Tag: Blue Origin

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Blue Origin and SpaceX revisit rocket landings

Image: Blue Origin view
A view from the “vent cam” on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital booster shows a West Texas landscape during an April 2 flight, plus a “toasty brown” ring fin at the top. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Will seeing a spaceship land on its feet ever get old? The novelty is still there in newly released videos from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, showing new perspectives on their most recent rocket landings.

Blue Origin’s video recaps the April 2 flight of its New Shepard suborbital space vehicle, as seen from a camera pointing out from one of the booster’s vents. The 2:38 clip begins with a shot of the curving blue Earth below the blackness of space – a view that paying passengers could see as early as 2018.

Then there’s the supersonic descent back through the atmosphere. If you look closely at the full-frame, high-definition video, you might be able to pick out the Rio Grande River running through the West Texas landscape surrounding Blue Origin’s launch and landing site.

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GeekWire

ULA’s chief sizes up the rocket engine race

Image: Tory Bruno
United Launch Alliance’s president and CEO, Tory Bruno, talks with students during the 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – United Launch Alliance’s president and CEO, Tory Bruno, is facing a 2019 deadline from Congress to come up with a made-in-the-USA replacement for the Russian-built rocket engines currently used on ULA’s workhorse Atlas 5 launch vehicle. But he doesn’t sound worried. He’s got a Plan A, and a Plan B.

“We’re in that great position of having the two to choose from,” Bruno told GeekWire this week here at the 32nd Space Symposium.

Plan A is a rocket engine that’s being built by Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and headquartered in Kent, Wash. Nineteen months ago, Bezos and Bruno announced a deal to support the development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, fueled by liquid natural gas, for ULA’s next-generation Vulcan semi-reusable rocket.

Bruno said Bezos is putting up the “lion’s share” of the money for the effort, and in February, the U.S. Air Force provided an additional $46.6 million boost.

But then there’s Plan B: Aerojet Rocketdyne – which is based in Sacramento, Calif., but has a facility in Redmond, Wash. – is getting $115 million from the Air Force to develop a kerosene-fueled engine called the AR-1 that could serve as an alternative for ULA’s rockets.

United Launch Alliance, a Colorado-based joint venture involving the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin, will soon have to pick which plan to go with. It’s not a decision Bruno takes lightly.

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GeekWire

Q&A: Jeff Bezos lays out his outer-space vision

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos talks about his vision for the space industry at the Space Symposium. (Tom Kimmell Photography, Courtesy of the Space Foundation)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn’t focused on creating America’s biggest online retailer when he was a boy. But he often says that he’s been obsessed with outer space since the age of 5, when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

That means he’s had a lot of time to think about how spaceflight should be done, and what kind of future is in store beyond our home planet. It’s what led him to create a space venture called Blue Origin a decade and a half ago. Now Blue Origin is taking off in a big way, literally: Over the past six months, Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship has gone through three successful launch-and-landing tests. People could start taking test flights on New Shepard as early as next year, with paying passengers due to climb aboard in 2018.

At this week’s 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos and I were on stage for a “fireside chat” during which the Amazon CEO discussed his vision for space travel. The “fireside” was purely figurative, but the chat nevertheless sparked some deep thoughts about Blue Origin’s business model, the state of the space industry and humanity’s future on the final frontier.

Get the edited transcript on GeekWire.

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GeekWire

Why Jeff Bezos passed up a trip to the moon

Image: Bezos and Boyle
Billionaire Jeff Bezos watches a replay of a New Shepard suborbital test flight with GeekWire’s Alan Boyle at the Space Symposium. (Credit: Tom Kimmell Photography, Courtesy of Space Foundation)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his chance to go into space in a Russian Soyuz capsule – and not just into space, but around the moon. But he says he’d rather taste the final frontier in a spaceship built by his own company, Blue Origin.

Bezos touched on what it would take for spaceflight, including what he’s done to prepare for the experience, during my informal chat with him in front of hundreds of attendees here today at the 32nd Space Symposium.

The Blue Origin space venture was created back in 2000, six years after Bezos founded Amazon, so that he could pursue his childhood dream of going into outer space – a dream that goes back to watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

Bezos noted that his high-school girlfriend, Ursula Werner, has been quoted as saying Amazon exists “solely to create money for Blue Origin.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he joked.

But he did confirm that he’s undergone some training for spaceflight – not under zero-G conditions in an airplane, as many people have done, but in a centrifuge at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. “If you’re subject to motion sickness, you might not want to do that,” he said.

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GeekWire

Get a drone’s-eye view of Blue Origin spaceflight

Saturday’s test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship marked lots of milestones, including the first time a drone captured video of its launch from above.

Those kinds of views have long been provided by SpaceX, one of Blue Origin’s rivals in the reusable rocket business, and they’re thrilling. The video that Blue Origin founder (and Amazon billionaire) Jeff Bezos shared today is in the same category – right down to the rockin’ soundtrack.

