX Falcon though. It seems Blue Origins are being very cautious and conservative and coming in very slowly. It's like fuel weight is not a problem for them. I'd be interested to know if they can still land like that after doing an orbital boost with a full payload.
"It seems Blue Origins are being very cautious and conservative and coming in very slowly."
They're doing the last few metres quite slowly, but have a look at the de-acceleration from a distance, it goes from dropping like a stone, to hovering in about two seconds.
I'm also wondering if the difference in size between the New Shepard and the Falcon 9 makes a difference in how that last hover appears to us.
The reason for the Falcon 9's terrifying looking sudden stop is because it can't throttle lower than ~70%. So even on only three engines they can't get down to an acceleration of 1g or below when the booster is mostly empty. If you can't throttle to 1g or below, you can't hover. New Shepard can get down to that (partly because it's a less powerful rocket in the first place) so it can hover.
What Seajay said. And added to that the fuel reserve for SpaceX is extremely limited. They are basically doing a suicide burn designed such that the rocket reaches 0 velocity right as the landing legs touch the ground and right as the fuel runs out. They have very very little room for error in terms of fuel load and timing. (As the last SpaceX landing attempt showed)
" I'd be interested to know if they can still land like that after doing an orbital boost with a full payload."
Of course not - but then again the entire rocket is what SpaceX consider to be a first stage payload (i.e. it's less than the mass of the Falcon second stage and it's payload (the sat).
This is a strictly 'hop above the atmosphere' rocket. Cool, and really useful as a technology demonstrator, and for getting funds by selling trips to the rich... but the serious business takes a whole lot more rocket!
Your are quite correct: fuel weight is not a problem for them. They go vertically up, cut off the engine at the arbitrary point where they have sufficient fuel reserve for a landing, carry on rising vertically till their speed drops to zero, then fall back down with aero breaking and a final gentle landing boost close to where they took off. They go up to the height they can comfortably reach, unlike SpaceX who are additionally delivering 120 tons of second stage and payload into a very tightly constrained high altitude and speed trajectory several hundred kilometers down range, all dictated by where they need to be to put the payload into orbit.
Thanks all for the extra info.
Having just watched that video on the big screen TV instead of the titchy laptop, I notice the US flag emblem is a bid worn looking and the bottom end of the rocket is all dirty and stained. Have they got more than one of these or is each flight an actual re-use? If that's so, they may be ahead of SpaceX on that level, although I expect SpaceX will not only doing a full re-use this year, but a full re-use of an orbital launch.
Interesting times ahead. I can't wait!!!
Wouldn't call it 'smooth' - but hey, any landing you can walk away from (or could have walked away from) is a good landing.
As to the other points raised so far:
I hope that this is the beginning of the real golden age of space exploration. So far it's looking good. It seems like this time it's really about actually doing it because it's worth doing. The classic space race was all about [insert nation] being first and proving the superiority of [insert political/economical system]. At least as far as the guys who signed the cheques were concerned.
Upvote for the 'Barbarella' reference.
And yes, this one should be painted pink.
Musk get to be smug at Bezos when SpaceX get round to re-using one of those F9's they've landed. Blue Origin have launched (and landed!) the same rocket four times now.
Personally I think they're both bloody impressive :)
Here's an explosion for you ;) >>>>>>>>>>
I must say that Bezos seems to have a dab hand with technology. Not only does he seem to be able to launch and retrieve his rockets at will but the camera work is pretty good as well. If those shots of the capsule were taken at about 60 miles range then the gimbals on the camera rig are very good at doing their job.
All in all a very slick demonstration.
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