Blue Origin Nails Abort Test
Blue Origin Completes New Shepard Abort Test (with video and screen shots)
“Blue Origin just completed an apparently flawless in-flight aboard of its New Shepard launch vehicle. The capsule separated and made a perfect landing. The booster continued, undaunted, to space and then made a textbook landing.”
An extraordinary test, solid engineering, a lot of gained data and total mission success. You cannot ask more from this rocket, it really earned a good museum retirement!
Post landing the booster was a little roughed up (a small fire + listing a little), and the performance of the SRM was somewhat erratic (thus the big oscillations). This looks totally survivable though, and there is a lot of valuable data to process.
Many congratulations to Blue for this. Gradatim ferociter!
I remember seeing paint fires like that on the old DC-X in some of its video.
> thus the big oscillations
They did look pretty big and fast. It would be interesting to see the accelerometer data from the capsule.
They published fhe time and velocity so the acceleration can be figured. About 2 gees eyeballs out. Not comfortable but not dangerous.
That is one tough booster! What a flight! Congratulations to Blue Origins!
That capsule looked like it had a pretty hard hit on landing. The commentators mentioned retro rockets on the capsule before landing, but I didn’t see them go. Did I miss them or did they not fire?
I believe the landing method is similar to how the Russians land on land and the rockets firing were what caused the dirt to blow into the air when it landed.
Descent speed under parachute was 15 mph, if it hit the ground at that speed it would be like a fast bicycle crash. The retro-rockets only fire for a fraction of a second, to reduce touchdown speed to something more like 3 mph.
Beautiful test.
As a passenger I suspect I would puke myself silly, but at least I would be alive to appreciate it.
SpaceX had better watch their back….
I don’t think they have to.
http://i.imgur.com/KPLHqiD.jpg
Actually is looks like Boeing is going to race them to Mars 🙂
http://money.cnn.com/2016/1…
“Sorry, Elon Musk! Boeing says it will win race to Mars”
But Jeff Bezos interests have always been for the Gerard O’Neill vision of space settlements and factories.
Good thing is that it looks like everyone is starting to move on beyond NASA.
” Good thing is that it looks like everyone is starting to move on beyond NASA.”
Bingo.
Elon won’t be able to stand the fact that the spotlight isn’t on him.
Expect a SX Press Release of some insignificance in 3…. 2….. 1…..
We’ve always heard “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”. It’s nice to see what a couple of guys with a lot of bucks are able to do. It’s as if reality is finally catching up with Sci-Fi. Of course still a long ways to go, but at least we are finally starting to see what until now was only imagined.
Am I the only one out there that had a twinge of disappointment that the booster did survive? BO was saying they fully expected the booster not to survive (some reports used words like “Shredded”). Given THAT context, I found myself watching and NOT chanting (in my head) “don’t blow up, don’t blow up” for once (I’ve had the unfortunate luck of watching Challenger live, and having my son watch his first live rocket launch with Antares going the RUD route).
I dunno.. I’m really happy it didn’t, but it was like watching a great fireworks show w/o the grand finale happening.
Amazing, beautiful. Love the Blue Origin design.
How far did the crew capsule land from the launch pad? I haven’t seen anything indicating that the Blue Origin capsule floats or is designed for a water landing. Won’t the unpredictability of a parachute descent make tourist flights from Kennedy/Canaveral unlikely?
All of their suborbital tourism launches / landings will be at that Texas facility.
Watch the video again , and pay attention to the moments just after the abort booster ignited at capsule separation for the 2-second escape maneuver. Use slow-mo or still frame , and see if you saw what I saw live: the capsule swapping ends and lurching rather very violently , very quickly, before it straightened out along the escape vector.
The ” official” Blue Origin condensed video at YouTube edited that motion out with a seamless segué to another scene. You’ll need the uncut sequence to see this, and it happened in less than one second.
I do hope I was not seeing things. I believe a live astronaut aboard this test would’ve had experienced severe whiplash doing what appeared to be a 4-G+ pitch roll and oscillation.
Were there crash test dummies and lots of accelerometers aboard that might confirm or deny this ?
I saw that as well. I also looked at the videos of the old Mercury and Apollo abort tests and noticed the capsules were made to spin to stabilize them. I wonder if Blue Origin should consider a similar approach.