Jeff Bezos’ spaceship misfires

[n2doc]

An unmanned spaceship funded by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos failed during a test flight last week, in a mishap described by the Wall Street Journal as an illustration of “the dramatic risks of private space ventures.”

“…(We) lost the vehicle…” Bezos wrote Friday on the website of Blue Origin, the Kent-based company he founded to build a new kind of rocket ship. He also posted some pictures of the doomed spacecraft.


“Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission,” Bezos wrote.

“(And) then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet.”

more
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/09/02/jeff-bezos’-spaceship-misfires/

[Trajan]

1. Oh shoot ....

THAT is the Blue Origin rocket ? .....



That design is doomed to fail .... The hazards of using rockets to 'soft land' on a consistent basis should be obvious ... ANY engine cutoff would be deadly, and rocket engines cut off often enough ....

It is similar to the McDonnell Douglas X33 'DC-XA' ...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyjiLWOS9Ps


The DC-XA wound up crashing during 'soft landing' ..... Imagine that .....

These rockets are reminiscent of the futuristic spacecraft imagined in the 50's ..... They could have starred in 'Forbidden Planet' ....

[bananas]

2. SpaceX Dragon lands the same way - retrorockets

They're designing these things to land anywhere,
the earth, moon, Mars, Phobos, etc.

[Trajan]

3. I dont think so ...

Dragon lands in water, aided by parachute ...

http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php

Dragon Highlights:

Fully autonomous rendezvous and docking with manual override capability in crewed configuration
6,000 kg (13,228 lbs) payload up-mass to LEO; 3,000 kg (6,614 lbs) payload down-mass
Payload Volume: 10 m3 (350 ft3) pressurized, 14 m3 (490 ft3) unpressurized
Supports up to 7 passengers in Crew configuration
Two-fault tolerant avionics system with extensive heritage
Reaction control system with 18 MMH/NTO thrusters designed and built in-house; these thrusters are used for both attitude control and orbital maneuvering
1290 kg of propellant supports a safe mission profile from sub-orbital insertion to ISS rendezvous to reentry
Integral common berthing mechanism, with LIDS or APAS support if required
Designed for water landing under parachute for ocean recovery
Lifting re-entry for landing precision & low-g’s
Ablative, high-performance heat shield and sidewall thermal protection

-snip


That is another aspect of the DC-X design that confounds - Where is the heat shield ? .... It still needs a heat shield for re-entry .... Imagine the difficulty of having workable engines BEHIND a hot heat shield .... I think the design of the Blue Origin spacecraft is a disaster ... It will never survive ...

[Orsino]

5. Phobos, at least, would be a different ball game.

That's near microgravity. You don't land on it; you dock with it.

[bananas]

6. "for the next generation of Dragon...propulsive landing"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2FpFZXWrvs

"And for the next generation of Dragon, we're actually going to step up the technology to a new level which is propulsive landing. So we'll have the parachutes there as a backup, so you can always pull the parachutes if there's a system malfunction and you'll be able to manually pull them so even if the electronics have gone all to Hell and there are holes in the craft is barely hanging together, you can still pull the parachutes and be safe. But in a normal case, it'll actually be able to land propulsively on it's engines with little landing legs that pop out."
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/07/08/pm-elon-musk-on-the-future-of-space-travel-and-exploration/

[bananas]

7. "the Dragon has a propulsion-based landing system"

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/07/13/7078446-spacex-chief-sets-his-sights-on-mars

13 Jul 2011
SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars
By Alan Boyle

<snip>

The shuttle is fairly constrained because it's a winged vehicle with a landing gear. It can't land anywhere except Earth, and even on Earth, it can land only on certain runways. It doesn't have any ability to go beyond Earth orbit. But because the Dragon has a propulsion-based landing system and a much more capable heatshield than the shuttle's, it can land anywhere in the solar system with a solid surface — as long as you can throw it there. The Falcon Heavy can throw it pretty much anywhere in the solar system.

<snip>

[caraher]

4. Maybe, but...

they lost this one not on landing but 8 miles up at supersonic speed. The landing system may not be the safest but that's not what hurt them this time.