Updates Blue Origin New Shepard News and Updates

[RisingFury]

SpaceX needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and give the F9 hovering ability.

Bob Clark

All the armchair rocket scientists agree!

 

[MaverickSawyer]

SpaceX needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and give the F9 hovering ability.

Bob Clark

Not gonna work. They're taking a disposable launcher and trying to turn it into a reusable one. Blue's got the right idea: Clean sheet design, reusable from the outset.

 

[Urwumpe]

BTW, interesting number for vertical landing phobics: The engine was already started in 3,635 feet altitude AGL.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

SpaceX needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and give the F9 hovering ability.Bob Clark

They'd love to, but they're stuck between the mass ratio to get something to orbit and the throttling limit of their engines. SpaceX is trying to do something much more difficult than tagging the Karman line.

What Blue Origin is doing now doesn't scale well when going to medium lift orbital operations, and they'll have to cope with the same problems.

 

[RGClark]

Not gonna work. They're taking a disposable launcher and trying to turn it into a reusable one. Blue's got the right idea: Clean sheet design, reusable from the outset.

Actually, Elon always intended the F9 to be reusable. There was an article a couple of years ago about how SpaceX engineers were not too happy with Elon's insistence the Merlin be reusable. It would be much easier to design without that requirement.

Bob Clark

 

[Urwumpe]

Actually, Elon always intended the F9 to be reusable. There was an article a couple of years ago about how SpaceX engineers were not too happy with Elon's insistence the Merlin be reusable. It would be much easier to design without that requirement.

Bob Clark

Well, Elon can sure do this all alone. Who needs experts anyway, if any armchair rocket scientist knows how to do it.

 

[RGClark]

All the armchair rocket scientists agree!

Actually everyone who has built a powered, vertically landing system has agreed, from helicopters to the Harrier jump jet to the Apollo lunar lander to the Mars landers. They all have hovering ability. Even SpaceX's own Dragon V2 designed to land vertically carrying a crew has hovering ability.

Bob Clark

 

[Urwumpe]

Actually everyone who has built a powered, vertically landing system has agreed, from helicopters to the Harrier jump jet to the Apollo lunar lander to the Mars landers. They all have hovering ability. Even SpaceX's own Dragon V2 designed to land vertically carrying a crew has hovering ability.

Bob Clark

None of those is launching second stages to their mission of delivering a satellite into orbit.

All of those gained hover ability with limitations on other missions. All. And the Dragon V2 is right now only a blueprint.

 

[RGClark]

Suicide-burn is the appropriate description for the Falcon 9 landing technique, not the "hover-slam" term SpaceX has been using.

Since the F9 can not hover, it is inappropriate to include the word "hover" in the landing description. A more appropriate name, aside from suicide-burn, would be "land-or-slam", since without hovering ability you only get one chance at it. You stick the landing on the first try or you crash and burn.


Bob Clark

 

[Ravenous]

Actually everyone who has built a powered, vertically landing system has agreed, from helicopters to the Harrier jump jet to the Apollo lunar lander to the Mars landers. They all have hovering ability.

I'm not directing this at anyone in particular as a criticism, just an observation:

Hovering atmospheric aircraft and experimental rocket powered landers for use in 1.6G (and yes I know there are a few other examples) are very different from commercial space launches.

I'm sure Mr Musk would be very glad to get that beast of his hovering, but for now he's judged it more sensible to try and get a timed burn approach working. It gets one landing attempt with a little steering, just like every other spacecraft built so far. He obviously thinks it'll be possible using modern sensing and control techniques. Why are we arguing about what he should do instead?

I just think it's unrealistic of us to expect him to fix every problem simultaneously at this stage, that's all

 

[Thunder Chicken]

They'd love to, but they're stuck between the mass ratio to get something to orbit and the throttling limit of their engines. SpaceX is trying to do something much more difficult than tagging the Karman line.

Actually, why can't SpaceX just make the center engine smaller than the ones on the outer ring - you can still use it to provide thrust to orbit, but make it small enough that it could hover the nearly empty stage?

If they could uprate the remaining Merlins by a small fraction they could keep the same performance to orbit and allow the stage to hover on landing. Assuming center engine peaks at 50% max thrust of remaining 8, would need to bring up thrust of remaining engines by 5-6%. Might even allow a little more fuel for payload acceleration, upping performance a bit. Can't imagine there would be much of a weight penalty either.

Yeah, it would eat into the economies of scale a bit by requiring logistics for a second engine type, but it would make a lot of landing complexity go away.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Pretty good video riding New Horizons Shepard down to landing:

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Pretty good video riding New Horizons down to landing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNPpdHYD8jo

New Shepard, you heathen. :lol:

 

[Thunder Chicken]

New Shepard, you heathen. :lol:

Fixed. TC no function sleep well without.

 

[Urwumpe]

Fresh from the newsletter:

You might remember the Apollo 15 capsule had one parachute fail during its return to earth prompting the recovery ship USS Okinawa to radio to Worden, Irwin and Scott in the Command Module “You have a streamed chute. Stand by for a hard impact.”


Parachute failure on Apollo 15

A parachute failure is a credible scenario in even the most carefully designed recovery system, so a robust vehicle needs to accommodate that possibility through redundancies and margin designed and built into each subsystem that protects the astronauts during landing. The New Shepard crew capsule is designed to safely land the crew even in the event of a parachute failure.

As I mentioned briefly in the last e-mail, we’re about to do that test. In addition to redundant parachutes, the crew capsule is equipped with a two-stage crushable structure that absorbs landing loads, along with seats that use a passive energy absorbing mechanism to reduce peak loads to the occupant. As an added measure of redundancy, the crew capsule is equipped with a “retro rocket” propulsive system that activates just a few feet above the ground to lower the velocity to approximately 3 ft/sec at touchdown. This final maneuver causes the dust cloud you can see when the crew capsule lands.

We’re planning to demonstrate the redundancies built into the capsule on this re-flight of the vehicle by intentionally failing one drogue and one main parachute during descent. This should occur around 7 ½ minutes into the flight at an altitude of 24,000 feet.

Our other goals for this mission include continuing to learn about our reusable architecture by actually reusing it (this will be the fourth flight of the same hardware), further demonstrating the predictability and repeatability of vehicle performance, and executing pre-planned flight control maneuvers on the booster and crew capsule via fin deflections, TVC deflections and RCS firings to observe system response in order to reduce modeling uncertainties.

We’ll provide a heads up when we know the flight date, but it will likely be before the end of the month.

Gradatim Ferociter!

Jeff Bezos

 

[Col_Klonk]

Fresh from the newsletter:

Our other goals for this mission include continuing to learn about our reusable architecture by actually reusing it

Ooooooo.. The 'war' is hotting up... get the beer and popcorn :thumbup:

 

[Andy44]

War?

 

[Urwumpe]

War?

I don't really know what he means. I would say he means the temperamental love between Bezos and Musk about their space programs (amantium irae amoris integratio est), which often reminds of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon...

 

[Col_Klonk]

Eggsactly.. the 'war' of words as key phrases are slipped into seemingly innocent sentences as the competition hots up.

I bet that comment stung SpaceX bad.. next is to see what Elon comes up with.. I'm sure he'll retort soon.

 

[Urwumpe]

Eggsactly.. the 'war' of words as key phrases are slipped into seemingly innocent sentences as the competition hots up.

I bet that comment stung SpaceX bad.. next is to see what Elon comes up with.. I'm sure he'll retort soon.

Did you understand the Latin quote? (The German and English translations also exist, but both are based on the same Latin)