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Blue Origin first human flight

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Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#481

Post by ragebol »

nimithryn wrote: post #407
iso1631 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bezos is a businessman, rockets require engineering.

Sure, he studied electrical engineering in the 80s, but I don't think that's going to help Blue Origin catch up with it's main competitor.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#482

Post by Paradigma11 »

afavour wrote: post #338
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what "trickle down" technology looks like. We are watching space flight move a rung down the economic ladder. Nation states -> wealthy bigco -> billionare's pet project -> ????? -> normal people (some steps omitted for brevity)

But what’s the actual purpose? Space tourism I get. But beyond that I’m struggling to see the uses of normal people having access to space travel. By comparison people having access to air travel has clear benefits.

Engineering and industry. Even small companies will be able to do innovation using microgravity, no gravity.

I am also sure that you could do cool sports events on the moon or a big space station.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#483

Post by iso1631 »

hinkley wrote: post #254
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.

What are the delta V's for a ballistic trajectory taking off in Texas an landing off the coast of Morocco? France? Western Australia? Hawaii? You don't need to go all the way around to have a story. Low earth orbit is apparently around 84 minutes per revolution. There's a lot of space in the middle for ballistic orbits of 5-15 minutes, right? We got in a rocket in Texas and had a light dinner on a yacht off Morocco 9…

If that's your goal than Virgin Galactic, which can take off from far more places in more weather conditions, is more attractive. Or you could use a Dragon capsule on an F9 which can do the job reliably today.

For a 2,400km downrange though you'd need 4.2k of delta-v (a Thor IRBM). You'll be reaching a 450km apogee too. Forget Hawaii and Morocco, you won't even make Seattle from Dallas.

You'll need 5.6k to get to places like Hong Kong and Israel, with an apogee of 1500km. That's 3 times the New Shepard.

(delta-v calc from https://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/ABM/DeltaV_BMs.htm)

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#484

Post by iso1631 »

double0jimb0 wrote: post #127
gameswithgo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understanding the difference between orbital and suborbital space flight need not cause one to be cynical and negative about things. Especially since blue origin has a design that can scale up quickly, as SpaceX did with falcon 1 to 9

“Scale up”, a software term that has almost zero value when translated to aerospace engineering.

"Scale up" is fine once you have a working design and can just pup out copies of that design by the dozen with mass production - what SpaceX is doing with Raptors (and did with Merlins) for example.

You need the demand to make that worthwhile though.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#485

Post by iso1631 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #465
machiaweliczny wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will see how Elon's 100 of Starships per year will affect costs of transport to space.

I suspect that as they scale up their costs will increase due to logistics and maintenance costs not necessarily scaling linearly with launches. Furthermore, I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up and hence costs associated with launch failures also increase.

> I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up

So you're saying that after say the initial 100 launches

Launch 100-199 would have 5 failures

Launch 200-299 would have 7 failures

Launch 300-399 would have 10 failures

Why?

Generally doing more of something reduces the cost per something. Why do you think the inverse will hold with spacex?

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#486

Post by iso1631 »

nimithryn wrote: post #407
iso1631 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the US was behind Russia at the end of the last space race, as Americans had to take Russian rockets to even get to orbit

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#487

Post by Chris2048 »

courtf wrote: post #471
Chris2048 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear those complaints, but aside from a snarky "then spend your own money on then", they fail mention: - anyone can spend money on things, if enough sub-billionaires spend money on something the same amount can be raised - there's no reason a billionaire needs to do it. On the other hand, large focused projects like this are arguably harder to crowdfund from a management perspective. - The governments is richer tha…

It's not really about the individual billionaires, that's missing the forest for the trees. That individuals can afford glamor rides to the edge of space in personal rockets is merely a symptom of gross inequality that has many more downsides than upsides. Life expectancy is dropping, climate change is accelerating and while we can't solely blame any individual billionaire, they have as a group profited astronomicall…

> from the collapse of our institutions and middle classes, and from the wholesale destruction of livelihoods during the pandemic

How are billionaires on the hook for these things?

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#488

Post by rvz »

dang wrote: post #480
rvz wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its more like that the parent comment ultimately 'invited' (and started) this so-called flamewar you are accusing me of. Dismissing the achievements of a certain project to only bring up somebody else's one and promote this clear bias is how flamewars start. I'm only just putting out the fires and celebrating the achievements of every other company competing and launching their rockets into 'space'.

Whatever the objection you have to the GP comment, you took a huge step (several huge steps) further into flamewar with your reply. Not cool; please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to ask you repeatedly about this in the past. Would you please do a better job of sticking to the site guidelines? I don't want to ban you but some of these cases are pretty clear-cut.

> we've had to ask you repeatedly about this in the past. Would you please do a better job of sticking to the site guidelines?

Sure OK, I will do better at sticking to the site guidelines.

But what is also clear in the comments of the post and especially the top comment that most users were replying to, after reading the site guidelines they have completely violated this guideline in [0]:

> In comments:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

You may disagree with this, but I see that as a known repeated symptom of creating 'flamewars' for other posts. I will be part of the 'good critical comment' club and do better at following the guidelines, rather than being the one posting shallow dismissals and flamebait at other people's work because they are a fan of someone else.

And as always, making my comment substantive. Not less.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#489

Post by dolmen »

renewiltord wrote: post #123
drcongo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a special kind of awful person to think that this is the hard problem they should solve with their billions.

Well, a million of us have more money than each of them and instead of exploring space or feeding the poor, I (a member of the million) am going to choose to buy a MacBook Pro. Our collective $2 billion is going to go to consumer devices.

Worse: money is going to ephemeral people experiences. Restaurant, Dinseyland, theater, Netflix. And many of them have a negative environmental impact.

Re: Blue Origin first human flight

#490

Post by Seanambers »

zzzeek wrote: post #410
aerovistae wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a quirk of evolution that this kind of thinking is around. This defeatist unwillingnes to do. Imagine if man had never ventured from Africa, or from the trees to the savannah - I bet even back then there were those who chose to stay behind. Where are they now?

There is something so unimaginative about this kind of thinking it's really off putting.

As a society one should always strive to do better in all areas, not only in the areas you deem worthy.

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