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Blue Origin first human flight

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Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#151

Post by nemetroid »

natch wrote: post #119
q1w2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there's no scientific or engineering achievement here and that this ride is essentially joyriding. I disagree that we should deride rich people for spending money the way they want. I splurge on things sometimes as well. Unlike a lot of modern social media, I don't think there's anything inherently immoral about being wealthy. If someone has an argument about what these specific people did that was speci…

It’s remarkable that such a mature, sane, and rational perspective has been downvoted at the time of this writing to the point of being dead. Like anyone I am alarmed by over-the-top displays of wealth but that’s not really all this was. There is a lot more going on here. Blue Origin needs a lot more test flights as they ramp up and increase their capabilities. They also need demonstration flights to hep increase con…

I don’t think the comment deserves downvoting, but I cannot agree that this characterization - dismissing those who disagree as mindless and juvenile - is mature.

> I find the mindless rich-people-hate to be nothing more than juvenile hate.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#152

Post by echelon »

mygoodaccount wrote: post #141

I feel the same way when software developers call themselves engineers.

Does your work involve research, measurement, planning, architecture, review, and instrumentation?

Are you using math to plan capacities and growth rates?

Do you push your services to 1000k+ QPS of sustained traffic to see how it handles or falls over?

Are you developing DR scenarios and training people and performing live exercises? Designing systems to fail open or closed appropriately, to gracefully handle missing dependencies, not cause a thundering herd upon restart, etc.?

Are you performing security analysis, STRIDE, etc.?

Is your data model active-active, have redundantly striped caching, and use vector clock consolidation, consensus?

This skill set is software engineering. It's not configuring a Drupal or Wordpress install.

Don't downplay it.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#153

Post by l30n4da5 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #116
ethbr0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walk before you run. I very much doubt Blue Origin intends to freeze rocket development after this launch. Blue Origin now has a successful manned flight under their belt, and a revenue stream. While it might surprise some here, Amazon started by selling just books... It feels like similar attitude comments on that would have been "They'll never compete with Walmart. Real retail stores sell all kinds of things."

Well to be fair, they don't compete with Walmart. Walmart almost doubled Amazon's revenue last year, and that was during the height of a pandemic, which naturally steered people towards more online orders, something you think would tip the scales in Amazon's favor.

have you _seen_ walmart.com? their online store rivals amazon easily.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#154

Post by Rumudiez »

l30n4da5 wrote: post #142
finnh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the "serve as commander or crew member" part?

are the members of the crew of Blue Origin 3 not 'crew members'?

If I drive onto the ferry am I part of the crew? I’ve been told (trained) on what to do and I’m equipped (my car), so am I a crew member? No, I’m just a passenger following the crew’s direction.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#155

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

mdorazio wrote: post #143
AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"An astronaut (from the Greek "astron" (ἄστρον), meaning "star", and "nautes" (ναύτης), meaning "sailor") is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft." They were trained (not as well trained as NASA astronauts, but still trained well enough for such a short mission) They were equipped with whatever equipments they needed for thi…

Crew members have defined roles and responsibilities, and are important to the success of a mission beyond having paid to be there. The alternative is more apt here, I think: passengers.

You may be right.

But still for the sake of discussion, I would argue that their mission required only 1 responsibility - that you be there. Even if they orbit around the Earth, modern spacecrafts are designed in such a way that crew member input is almost unnecessary. I wonder how much crew input is needed to dock on ISS in modern crafts...

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#156

Post by comeonseriously »

mygoodaccount wrote: post #141

I feel the same way when software developers call themselves engineers.

What if we have engineering degrees? That change anything?

Edit: That being said, depending on who I am talking to it ranges from "I do computers" to "I am a computer programmer", and very rarely use "engineer" unless I am referring to my actual degree (BSCpE).

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#157

Post by Ottolay »

marshallbananas wrote: post #8

This felt so underwhelming. I don't know if it's because I've seen SpaceX doing much more complicated missions or it's just not that big of a deal. They got about two minutes of zero G and came down immediately. You can experience that for much longer with a regular plane, for much less money. It really shouldn't count as space travel unless they go into orbit around Earth.

The underwhelming part is that it took so long.

The first private manned suborbital flight occurred in 2004 with SpaceShipOne. It is 17 years later at this point and only now do we have paying customers for sub-orbital flight.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#158

Post by fallingknife »

gist wrote: post #126
detritus wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that amuses me is that if SpaceX can make Starship and the Heavy booster work, they could actually come up with a tourism/joyride that would blow these piffling jumps by Branson and Bezos into irrelevance. If you can send 50-100 people on an actual orbiting jaunt, perhaps a night in 'space rocket hotel', rich folk would gladly pay millions, which makes the business case a lot more compelling. Then they'd ju…

> rich folk would gladly pay millions, which makes the business case a lot more compelling. I would say some would but keep in mind that a few other things have to come together. a) Willing to take the risk (non trivial example I would not do this no chance) b) Your family/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend has to buy into the risk even if it's just you going into the orbit. c) Potential negative publicity as in 'look how t…

The publicity aspect would deter some, but it would attract others. By the time even 20 people have gone up, it won't be newsworthy, and then it will just be like buying a yacht. There are about 1.5 million people in the US worth $10 million or more, which is about where you need to be to comfortably afford this type of thing now, and another 10 million or so single digit millionaires, many of whom would take a significant hit to net worth to go up. So I think the odds that you can get > 10K takers just in the USA are pretty much 100%. If you can put 10K people up with a solid safety record, then that number would probably go up to 100K to 1 million potential customers. The economy of scale at that level would probably drop the price to where most of the upper middle class is a potential customer. So I think this can work. Safety record is the key.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#159

Post by Axsuul »

Really clean launch! I think this was the first time a reusable rocket was landed with humans onboard? It must’ve fell 100k feet at the end in less than a minute which must’ve been nuts.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#160

Post by iso1631 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #109
iso1631 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like a throw towards the edge of orbit. It's nowhere near orbit. Orbit is about 10km of delta-v, then there's the reentry problem. Reaching the Karman line is about 2km of delta-v.

Walk before you run. I very much doubt Blue Origin intends to freeze rocket development after this launch. Blue Origin now has a successful manned flight under their belt, and a revenue stream. While it might surprise some here, Amazon started by selling just books... It feels like similar attitude comments on that would have been "They'll never compete with Walmart. Real retail stores sell all kinds of things."

20 yeas from founding to a suborbital demo flight, 15 years of development for the rocket itself. New Shephard will never make orbit, it's a dead end.

New Glenn would be great if it existed. As it stands it's likely to be eclipsed by Starship. B.O. are going to have to change into a whole new gear if they want to compete. I have far more confidence in rocketlab scaling upwards from electron than in Blue Origin scaling anywhere.

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