Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: Blue Origin relaunches rocket and lands it again

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: January 23, 2016 at 7:53:16 PM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Blue Origin relaunches rocket and lands it again

Blue Origin relaunches rocket and lands it again
Emilee Speck
Contact Reporter

Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos relaunch used New Shepard rocket, land it again
The same Blue Origin rocket launched and landed in November has taken a second flight, CEO Jeff Bezos announced Friday night.
The New Shepard rocket flew to the edge of space at 333,582 feet before returning both crew capsule and booster for a controlled ground landing in Texas, according to the release.
Bezos tweeted "can a used rocket fly?" Friday night with the official announcement and a video.
The commercial space company launched and landed the very same New Shepard rocket less than two months ago. In December, SpaceX became the first company to launch and land a rocket during a orbital mission. Now Blue Origin is the first to relaunch a used sub-orbital rocket.
In preparation for Friday's launch the crew capsule parachutes were replaced as well as the pyro igniters. Blue Origin conducted functional and avionics checkouts, and made several software improvements, according to the news release.
One very important software update was made to allow for a smoother landing, by targeting the center of the pad and setting down where it needs to instead of making unnecessary correction so close to landing.
From the announcement:
"It's like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don't swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline."
The video also shows the crew capsule separation and touch down in West Texas. The capsule parachute deploys slowing it down from 15 mph to 3 mph before landing.
In September, the Amazon-billionaire announced plans for a $200 million factory and launch complex at the old Launch Complex 26 site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The complex will help bring 330 jobs to the Space Coast starting in the next few years.
Bezos and Blue Origin's goal is to see people "living and working in space" and "You can't get there by throwing the hardware away."
New Shepard will be launched and landed again and again this year, said Bezos.
Copyright © 2016, Orlando Sentinel

Launch. Land. Repeat: Blue Origin posts video of New Shepard's Friday flight
by Brian Berger — January 23, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=74tyedGkoUc
Blue Origin launch and landed its New Shepard reusable launch vehicle Friday (Jan. 22) at its West Texas test facility. The notoriously secretive company did not announce the mission ahead of time, but FAA airspace restrictions pointed to a Friday or Saturday attempt.
The company posted a video Friday of the launch and landing .
"The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse," Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "This time, New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582 feet (101.7 kilometers) before both capsule and booster gently returned to Earth for recovery and reuse."
Here's his full statement:
The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse. This time, New Shepard reached an apogee of 333,582 feet (101.7 kilometers) before both capsule and booster gently returned to Earth for recovery and reuse.
Data from the November mission matched our preflight predictions closely, which made preparations for today's re-flight relatively straightforward. The team replaced the crew capsule parachutes, replaced the pyro igniters, conducted functional and avionics checkouts, and made several software improvements, including a noteworthy one. Rather than the vehicle translating to land at the exact center of the pad, it now initially targets the center, but then sets down at a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning. It's like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don't swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline. Our Monte Carlo sims of New Shepard landings show this new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle's ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds.
Though wings and parachutes have their adherents and their advantages, I'm a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing. Why? Because — to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space — we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well. When you do a vertical landing, you're solving the classic inverted pendulum problem, and the inverted pendulum problem gets a bit easier as the pendulum gets a bit bigger. Try balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger. Now try it with a broomstick. The broomstick is simpler because its greater moment of inertia makes it easier to balance. We solved the inverted pendulum problem on New Shepard with an engine that dynamically gimbals to balance the vehicle as it descends. And since New Shepard is the smallest booster we will ever build, this carefully choreographed dance atop our plume will just get easier from here. We're already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it's still many times larger than New Shepard. I hope to share details about this first orbital vehicle this year.
Also this year, we'll start full-engine testing of the BE-4 and launch and land our New Shepard rocket – again and again. If you want to stay up to date with all the interesting work that our team is doing, sign up for email updates at www.blueorigin.com/interested.
Gradatim Ferociter!
Jeff Bezos

Blue Origin reflies New Shepard suborbital vehicle
by Jeff Foust — January 23, 2016

Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle lands at the company's West Texas test site after a suborbital flight Jan. 22. Credit: Blue Origin
WASHINGTON — Blue Origin successfully launched and landed Jan. 22 the same New Shepard vehicle that flew in November, a demonstration of the vehicle's reusability and the latest round of one-upmanship in its rivalry with SpaceX.
The suborbital New Shepard vehicle took off from Blue Origin's test site in West Texas early Jan. 22 and reached a peak altitude of 101.7 kilometers. The vehicle's conical crew capsule separated and parachuted to a soft landing, while the cylindrical propulsion module made a powered vertical landing on a landing pad several kilometers from the launch site.
"The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse," company founder Jeff Bezos wrote in a blog post late Jan. 22. The von Karman line, an altitude of 100 kilometers, is a commonly used, although not universally accepted, boundary of space.
The same vehicle also flew a suborbital flight on Nov. 23 from the same site, reaching a peak altitude of 100.5 kilometers. That flight was the first time the vehicle's propulsion module made a successful powered landing, after a hydraulic problem prevented a landing during an April flight.
Bezos' post was the company's first acknowledgement of the test flight. The company provided no advance notice of the test, a practice it has followed in earlier test flights. A temporary flight restriction published by the Federal Aviation Administration Jan. 21, limiting access to airspace around the test site for two days for "space flight operations," was the only official hint of an impending test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=74tyedGkoUc
That November test escalated an existing a rivalry with SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk. After that test, Bezos tweeted a link to the video and called New Shepard "the rarest of beasts – a used rocket." Musk objected in a series of tweets, noting low-altitude vertical landing tests of SpaceX's Grasshopper vehicle as well as the differences between suborbital and orbital flight.
On Dec. 21, SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, ten minutes after liftoff on a mission to deliver 11 Orbcomm satellites into orbit. The stage is significantly larger than the New Shepard propulsion module and traveled much higher. "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage," Bezos tweeted after the flight. "Welcome to the club!"
The latest New Shepard flight is the first time a vehicle that flew at least suborbitally and made a powered vertical landing repeated that feat. While SpaceX performed a test firing of the landed Falcon 9 stage on its Cape Canaveral pad Jan. 15, Musk said in December there were no plans to refly this stage.
New Shepard is not the first reusable suborbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, made three flights to altitudes of at least 100 kilometers in 2004, including two within a week in late September and early October that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The U.S. Air Force's X-15 made 199 flights between 1959 and 1968, including back-to-back flights in 1963 that flew to altitudes above 105 kilometers.
Both SpaceShipOne and X-15 were winged vehicles, launched from aircraft and gliding back to runway landings. Bezos, though, wrote in his blog post that the vertical landings demonstrated by New Shepard are preferable to wings or parachutes. "Because — to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space — we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well," he wrote.
Bezos subtly suggested that the powered landing performed by New Shepard was a more difficult achievement than SpaceX's Falcon 9 landing last month. "And since New Shepard is the smallest booster we will ever build, this carefully choreographed dance atop our plume will just get easier from here," he wrote.
Blue Origin is working on an orbital launch vehicle. The company has disclosed little information about the vehicle, but at an event at Cape Canaveral in September to announce the company's plans to build and launch rockets there, the company showed illustrations of a two-stage rocket whose first stage featured landing legs to enable a landing. Bezos wrote that he hopes to provide more details about that vehicle later this year.
Not everyone, though, agrees with Blue Origin's preference with vertical landings. "Our spaceship comes back and lands on wheels. Theirs don't," Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, said of competition with Blue Origin and SpaceX during an interview with CNBC Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Branson was referring to SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's suborbital vehicle, which like SpaceShipOne is air-launched and glides to a runway landing. The company plans to unveil in February a second SpaceShipTwo vehicle, replacing one destroyed in an October 2014 test flight accident.
"People will have a choice of which spaceships they want to use to get to space," Branson said. "Because ours is shaped like an airplane, we hope to do point-to-point travel one day. Theirs is not."

© 2016 SpaceNews, Inc. All rights reserved.

