Blue Origin's New Shepard launch & landing, 29 April 2018
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Very nice
Sooner Boomer
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The booster landing is noticeably different from that of SpaceX's. SpaceX's Falcon (as my flight instructor would have put it) "stops flying just as it touches the Earth"*. The NS hovers for a bit before touching down. Both are very impressive!
*his definition of a perfect landing...
*his definition of a perfect landing...
What was this a test of? I couldn't hear the video where I was watching so I apologize if it was covered there. Were there people in the capsule, or just another test of their landing? The capsule landing looked pretty hard, not something a human would have enjoyed.
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Unmanned, 2nd flight of booster and capsule. Some paying customers' microgravity experiements onboard.
Before anything carrying human beings can be certified, it has to undergo extensive tests, This is part of the process. The capsule is a version 2, with larger windows, one in front of each "customer. As for the landing, the capsule has a retro rocket pack, similar to the Russian capsules, that lights up just before touchdown, slowing the impact to 1 mph. The cloud of dust you saw is from the retro ignition, not the capsule impacting the ground.
Ah, thanks for that explanation. From watching the video and keeping an eye on the "speedometer" in the sidebar, it looked as if the landing was at 20mph. That looked unpleasant to me.
The tax dollars that SpaceX is getting is a fee from the government for launching satellites and resupplying the ISS. SpaceX is able to do these things WAY cheaper than the government agencies can, so they're actually saving the government money.
If Blue Origin can ever get anything into orbit maybe they can get paid to do so too.
boatgeek
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Blue Origin will get to orbit before too long--they wouldn't be building the BE-4 engine (550K lbs of thrust) or New Glenn rockets otherwise. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/01/blue-origin-be-4-engine-testing/ I don't really believe a 2020 launch for New Glenn, but I wouldn't think it's more than a couple of years beyond that.
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