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Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
All well and good, but suborbital IS (yawn) BTDT...
IF they were flying passengers suborbitally across the Pacific from California to Japan or Australia in 30 minutes, or from the Eastern Seaboard to Europe in 30 minutes, it might be the model for a "new era".
Flying a vehicle that's basically a glorified sounding rocket or some sort of plaything for the super-rich to fly straight up and straight back down without actually doing anything but floating around a few minutes and looking out the window, isn't going to make space any more accessible or affordable.
It's a good start, but it's basically a "reusable Redstone". Not even in the same class as SpaceX's Falcon 9.
Later! OL J R  |
You're only looking at one tile of a large mosaic. Blue Origin has always had cislunar and interplanetary travel as their objectives, and to do that affordably requires reusable vehicles (they're developing a TSTO rocket with a reusable VTOVL first stage, and a more-maneuverable [higher crossrange] biconic crew capsule). As Jeff Bezos points out, New Shepard is the smallest vehicle they will ever build, and being the smallest and stubbiest, it is the most challenging to land successfully, balancing itself on its exhaust plume. Perfecting the VTOVL technique with it (which they have now done) will make it easier for them to incorporate the technology into the larger vehicles they're working on (and VTOVL is scalable up to very large sizes, as Bezos mentioned). Also:
New Shepard will make money for the company (the Zeppelin company's first commercial flights were "mere aerial excursions" paid for by well-heeled customers, yet they built the foundation for true point-to-point airline services, which improved heavier-than-air craft took over before long). So what if a ride on New Shepard is only what a rich person can afford? There is no reason why it must *always* be so--we're in the very infancy of truly commercial space flight, and New Shepard will provide the vehicle design & operations experience that will ultimately enable most people to be able to afford it. Even as it is now, though, New Shepard is a useful vehicle for scientific and commercial suborbital work. For example:
Many astronomers fly telescopes (particularly ones for use at wavelengths that are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere) on sounding rockets, because it can take years to book observing time on a space telescope. While such telescopes are often flown multiple times, they have to be rugged (and thus more expensive) in order to withstand the high ascent accelerations and ground impacts under their parachutes. Also, the rockets' solid propellants emit smoke after final-stage burnout, which can dirty-up the telescope optics and/or obscure the view (astronomers liked the liquid propellant Aerobees because they *didn't* have this problem). New Shepard can provide gentle rides for telescopes, which can thus be more cheaply built, and its clean (with positive cut-off) LOX/LH2 propulsion system is free from the smoke and outgassing that can mar the telescopes' views. As well:
Just by flying New Shepard repeatedly, Blue Origin is generating a knowledge base for reusable VTOVL vehicles that is still sorely lacking: How many times can such craft be reused? What level of maintenance will they require between flights? How often can they fly? How will they age, and what components will require refurbishment or replacement the most often? These and other questions can only be answered by flying it a lot. True, this isn't the most exciting space work, but I don't judge a project's value solely by how exciting it is--and it will be boringly reliable space vehicles that will *do* exciting things, and *go* to exciting places. I don't favor Blue Origin over SpaceX (or vice-versa); they're simply taking different paths to reach the same place, and there's no reason--at this point, at least--to conclude that one road is better than the other.