Blue Origin Launches Rocket Into Space and Lands It Safely for 2nd Time
by Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor | January 23, 2016 01:11pm ET
Blue Origin has done it again. The private spaceflight company has launched a private rocket into space and landed it back on Earth. And as a bonus, Blue Origin reused the same rocket from its first launch-landing test flight.
"Launch. Land. Repeat," company officials wrote in a statement announcing the epic space feat on Friday (Jan. 22). The statement accompanied a spectacular video of the Blue Origin launch and landing.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket approaches landing at the company's West Texas landing pad on Jan. 22, 2016 during a launch and landing test flight. It was the second flight for this New Shepard booster.

Credit: Blue Origin
Blue Origin's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos announced the test flight success in a blog post, revealing that it used the same suborbital New Shepard rocket and crew capsule the company launched and landed last year. Both flights launched from and landed at the company's proving grounds in West Texas. [See more photos of Blue Origin's test flight]
"The very same New Shepard booster that flew above the Karman line and then landed vertically at its launch site last November has now flown and landed again, demonstrating reuse," Bezos wrote. The Karman Line is the widely recognized border between Earth and space, about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and capsule lift off from a West Texas launch pad during a suborbital test flight on Jan. 22, 2016.

Credit: Blue Origin
Would you ride Blue Origin's private spaceship the New Shepard on a suborbital space trek?
Blue Origin is one of several commercial spaceflight companies pursuing reusable rocket and spacecraft technology to dramatically lower the cost of space travel. In Blue Origin's case, the company aims to launch passengers into space on its New Shepard spacecraft, which will seat six people.
Blue Origin made history last year when its New Shepard booster launched into suborbital space and returned to Earth. That Nov. 23 test flight reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (62.4 miles or 100.5 km). The Jan. 22 flight went a bit higher 333,582 feet (63.2 miles or 101.7 km) "before both capsule and booster gently returned to Earth for recovery and reuse," Bezos wrote in the statement.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and crew capsule are suborbital spacecraft, meaning that they can launch into space, but cannot orbit the Earth. The New Shepard booster is designed to launch and land vertically, while its crew capsule separates in space and returns to Earth to make a parachute landing.
Another private company, Blue Origin's rival SpaceX founded by Elon Musk, has successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket - which does fly all the way into orbit - in the pursuit of reusable rocket technology. SpaceX aims to launch, land and reuse a Falcon 9 booster sometime this year. The company already tried to land a Falcon 9 once this year during a Jan. 17 flight, but a landing leg failed to latch securely, causing the rocket to tip over and explode after touching down on a drone ship platform.
In his statement, Bezos wrote that there are some compelling reasons why Blue Origin is pursuing vertical launch and landings as its approach to reusable spaceflight systems.
The crew capsule for Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft makes a soft landing with parachutes and retro rockets in West Texas during a Jan. 22, 2016 test flight.

Credit: Blue Origin
"Though wings and parachutes have their adherents and their advantages, I'm a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing," Bezos wrote. "Why? Because — to achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space — we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing architecture scales extraordinarily well."
According to Bezos, New Shepard may be the smallest rocket Blue Origin has flown, but it the foundation for ever-larger and more capable reusable space vehicles. The company plans to launch and land New Shepard "again and again" this year while also beginning full-up testing of its new, more powerful BE-4 rocket engine. New Shepard uses a single BE-3 engine for launches and landings, Bezos added.
"We're already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle," Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it's still many times larger than New Shepard. I hope to share details about this first orbital vehicle this year."

Blue Origin's New Shepard Rocket Lands Again: 2nd Test Flight Photos
2016, January, 23 10:07
On Jan. 22, 2016, the private spaceflight company Blue Origin launched and landed its New Shepard rocket and crew capsule in a successful test flight that also reused a spaceflown rocket. See images from the test flight here.
http://www.space.com/31718-blue-origin-new-shepard-rocket-2nd-flight-photos.html

Blue Origin Booster Reused! Lands Safely After 2nd Launch | Video
2016, January, 23 06:44
On Jan 22nd, 2016, the private spaceflight company launched its New Shepard booster and capsule to an altitude of 333,582 feet (101.7 km).
http://www.space.com/31716-blue-origin-booster-reused-lands-safely-after-2nd-launch-video.html

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