Nov 182011
Go ahead and try to tell yourself that this ain’t awesome:
[youtube wXhZVB6bi34]
[youtube zZEBj7nh0PI]
A short test hop of the Blue Origins “New Shepard.” Unclear if this is a new flight, or a flight from before it went kersplat a few months ago. I suspect it’s a pre-crash test.
9 Responses to “Straight outta Sci-Fi: Represent!”
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Wired had the same video, said it was from July, pre-splosion. Good to see someone picking up after the DC-X. Now if they could only get it into orbit….
Znapel
Great! And I was wondering where I had seen that odd shape for the fins, then I remembered your article on the Nexus.
Seemed even smoother than DC-X. Larger tests of liquid fueled vehicles seem to be more controlable than smaller packages. The computer is better at throttling than the actual plumbing is at smaller scales. The Fregat that caused such problems for Phobos Grunt really isn’t a lot different from Carmack’s smallest vehicles. This makes me appreciate all the test footage of the kinetic kill vehicle hover tests above netting. Hard to have small packages so steady.
I wonder if they’d get similar results with computer users who needed to alt-tab between full-screen apps to perform tasks versus those who have all the necessary windows open and visible at once.
We’ve got ridiculously small monitors at work, and old legacy apps that almost fill the screen at legible resolutions. Several times a day I find my myself having to alt-tab back to a previous window to remind myself what I was going to do in the new window…
Grr – posted to wrong thread – must of have forgotten what I was doing when I alt-tabbed back… 😉
The current army of Delos D. Harriman types have me very hopeful for our space future. We simply must wrest this away from government and the pork-in-situ.
I don’t agree with that. Take a look at the deal with the Dodgers, where a costly divorce played a role in their troubles. Same thing with Musk:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/29/divorce-wars-justine-musk_n_841761.html
Suppose he put the EELVs and SLS out of business. This is the reason you have gov’t suplied military–so no one personality can ruin things. Then too, there was Curtis LeMay and Admiral Rickover who imposed their will, but they still had checks on them.
More on topic. Blue Origin seems to be going the Phil Bono route. That seems to be a little better than landing a telephone pole on its tail as Musk wants to do. Musk has more experince with large engines, and Bezos bunch has more skill with landings. They should team up.
Both videos are *AMAZING*, but it really annoys me how they’re not in HD, just like the NASA videos of the ISS passing over various parts of the earth. Insanely cool stuff like this deserves to be seen in 1080p.
Am I the only one who finds the ides of a powered landing like that terrifying? Give me wings or a lifting body any day thank you.
It is totally awesome that this kind of entrepreneurial stuff is going on though. There is hope for the human race to leave the cradle yet.