NASA and the Private Sector - Page 119

COLORADO SPRINGS — Standing against the backdrop of his New Shepard rocket booster and a full-scale mock capsule for carrying humans into space, Jeff Bezos revealed on Wednesday that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.

Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, showed off the reusable rocket booster and the mock-up of the capsule that will take people up for panoramic views back down at earth, during a symposium here.

Mr. Bezos, who hopes to build Blue Origin into a commercial and tourist venture, also disclosed that it would cost about $2.5 billion to develop an even bigger rocket, New Glenn, capable of lifting satellites and, eventually, people into orbit.

Like his fellow technology titan Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Bezos has identified reusable rocket parts as a key to lowering the price of admission to the field, which he said on Wednesday would lead to a “golden age of space exploration.”

“If we can make access to space low-cost, then entrepreneurs will be unleashed,” he said. “You will see creativity, you will see dynamism, you will see the same thing in space that I’ve witnessed on the internet in the last 20 years.”

Last month, Mr. Bezos announced the first-paying customer, Eutelstat, a satellite company, for New Glenn, whose commercial flights would help offset costs. New Glenn is expected to fly by 2020, he said, but humans will not be passengers on the heavy-lift rocket until many years after that.

Mr. Bezos has repeatedly expressed caution about setting timetables for the start of Blue Origin’s commercial or passenger trips, and he did not diverge from that on Wednesday. He would not say when New Shepard would undergo its next round of test flights, or set a specific date as a goal, merely mentioning next year for possible tourist trips.

“It’s a mistake to race to a deadline when you’re talking about a flying vehicle, especially one that you’re going to put people on,” he said. “I still think we can do commercial paying passengers in 2018.”

Asked how much passengers would pay, Mr. Bezos said he did not know yet, but he predicted ticket prices would decline as spaceflight became more common. (Hundreds of people have already put down deposits to reserve places on similar commercial trips on Virgin Galactic that could cost $250,000 a ticket, although that company’s spaceplane has yet to take anyone up.)

New Shepard is a modest start for Mr. Bezos’s ambitions to tap into the nascent space tourism market. It is a single-stage booster with a capsule on top that is designed to carry six passengers at a time on trips of about 10 to 11 minutes.

There will not be a Blue Origin crew on the spacecraft. Passengers wearing sleek jumpsuits will be able to peer out what the company says will be the largest windows in space, taking up about one-third of the surface area of the dome.

About 12 feet in diameter, the passenger capsule holds six black seats that resemble recliners, with panels offering details about altitude and other features of a trip.

The engine that powers the booster produces up to about 110,000 pounds of thrust.

On ascent, passengers will experience forces of about 3 Gs, about three times the normal force of gravity that humans experience on earth. When the booster reaches a certain altitude, the capsule will detach and coast above the Karman line, which is 62 miles above sea level, officially entering into space.

There, the passengers will experience about four to five minutes of weightlessness. They can unbuckle their harnesses and do somersaults, if desired, in the padded-dome interior.

On descent, they will encounter forces of 5 Gs.

The capsule will parachute back to the plains of West Texas, slowing to a coasting speed of about 20 miles per hour, while the booster drops and fires its engine to slow down and make a vertical landing. The capsule slows to 3 m.p.h. before touching down. Both pieces are reusable to make the trips more economical.

“Reusability is the key to getting millions of people living and working in space,” Mr. Bezos said.

While the concept is similar to the procedures SpaceX has used to recover the boosters for its Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX’s endeavors have been far more challenging, because the boosters must accelerate to speeds of thousands of miles per hour in order to put payloads on a trajectory to reach orbit. Just last week, SpaceX successfully launched a satellite into space with a reused booster, a first for commercial spaceflight.

New Shepard has a simpler flight path: just up and down, almost like a big roller coaster that slows to a stop at the top of its arc.

However, Mr. Bezos and his Blue Origin team believe that New Shepard, which is expected to fly many times, will give the company ample practice and experience that can be applied to New Glenn, which will be manufactured and launched in Florida.

