Category Archives: spacex

Blue Origins, space flight, space-age technology, spacex

Blue Origin brings Science Fiction to Life

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The Reusable Rocket is Now a Reality

Blue Origins after its historic landing back at the launch site in Texas. Courtesy Blue Origin.
Blue Origins after its historic landing back at the launch site in Texas. Courtesy Blue Origin.

The folks at Blue Origin made science fiction come to life  on November 23rd with the launch of the New Shepard space vehicle. It’s designed to launch, deploy its crew capsule payload, and then land safely back on its retractable legs. The test, which took place in Texas, looked almost too easy — but it showed that reusable rockets are here to stay, and that’s a HUGE advance in spacecraft engineering in the current round of development.

Settling a rocket back onto the ground “bottom first” on its retractable legs is not an easy task. It can be blown off course if winds kick up, and of course, there are the technical challenges of making sure all the rockets and electronics work in synchrony to guide the rocket back down over a narrow path. As you can see from the picture, the rocket did fine, landing right on the pad, with only a few burn marks on its rear end to show for its trouble.

Watch this video of the test provided by the Blue Origin team. It’s very cool.

Anybody who has read science fiction or seen SF movies with rockets routinely settling back to Earth after their journeys will recognize the beauty of what Jeff Bezos’s team has achieved. It’s another step into making space more accessible, particularly inspiring after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet a few years ago. In the first Space Race, there wasn’t the time to properly develop the “land the rocket back on the ground” capability, although there were early tests of reusable rockets with the DC-X by the folks at McDonnell-Douglas in the 1990s (thanks to Aldo Spadoni for pointing that out). But, the expendable rocket carried through all the world’s launches. Today, that’s changing — why throw away rockets if you can save money by safely reusing them? That’s what this test (and SpaceX’s tests) are trying to prove.

This test took place at the Blue Origin test site in Texas, and the missile reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 meters). At that altitude, the crew capsule separated from the rocket and deployed parachutes for safe landing. The rocket then reversed course and settled back onto the pad in an amazing controlled landing.

So, this is a game-changer for space flight. It means that rockets can be re-used. After a thorough set of test flights like this one, Blue Origin’s vehicle can begin taking astronauts to space for a wide selection of crewed missions. This is something that the SpaceX team (led by Elon Musk) also is trying to do, but their attempted landings on a floating barge have been unsuccessful. The last one saw their rocket get back to the barge, but in the last few seconds, the vehicle blew over.  Since SpaceX has a contract with NASA to provide crew launch capabilities with its rocket, this latest test ups the ante in the private business space race.  Stay tuned!

astronomy, launch failures, spacex

We Choose to Do These Things Not Because They Are Easy

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But Because They Are Hard

Explosion of the Falcon booster carrying supplies to the International Space Station. Courtesy NASA.
Explosion of the Falcon booster carrying supplies to the International Space Station. Courtesy NASA.

By now, most everybody has heard that the SpaceX tried to launch the Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo capsule on a resupply mission to the International Space Station and that the booster blew up just over 2 minutes into flight. The details are still coming in, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more reports with information as soon as the launch crew can assemble and understand them.

I’m not going to supply much commentary about what actually happened; that’s what the launch experts will do. It’s certainly a sad day, particularly for the folks at SpaceX and NASA, but also for a group of students whose Cubesat experiment was on its second try (their first one was destroyed in last October’s Orbital Sciences Mission disaster). There were other experiments and pieces of equipment aboard, and those are now a total loss.

I’ve seen a lot of people commenting on social media now, making unfounded accusations, making statements that belie a lack of understanding of just how tough it is to launch things into space and how SpaceX and NASA and others handle the  news of these events. Belligerence doesn’t uncover facts. Patient, scientific investigation will tell us the story. For the folks who want to rant and rave, think about this: if it happened to YOU and your company, would you want people saying about YOU what YOU have said about this mishap today? Think a little before you post rantings, people.

Apparently, people also don’t read history too much. Everybody who has ever tried to launch something has faced failures. Most of the time, those failures resulted in the loss of the craft, but they also taught us something about the complexity of launch.  A few times, we’ve lost people in those failures, and those disasters taught us a deeper lesson about exploration and the human will to expand our horizons and how gawdawful it is when lives full of promise are lost in the attempt to do something big and important.

At least today, no one’s life was lost. The mission hardware is a loss, but the lessons learned will be used to pick ourselves up and try again. If you don’t believe me, do some reading about the early days of the American space program. Put yourself in the boots of the Russians, who have had their share of problems; or in the place of the Arianespace people, who also know the bitter taste of launch failure, but have gone on to more success. Everyone who launches faces failure, while hoping for success.

In short, as I say in the headline, and echoing the words of the late President John F. Kennedy, who spoke them while I was still a tiny child:  “We do these things… not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”  And, launching is hard. No matter how many times I’ve watched a launch (and I’ve seen a LOT of them), the knowledge that something can go wrong is never far from our minds. A lot of things go right, and when they do, we get amazing knowledge about ourselves, our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. We didn’t lose the universe today and we didn’t lose ourselves. A launch vehicle failed. But, another one will take its place, and we’ll move on and upwards.