Blue Origin
Jun 25th, 2006 by Moonage
From Cosmic Blog, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is looking to the future, again:
Some of the contenders in the commercial spaceflight race are more hush-hush than others - and virtually no one is more secretive than Blue Origin, the space effort funded by Amazon.com’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos.
This is what it might look like:
Blue Origin is developing a reusable, vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket ship called the New Shepard
I hope they have a Plan B. I can’t even imagine the amount of energy it would take to land vertically. And, if the rockets failed……..
I like wings for more than one reason. I’m no scientist, but I’ve got a pretty good understanding of odds. If you’re dropping straight out of the sky, I want a backup plan.
Secondly, I can not believe they’re wanting to use kerosene and hydrogen peroxide? I would appreciate it if someone could explain that logic to me. I really would. So far, I am much more impressed with who is involved than what the finished product is appearing to be.
Kerosene and HTP hydrogen peroxide are relatively dense, non-cryogenic, storable and relatively non-toxic.
Thanks for the enlightenment.
I’m just somewhat at a loss as I picture people trying to develop a new, better way to fly into space. Best I recall, isn’t that mix what the Russians have been using for a long time?
The Russians use a wide variety of different propellants; LOX/kerosene on the manned Soyuz rockets, N2O4/UDMH on Proton cargo rockets (which is REALLY nasty stuff, toxic, corrosive, carcinogenic).
Bezos isn’t aiming for high payload capacity to orbit (yet). He wants a vehicle which is safe to fly manned, fully-reusable and has rapid turnaround, so he needs propellants which are easy to store and handle, and won’t corrode the tankage or engines.
Thanks for the input JD. Very enlightening. It’s a shame I couldn’t have read this in the original articles. A lot of times, expecially in science articles, they tend to skip the small stuff. However, that small stuff is what leaves people like me scratching our heads. I’m still looking for the space elevator and I keep getting kerosene.
Thanks again.
Anyone remember the Roton - Rotary Rocket from a few years back? They were going to use a huge propeller on top of the rocket to help it land and maneuver. I think the demonstrator is still in one piece somewhere.
Good catch! This is what you’re referring to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roton_SSTO
It’s intact and sitting at the Mojave Airport. And, looking at the pic, it’s dead on this thing. I knew it looked familiar, but couldn’t put my finger on it. Thanks for the comment!
Actually, I’m more inclined at this point to think I was thinking of the X-33:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-33
Check out the middle pic. NASA spent $912 million tryign to get the X-33 to fly and basically failed. At about the same time, Roton was being developed as a “rocket helicopter”. It had some success that NASA never did with an approximately $30 million budget. Goes to show ya what the private sector could accomplish. If Roton had secured another $120 million, it would probably be flying today. As such, Roton was shut down in 2001 for lack of funding.
Honestly, the follow up comments to this post tend to make me believe this is a bad idea moreso than my original question did. Seems to me all they are doing here is replacing the rotors with fuel. According to NASA, there were ineherant flaws in the design itself requiring a multi-stage launch for the type of functionality this craft would be expected to pursue.
Did you see any of the video from the recent test launch of this vehicle? Ive no doubt you will be posting an entry about it shortly so I will wait to comment until then.