The New Shepard booster on display at the Colorado symposium made five successful up-and-down flights beginning in November 2015.

Its last flight, in October, included a test of an emergency-abort system that is designed to blast the capsule — and, eventually, passengers — to safety in case something goes wrong with the booster.

The abort system worked. To the pleasant surprise of the engineers, the booster survived the force of separation, righted itself and descended to a landing. (It would have still been considered a successful test if the booster had crashed.)

A Virgin Galactic test flight in 2014 crashed, killing one pilot and severely injuring the other.

Both Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk have much more ambitious goals beyond their current rockets. Mr. Musk wants to send settlers to Mars. Mr. Bezos has said his long-term vision involves having millions of people living and working in space.

On April 08 2017 07:31 LegalLord wrote:
SpaceX claims to have saved 50% on the first stage in refurbishing rather than building from scratch. It goes without saying that I'm skeptical of that claim (they aren't public so if they lied no one would know) - but if it's true, then good job.

Between November 2015, and October 2016, the reusable New Shepard rocket and spacecraft made five suborbital flights, surviving some pretty harsh scenarios. But during the last six months, Blue Origin, the semi-secretive rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has not flown any new vehicles. So what has it been up to?

This week, the company brought the rocket that made those five flights to the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado and displayed it along with a mockup of the spacecraft that will eventually begin carrying customers on 11-minute suborbital flights. Bezos said he was not ready to disclose a price yet or sell tickets, but these consumer flights remain on track for sometime in 2018.

The original rocket has been retired and will likely go on a road show before ending up in a museum. To find out what has been happening behind the scenes with the second iteration of the New Shepard rocket, Ars spoke with Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson. He said the company's engineers have learned a lot of "little lessons" from the test flights of the New Shepard module in late 2015 and early 2016.

For example, the "ring fins" at the top of the vehicle, which help control its descent through the atmosphere, are part of the leading edge of the vehicle as it comes back to Earth. Originally, the company had applied ablative thermal protection to the bottom of these (the material can be seen browning over time in this descent video). "We had to go and repair that in between flights, and it was a pretty labor-intensive activity," Meyerson said, requiring dozens to hundreds of hours of sanding and smoothing. Blue Origin has since begun using a metallic panel to shield this area.

After making a few dozen fixes and modifications to the New Shepard system, Blue Origin is now building three operational propulsion modules and two crew capsules. A testing program will begin by "late summer or early this fall," Meyerson said. After uncrewed test flights, "test passengers" could be added early in 2018 before customer flights later in the year—if all goes as planned.

On April 11 2017 04:08 LegalLord wrote:
- Talks about certain deficiencies in Russian space programs (I talked about them before) but notes that they basically have every kind of progress they need - just to fix certain issues including manufacturing failures in Proton. Trying to expand use of commercial space launches within Russia.

A couple of years ago we told you about a future project from startup SpaceVR that would send virtual reality cameras into orbit in order bring back immersive space video to VR users on Earth.

On Friday, I held that future in my very hands, and it felt like most space bound objects — surprisingly clunky, but packed with all the mystery and promise of the universe.

During a meeting in Los Angeles, SpaceVR's CEO, Ryan Holmes, allowed me hold his space baby, a large thermos-sized device that houses eight cameras (four cameras on each end). Those cameras will capture two to three hours of 360-degree footage per month over the course of nine months. After nine months, the device will fall back to Earth and burn up during re-entry.

The footage will be recovered while the device is in orbit via X and S band microwave radio transmissions.

To get the device into low Earth orbit, the company will ride one of SpaceX's launches in August.

But getting to hitch a ride with SpaceX takes a good deal of cash, more than the company's initial Kickstarter could possibly raise (that campaign ultimately raised just over $100,000). To that end, last year, SpaceVR raised $1.25 million, the majority of its funding, from China's Shanda Group. Additional funding just came from HTC Vive's recently announced VR for Impact fund, which is dedicated to investing in VR projects that are designed to have a positive impact on society.