Public.BlueOrigin.Com
Jan 3rd, 2007 by Jonathan Goff
(via rocketforge.org) All I can say is wow. That’s a big peroxide powered VTVL vehicle, and definitely a beautiful flight. Hopefully we’ll be joining them and Armadillo in the not to distant future.
Hmmm, pretty shifty how it ended up on Rocketforge (no offense to Michael Mealling who runs a great site). But I guess that’s the nature of leaks official or unofficial. I guess it has to be Blue Origin (haven’t been able to run the video from my current computers, but I’ll swing by a PC later).
Can’t tell from the little bit I see, but the location is a lake bed with mountains in the background. Would that be Blackrock?
Nothing shifty about it, AIUI. Just somebody (probably a Blue Origin employee) announced it on an IRC gateway. The actual page itself seems to have been written by Jeff Bezos himself for public consumption, so it sounds like an “official leak”.
The launch site is definitely his site down in Texas though. He’s not working out of Black Rock.
~Jon
Wow. I was immediately reminded of this:
http://www.uchumaru.com/
http://www.spacefuturejapan.com/sfj_english.htm
Can Blue Origin launch an orbital flight from their launch site near Van Horn, TX while staying within the FAA’s “expected casualties” limit?
Well, the site is down. So I wonder how official it was.
Ok, I see the video on the Blue Origin site. I’ll shut up now.
This reminds me of the Clipper from the early 90′s.
Ok, so how much more engineer development before they can do a man flight to LEO?
To bad it’s not nuclear.
Just wanted to point out the typo in the URL linking from “wow” in the original post.
http://public.blueorgin.com/index.html
should be
http://public.blueorigin.com
Ok, so how much more engineer development before they can do a man flight to LEO?
You could stick it on top of a Proton. Not exactly safe for the crew but it would reach LEO.
It’s easy to reach LEO. Getting back is the hard part.
It’s easy to reach LEO. Getting back is the hard part.
I disagree. Look at the relative complexity of the Soyuz reentry capsule versus the complexity of the Soyuz rocket. You don’t need to assemble a few kilotons of fuel/oxidizer in your return vehicle. A machine shop could put the basic structure together (IMHO) especially if there was no serious weight restriction.
The engineering threshholds are another indication of the relative difficulty. The single biggest restriction on a reentry system is that you need to get it up there. Rockets are very much barely on the threshhold of viability with a huge amount of chemical propellant for very little payload. I suppose we’ve all heard of crazy approaches to get around that problem (nuclear propulsion is the tip of the iceberg).
Sorry guys. I’m not much for censorship, but anonymous comments with crude language go bye-bye. Keep it clean please. If you have an issue, and think we’re all a bunch of nuts or something, fine. But using crude language is a fast way to get a comment deleted.