Several journalists seem to have gotten a personal tour from Jeff Bezos yesterday. Here’s Jeff Foust’s story. Things seem (finally) to be ramping up. I’d say they’re now solidly in the lead in the suborbital race, but they’re also going to orbit.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And here’s Ken Chang’s story. I’m sure that Alan Boyle and Eric Berger will have their own takes. Wish I’d known about it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Chang’s take is more detailed. I found this amusing:
Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
NASA proposes to launch SLS once every couple of years. Insane.
[Update a while later]
Here’s Eric Berger’s take. He has more detail about the BE-4 and its implications for the RD-180 issue.
The story has been published in several places today. In a couple of them, including Aviation Week, made the error of saying New Shepard has only flown twice. They’ve flown their rocket three times. The first one successfully lifted the capsule to just over 100 km but the landing attempt failed. They were fully successful on their next two flights.
They’re referring to that particular vehicle, not the vehicle type. It has only flown twice.
Competition is good. Blue and SpaceX give us hope.
You maybe. I just see different stages of zombification.
Could you elaborate, Trent? I don’t follow.
If they continue the same way as SpaceX, pretty soon they’ll lose interest in this whole human spaceflight thing – let alone the space tourism – and become a good little subcontractor. Of course, they’ll still talk about colonizing space, but after a decade or so it’ll get a bit old.
I was a bit disappointed to read that Bezos’ team spent years looking for an alternative to chemical rockets before concluding that there isn’t a better way. Bezos seems like the sort of deep-pockets backer you’d need to give one of the more exotic approaches (gas guns, tethers, beamed power, etc.) a decent shot.
Still, it’s fantastic that there are multiple companies trying to achieve high flight rates and reuse.
Just because someone has deep pockets doesn’t mean he should dump his money down a rat hole.
I don’t want him to dump it down a rat hole, I want him to find something that’s dramatically better than chemical rockets, and that can be developed on his budget: a win for him and for the wider use of space. I’m glad he looked for such a thing, and disappointed he didn’t find it.
I think there are many ways to launch things dramatically better than chemical rockets, but all paths lead from first increasing launch rate, and reusing the chemical rockets.
The assumption of increased launch rate is there is market for the increased launch rate. Currently there is such a market and it’s reasonable that over time this market will increase.
There are also other kinds of markets which could be developed, such as the suborbital market which could potentially could be very big market.
An important aspect of increase launch rates, and in particular the high launch rates related to suborbital launches will efforts related to lower cost of launching anything from spaceport.
So one could get to the point where customer wants a orbital or suborbital flight and be able to buy it within a month or week time period. And getting to such a point, can done using chemical rockets, and once we arrive at such point in time, one gets a potential market for something that lowers the fixed cost of rocket fuel used by chemical rocket. Or the cost of chemical rocket fuel becomes a problem to be solved by other way of getting into space.
It seems possible that were the Moon explored to find minable water to make rocket fuel, the development of such lunar rocket fuel market, could be a path towards getting to point of not using chemical rockets in the nearest future. Or the high cost of lunar rocket fuel and market for it, could give incentive to find other ways to leave the Moon. Or the lunar rocket fuel market could become a billion dollar market, whereas the earth rocket fuel market is a million dollar market.
Or the total amount of money spend per year for chemical rocket fuel basically indicates what kind of possible market is available to compete against the chemical rocket market with alternative to using chemical rockets.
Or if we were spending tens of billions of dollars for earth rocket fuel then you could possible afford to invest billion of dollars to compete against the chemical fuel market..
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