“We pushed the envelope on this flight, restarting the engine for the propulsive landing only 3,600 feet above the ground, requiring the BE-3 engine to start fast and ramp to high thrust fast,” Bezos said in a blog post accompanying the video.

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GeekWire

Jeff Bezos live-tweets Blue Origin spaceship test

Image: New Shepard landing
Blue Origin’s New Shepard fires its BE-4 rocket engine for a vertical landing. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos served as launch commentator for a risky but successful third flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship to space and back on April 2. He even worked in a reference to his lucky cowboy boots.

The 11-minute-long suborbital mission not only featured the first ride for university research payloads, but also a quick restart of the propulsion module’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 rocket engine, just seconds before what would have been a crash.

That maneuver was aimed at “pushing the envelope” for the uncrewed New Shepard’s performance, Bezos said on the eve of the flight. Blue Origin reported that the restart was executed successfully at an altitude of 3,635 feet, as planned.

The running commentary on Twitter marked yet another role for the 52-year-old Bezos, who founded Blue Origin back in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of spaceflight. New Shepard is named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, who became the first American in outer space three years before Bezos was born.

Bezos traced the preparation of the crew capsule (CC) for launch from Blue Origin’s test facility in West Texas, then the liftoff, then the status of the propulsion booster and crew capsule after the two parts of the spacecraft separated on cue.

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GeekWire

Jeff Bezos counts down to Blue Origin launch

Image: New Shepard preparations
Workers prepare Blue Origin’s rocket ship for a test flight. (Credit: Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin rocket venture will put its New Shepard suborbital spaceship to its sternest test to date: a flight that involves a quick restart of the craft’s rocket engine just six seconds before projected impact.

If the restart doesn’t work on April 2, the third flight of the reusable New Shepard will end with a fiery splat.

The mere fact of Bezos’ announcement is almost as remarkable as the flight plan.

Previously, he might have said in advance that a flight would happen “very soon,” or the timing could have been figured out by checking the required notice from the Federal Aviation Administration. But the April 1 tweets represent the first time Bezos has publicly specified the date of a Blue Origin test flight in advance. (No fooling!)

Bezos is promising that there’ll be drone footage of the test. And two research experiments will be packed aboard for the trip to outer space. That marks another first for Blue Origin’s suborbital space effort.

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Cosmic Space

Listen to a two-pack podcast about Blue Origin

Image: Bezos and Boyle
Jeff Bezos and Alan Boyle get a selfie taken next to a nozzle for Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine.

Journalists got a first-of-its-kind tour of Blue Origin’s rocket factory this week, personally conducted by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. While the memories were still fresh, Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle recounted the tour and talked about Bezos’ vision on two podcasts:

  • On GeekWire Radio, host Todd Bishop asks why Bezos decided to lift the veil on Blue Origin’s operation after 16 years of secretiveness.
  • On KUOW’s “The Record,” host Bill Radke gets the details on a tour that’s reminiscent of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “No Oompa-Loompas, but lots of rocket engines.”
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Rocket reports from Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin

Image: VSS Unity
Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane is brought out from its hangar in Mojave, Calif. A portion of the plane’s WhiteKnightTwo mothership can be seen at right. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

In the past few weeks, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space venture and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture have both had a lot to talk about. Today, both companies delved more deeply into the nitty-gritty of getting rockets ready for flight.

Three weeks after Virgin Galactic unveiled its second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, known as VSS Unity, the company said it was putting the craft through integrated vehicle ground testing at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. These tests involves operating the plane’s systems under ground conditions that mimic space conditions as much as possible.

“For example, instead of just testing our feather lock actuators at room temperature, we use liquid nitrogen to chill them down to the temperatures they will experience when performing at high altitude,” Virgin Galactic said in today’s update.

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Efforts to boost space ventures fizzle out

Image: Blue Origin crew capsule
Engineers work on a crew capsule at Blue Origin’s factory in Kent, Wash. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Two measures that would have lent a hand to Washington state’s fledgling space industry have been stalled in committee and aren’t likely to win approval during the state Legislature’s current session, the bills’ sponsor said March 9.

“We’re having such a tough time with the budget” that the space-related measures appear likely to go by the wayside this year, even though they’ve enjoyed bipartisan support, said state Rep. Jeff Morris, D-Mount Vernon.

One of the bills, HB 2434, would have created a space exploration center to boost Washington industry. That bill is stuck in House Appropriations Committee.

The other bill, HB 2226, would have let spacecraft manufacturers enjoy tax incentives that are similar to those currently offered to Washington’s airplane manufacturers, as in the Boeing Co. That bill didn’t make it out of the House Finance Committee.

HB 2226’s fate could have an impact on where Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, decides to locate a future manufacturing facility for its BE-4 rocket engine.

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