Fwd: Jeff Bezos's Space Launch Breakthrough

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: November 26, 2015 at 9:54:10 AM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Jeff Bezos's Space Launch Breakthrough

Jeff Bezos's Space Launch Breakthrough

Nov 25, 2015 Guy Norris and Mark Carreau | Aviation Week & Space Technology

 

Video: Blue Origin's First Successful Reusable Rocket Landing

The successful suborbital test flight of the New Shepard space tourism vehicle over West Texas not only secured Blue Origin's place in the history books by culminating with the first vertical touchdown on land of a rocket after a supersonic reentry, it was also a striking bellwether of the company's wider commercial spaceflight ambitions.

Though the Nov. 23 test was aimed at deploying the six-seat crew capsule into suborbit for a planned 4-min. weightless period, attention was chiefly focused on whether the rocket stage could be successfully recovered using the tricky vertical-powered-landing technique. Blue Origin, the space company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is staking its entire venture on mastering routine vertical landings to make launch vehicles reusable and reduce costs.

While the New Shepard is aimed at the suborbital tourism market contested by companies such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR, Blue Origin plans to scale up the same system architecture for a larger orbital launch vehicle powered by the more powerful BE-4 engine currently in development. The New Shepard's vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) technique has drawn inevitable comparisons with SpaceX, which also wants to make the first stage of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle reusable using the same powered-landing concept. 

While the different dynamics and scale of the two vehicles make such a comparison a little unfair (the Falcon 9 first-stage apogee and speed is over 124 mi. and up to Mach 7.5, versus 62 mi. and Mach 3.7 for New Shepard), the Blue Origin flight nonetheless succeeded where SpaceX so far has not.

Indeed the achievement quickly captured the attention of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. This year SpaceX was unsuccessful in two attempts to vertically land the first stages of Falcon 9 launch vehicles carrying supplies to the International Space Station on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville, Florida.

"Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the [Blue Origin] team for achieving VTOL on their booster," Musk commented by Twitter. However, following remarks by Bezos about the New Shepard being "the rarest of beasts—a used rocket," the collegial atmosphere swiftly evaporated on social media. Musk retorted that the achievement was "not quite 'rarest.' [SpaceX's] Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago and is still around." He then added that "Jeff [Bezos] may be unaware SpaceX suborbital VTOL flight began 2013. Orbital water landing 2014. Orbital land landing next."

Musk also offered a distinction between the difficulty of achieving vertical landings with suborbital rockets and those designed with enough propulsion to reach geosynchronous orbit. He also singled out the achievements of the X-15 and SpaceShipOne rocket planes as the first government and commercial suborbital rockets, respectively, to land intact, albeit on a runway.

While Musk's reaction may have more to do with the longer-term competitive implications of Blue Origin's achievement, the successful test nonetheless represents a major milestone for commercial space in general and reusability in particular. The successful 8-min. test flight unfolded with a 12:21 p.m. EST liftoff of the single-stage, liquid-hydrogen- and oxygen-fueled suborbital launch vehicle. The capsule separated as the New Shepard climbed toward its apogee of 329,839 ft. (62.45 mi.) after reaching a velocity of Mach 3.72 and landed under three parachutes that began to deploy at 20,045 ft. The capsule touchdown occurred 11 min. after liftoff.

Hurtling back down toward the test range near Van Horn, Texas, after successfully deploying the crew capsule, the New Shepard rocket stage was stabilized for a base-first descent by the unusual aerodynamic ring fin surrounding the upper vehicle. The ring fin structure is shielded during ascent by the crew capsule for which it provides a vehicle interface. Guided by forward and aft steering fins, the vehicle's single BE-3 engine was relit as it dropped to 4,896 ft. The engine, which is capable of throttling from 110,000 lb. to 20,000 lb. thrust, slowed the descent and, at just over 50 ft. from the ground, four landing legs deployed. New Shepard settled to the ground at a velocity of 4.4 mph.

"As far as we can tell, this was a nominal flight. I'm sure we will learn things," says Bezos. "We will do the most thorough test program over the next couple of years that we can possibly do. Hopefully, in a couple of years from now we will be putting humans on New Shepard and taking them into space."

Commenting on the timing of the next flight, he adds, "we will have to wait and see. It will be some number of weeks before we can fly that hardware again. As we examine all the data closely and inspect all the hardware, we may find some subsystems we want to improve, make more robust, modify in some way. If we find that, we will do it. Our approach to this is to be very step-by-step, very patient and very methodical. If we find a subsystem that we want to modify, we will take the time to do that. As much as I would like to put humans on that vehicle and fly it as soon as possible, the reality is that we will enter commercial operations with that vehicle when we are ready and not before."

Future testing will include an abort of the uncrewed passenger capsule while New Shepard flies through a stressful regime, most likely at MaxQ, or maximum flight dynamic pressure, as New Shepard goes transonic, according to Bezos.

The flight was the first since the inaugural New Shepard developmental launch on April 29. After reaching 307,000 ft. and scoring a successful capsule separation, the suborbital rocket lost control because of a hydraulic system failure and crashed. The Nov. 23 test featured a new redundant hydraulic system that functioned without problems, says Bezos.

The New Shepard testing will contribute to a scalable recovery architecture that Blue Origin intends to integrate into the orbital vehicle it is developing to launch from Cape Canaveral in competition with other commercial launch services providers. Like SpaceX, Blue Origin's launch vehicle will return to a ship in the Atlantic.

"We are on two paths," says Bezos. "We will continue to develop New Shepard through its flight-test program over the next couple of years so we can fly tourists into space. We will take the same exact architecture we just demonstrated and use it on the booster stage of our orbital vehicle." 

Video Watch Blue Origin's video of the New Shepard vertical landing

 

Copyright © 2015, Penton.  All rights reserved.

 

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