A Suborbital Flight To Space

Everyone’s been paying attention to the “race” between Virgin Galactic and XCOR (a story that got more complicated yesterday), but Blue Origin apparently had the first successful private flight to a hundred kilometers since the X-Prize was won, over eleven years ago. It will be interesting to see when their next one is, to see what kind of turnaround capability they have. It’s now clearly possible that they’ll be offering passenger flights sooner than either of the horizontal approaches.

[Update a few minutes later]

As someone over at Arocket points out, this wasn’t just the first trip to space since 2004, but the first-ever vertical landing of a ship that had been to space (even if SpaceX lands a Falcon 9 first stage, I’m not sure what its apogee is). It was a big milestone.

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, on rereading, it’s not clear that the booster went all the way to space, just the capsule, so maybe that hasn’t happened yet.

[Update a while later]

Jeff Bezos issues his first tweet ever.

[Late-morning update]

Jeff Foust has the story now, including the Q&A with Bezos.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here’s Chris Bergin’s story.

[Early-afternoon update]

[Update a while later]

Ashlee Vance has an amusing take on the pissing contest between Musk and Bezos.

BTW, it seems to be confirmed that there was only a 120-meter difference in apogee between booster and capsule, so it definitely made it into space.

[Update a few more minutes later]

For those new to the topic, I wrote an explainer about orbits and suborbits a little over a year ago.

27 thoughts on “A Suborbital Flight To Space”

  1. I’m beginning to think a deeply throttleable engine is required for VTVL landings returning from an appreciable velocity. Not sure SpaceX will stick a landing with an engine that can’t go T/W 1, but I think you really need to hover and correct before making a final landing.

    Question for the peanut gallery: Did DC-X land with T/W > 1?

  2. Weird, comments won’t render the less than sign. This sentence should read SpaceX will stick a landing with an engine that can’t go T/W less than 1

  3. If the booster gave the capsule enough momentum to go into space, then it seems very likely that the booster also flew into space. The capsule has no propulsion system that I know of.

    BO did achieve something wonderful yesterday. What SpaceX is trying to achieve is more difficult due to the Falcon 9’s first stage travelling much faster (both vertically and horizontally) and also having to attempt landing on a moving target for now. This isn’t to belittle BO’s achievement in any way. If I worked at SpaceX, I’d be encouraged by BO’s success.

      1. I know the crew capsule has a launch escape system. Not sure what it does for RCS. I asked Blue what the booster apogee was via Twitter.

  4. I’ve tried several times to write out an error budget for sensor and timing errors to make spacex landing work with Thrust greater than 1,5* Weight and its a dicey proposition, add wind and unknown aerodynamics like the rocket equivalent of helicopter descending with power vortex ring state…. and either the legs have to absorb a lot of delta v or it does not work. Things like the the descending with power will vary by an order of magnitude depending on the wind, ie will be really bad in zero wind, almost not noticeable in 20mph winds…. as the disturbed air will be down wind instead of under the vehicle.

    Elon needs to spend some time with an experienced helicopter designer/pilot…

    1. Paul B. fascinating work you are doing with the 3D printed engine over on A-Rocket. Good luck with the Dec. 5th test…

  5. Huge kudos go to the Blue Origin team on this major accomplishment.

    P. Sanchez I do wonder the same thing. It seems to provide an important option when it matters most. There did seem to be some lateral translation used to “nail” the landing where T/W was essentially 1. The Blue Origin booster comes in quite hot. Even at 1000 feet. Coming in hot helps when traversing layers of atmosphere though.

  6. Remember that SpaceX hacks around the deep throttling problem somewhat by having a multi-engine cluster. IIRC they only restart three of the nine engines for landing?

    So is the idea for New Shepard to become an upper stage, or is it a reduced-scale prototype, or just a technology development testbed?

    1. The New Shephard form factor (albeit a scale up version) will be the 1st stage for their orbital vehicle. Not sure what the upper stage will look like, but it will use an expendable version of BE-3 with a bigger nozzle designed for vac operation.

    1. I have to wonder what kind of assumptions went into that study. Fuel? Number of stages used? probably no lunar orbit rendezvous. Likely a few other assumptions that Saturn-Apollo didn’t follow.

  7. Unlike SpaceShipOne, Blue took significant government money. Consider that SpaceShipOne actually had a pilot aboard too and you get a feeling for just how far we haven’t come in 12 years.

  8. Re: Pissing Contest Between Musk and Bezos

    Fantastic! How I’ve dreamed for this day….

    Young people reading this: There IS a future in an aeroSPACE career!
    The people doing handsprints over this are the engineering faculty in every college aerospace department in the country…

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