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Blue Origin first human flight

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Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#401

Post by lostlogin »

aerovistae wrote: post #395
quijoteuniv wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people have better dreams. That is my dream.

Oh man, struggling to channel dang here. How to respond constructively. Probably the best thing to do is flag and ignore, but I can't pass this up. If people are interested in going somewhere, who are you to denigrate their ambitions? What is wrong with dreaming of orbiting the planet? How does that dream fall short? Is it a weak dream for a midwestern child, landlocked a thousand miles in every direction, to want to…

Oxfam’s Deepak Xavier vented about the billionaire-hobbies issue early this week.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-blast-s...

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#402

Post by darknavi »

caconym_ wrote: post #383
bob1029 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all of these space-faring corporations, SpaceX has orders of magnitude more aerospace infrastructure and assets to work with. Their entire ethos since inception was getting humanity to Mars, not sending a handful of wealthy people into suborbital trajectories. Elon/SpaceX have certainly participated in a lot of PR throughout, but it always seemed to be along an engineering axis, not some feel-good emotional ax…

BO has plenty of funding, and lofty ambitions far beyond New Shepard, but they just haven't made much progress toward achieving them. I haven't done the math, but it seems like Starship is potentially an incredibly cheap heavy lift rocket even in total or partial expendable modes, e.g if SpaceX fails to realize their full reusability goals. At this point, I think BO and others are only falling further behind.

It's worth noting that BO is much less open (pretty much the other end of the spectrum as SpaceX) about its progress.

We aren't really sure exactly how far along a lot of their projects are other than "not really close".

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#403

Post by sneak »

pantalaimon wrote: post #386
dolmen wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this raises the cost of capsule reuse because of transport back to the launch point.

Why not also have a launch facility at fiji? You could even book a return trip.

I imagine the geopolitical efforts involved in coordinating to allow passenger ICBM launches at major cities in the industrialized west is on the same order of the effort involved in designing and building starship itself.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#404

Post by gameswithgo »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #292
Ajedi32 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the dream; affordable space tourism for the masses. If Starship manages to hit the price and performance targets Musk has set for it (~$2 million/launch[1], max of 1000 passengers[2]) you could get a ticket to orbit for around $2000. Throw in some extra for profit margin, a stay at an orbital space hotel, and a few additional expenses, and it might well be possible to take a vacation in space for less than $10…

I hope people have better dreams. That is my dream.

i hope people quit being insufferable downers

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#405

Post by dcow »

pie420 wrote: post #313
fallingknife wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 signi…

The economics are just silly. 4 passengers at $250k each is only $1M in revenue per flight. Between fuel costs, rocket costs (even assuming 10x reuses per rocket, you'd need to build the rocket for significantly under $10M to have a chance at profitability, could you imagine building a rocket for under 10M?), engineer and employee salaries and benefits, advertising, liability, etc. Add in the fact that you have a ver…

I suspect their end goal is other funding whilst using the consumer space to launch their program and establish credibility.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#406

Post by gameswithgo »

rtkwe wrote: post #310
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.

I think it's pretty underwhelming and then is further diminished because it feels so much like Bezos and Branson just spending their obscene amounts of money to notch a win in this billionaire one upmanship game. First there was Bezos's Blue Origin crowing about their early launch and land success vs SpaceX like they were in a similar league of difficulty. Then with this you have Virgin Galactic coming out of seeming…

come on, our billionaires are spending money advancing space tech. what a grand improvement over billionaires bribing governments and having people slaughtered instead, as happens through much of the world and history. applaud this.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#407

Post by nimithryn »

iso1631 wrote: post #46
_fat_santa wrote: post #22

Seems that between Musk, Bezos and Branson, we have in essence restarted a space race but this time it's billionaires in the private sector versus governments. Some will surely say that they have better things to spend their money on (Bezos for sure) but I gave to say it's still mindblowing. I would imagine if you're one of those guys, you've basically have enough money to solve any problem, so these guys it seems ar…

Mentioning Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in the same breath as SpaceX seems disingenuous. It's like comparing an horse+cart with a modern car. Maybe Electron and Virgin Orbit are in the race, but these hop 100km (or 80!) up and about 5 miles downrange are nowhere near the same league.

The US was behind the USSR at the beginning of the last space race. Jeff Bezos is an extremely smart and talented guy, and is now focusing a lot more of his time on Blue Origin. I wouldn't count them out.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#408

Post by colordrops »

aerovistae wrote: post #395
quijoteuniv wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people have better dreams. That is my dream.

Oh man, struggling to channel dang here. How to respond constructively. Probably the best thing to do is flag and ignore, but I can't pass this up. If people are interested in going somewhere, who are you to denigrate their ambitions? What is wrong with dreaming of orbiting the planet? How does that dream fall short? Is it a weak dream for a midwestern child, landlocked a thousand miles in every direction, to want to…

Everyone is required to fix the worlds problems before doing anything else. At least that is how the thinking goes, which is absurd in most cases. Though there is some nuance here considering Bezos' absolute detestable behavior climbing on the backs of abused workers to get to this point.

It's an old story, as expressed by Dr. Seuss in his story Yertle the Turtle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_St...

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#409

Post by awrence »

samstave wrote: post #339
Ajedi32 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the dream; affordable space tourism for the masses. If Starship manages to hit the price and performance targets Musk has set for it (~$2 million/launch[1], max of 1000 passengers[2]) you could get a ticket to orbit for around $2000. Throw in some extra for profit margin, a stay at an orbital space hotel, and a few additional expenses, and it might well be possible to take a vacation in space for less than $10…

But for a $10k vacation, you get to sleep in a bed, order room service, go outside, go golfing, see a show, etc. 10k in space will get you what? --- Random thought: If they were able to get enough water into space such that one could swim through a sphere of water in a weightless environment, what would the sensation of being encapsulated in water while weightless feel like (clearly needing scuba or some other air co…

Random reply:

Or you can stay here on earth, go scuba diving and experience the exact same weightlessness... :)

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#410

Post by zzzeek »

aerovistae wrote: post #395
quijoteuniv wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people have better dreams. That is my dream.

Oh man, struggling to channel dang here. How to respond constructively. Probably the best thing to do is flag and ignore, but I can't pass this up. If people are interested in going somewhere, who are you to denigrate their ambitions? What is wrong with dreaming of orbiting the planet? How does that dream fall short? Is it a weak dream for a midwestern child, landlocked a thousand miles in every direction, to want to…

it's an entirely appropriate dream for a child. for a society with enormous intractable problems such as global warming, income inequality, and fascism, it's pretty lame.
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