>They have some achievements to show. New Shepard was the first to land vertically. That's not nothing.
Sorry, but the McDonnell Douglas DC-X did the rocket straight up & down vertical landing in 1993. New Shepard frankly wasn't particularly different. It went higher and longer sure, but for orbital rocketry the challenge isn't height so much as speed and everything that comes with that. The Falcon 9 flight 20 at the end of 2015 that marked its first landing was a vastly bigger achievement given that it was an orbital class rocket booster. It was going much, much faster and had to descend on a much more complicated arc through the atmosphere. And it pathfinded for actual rapid reuse, which is a whole different set of skills. That New Shepard did a suborbital jump a mere one month earlier 2015 honestly just isn't great.
Since then, F9 has done over 100 more flights, to orbit, including crewed ones, and set ever growing records on cadence, reuse of boosters and refurb speed, satellite launch records, etc. NS has done... what? 5 test flights over 6 years? Then that silly little PR stunt? It's ludicrous. And it's long since stopped serving any useful purpose in terms of learning because it avoids so many of the true challenges in going orbital which involve 9+km/s of delta-v.
The media has been grossly unfair to Bezos. What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design. It was a massive display of faith in his engineering team.
Musk didn't do that. Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
As for the BO rocket being totally automated, that was the original intent of the Mercury missions, until the astronauts objected. Nobody called them joyriders or ludicrous.
One pilot died, the other bailed out successfully.
Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.
It didn't have to have manual controls, and in fact the fatal accident was caused by moving the wrong control.
Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.
> most boring
Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.
Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.
I honestly think you have it backwards: the media has been very kind to both Bezos and Branson, particularly the latter. This isn't surprising because the media doesn't really get orbital dynamics any more than they get most technical topics. Nevertheless a lot of them act as if Branson's and Bezos' flight were some big technical achievements or progress forward, as if they can just evolve the designs around the current limitations.
They cannot. Hybrid engines have garbage ISP, the entire design of the Unity is completely worthless for high speed period let alone reentry, every $ spent on it is pointless beyond a quick joyride that will relatively soon be obsoleted by real space tourism. NS is at least vaguely sort of more useful for BO, it has a hydrolox engine so it's not doing anything for them on that front but they got to work on their landing a bit somewhat more easily.
But the value of space comes from actually getting to orbit and then beyond, and that's a fantastically more difficult problem due to the delta-v needed, the rocket equation, our material science, etc. SpaceX's approach of focusing on the real hard problem which delivers serious revenue and opportunity then working backwards on economics, always with focus on orbit as their lodestone, has clearly been much more effective. BO is older than SpaceX and has yet to even once get to orbit or deal with reentry. At all. It's hard not to look at so much of NS and just see such a waste of years and dollars.
>What Bezos actually did was risk his own neck in the first manned flight of a totally new rocket design.
I guess? It had been flown and landed multiple times and it had a lot of margin to work with since it's just a big sounding rocket. They did a hyperconservative work-on-the-first-launch Old Space development process.
>Musk didn't do that.
You think Musk wasn't puckered launching 6 astronauts and tens of billions of dollars worth of other people's precious cargo to space? Musk didn't do that because it wouldn't have proved anything and been a pure waste and distraction from the actual serious mission.
>Branson didn't do that - and earlier test pilots of his craft died.
Branson is a daredevil and that design is garbage on a host of levels.
>As for the BO rocket being totally automated
So is Dragon 2. So will Starship. That's normal and good, it's manual that's bad. But it's also not a special achievement that justified 6 years after first launch and landing.
The public has been primed too much by the media to literally spew hate like there is no tomorrow for certain individuals. On the right wing - it is Bill Gates, on the left wing it is Bezos/Elon. They got their clicks and ad revenue.
Y'all might be interested that the Air Force used to take the chief mechanic along for the check ride after an overhaul. It wasn't policy, but it happened a lot. It ensured the airplanes got overhauled properly.
It's a good thing. I've also always been happy to fly on a 757. (I worked on the design of flight critical parts for it.)
Blue Origin arguably did the first verticals landing from “space” as defined by 100km of altitude in 2015. Though the lunar lander is perhaps the more famous vertical landing from space in 1969, following earlier soft landings like Luna 9 1966, and a lot of earlier VTVL rocket research at the time.
SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015. I don’t mean to dump on Blue Origin but their achievements are really just around the definition of space as 100km which is completely arbitrary, their effectively just publicity stunts.
It’s possible that Blue Origin will create a useful system for space exploration, but based on past progress their years if not decades from that point.
> SpaceX started on powered decent in 2011 achieving it’s first landing from an actual orbital space flight in 2015
I'm not sure how important/big the difference is, but IIRC spaceX only lands boosters that never actually reach orbital velocity. They help boost things into orbital velocity, sure, but the things that land under powered flight never actually reach orbital velocity, right?
I'm aware that the crew dragon was supposed to do this, but AFAIK it never has.
It's still a dramatically different and faster trajectory than straight up-and-down. There's a reason SpaceX has drone ships out in the middle of the ocean -- they travel laterally hundreds of miles.
Yes, but what I was getting at was the safety factor. As part of the first stage of an orbital rocket SpaceX was stuck with a ~20% safety factor if they wanted to get significant cargo to orbit, where Blue Origin could seriously over engineer the rocket without any obvious problems.
I am not saying they fudged things or that it was easy, just that it wasn’t the kind of litmus test you see on an actual orbital rocket.
The first stage is far from orbital velocities when it reaches MECO and starts down, even though I strongly agree with you: SpaceX is in an entire other league.
> if it were looking like a failure, ULA would have dropped them a long time ago
That seems to be assuming that they have a choice. Given the fuel difference between AR-1 and BE-4, they've been committed to BE-4 for quite some time, no matter how much progress BO is doing (or not doing) on BE-4.
Sure, if that probe's rather crude landing system is enough for you, suit yourself with Luna 9. However, the LM landed on its legs in one piece, just like DC-X, New Shepard, Grasshopper, and F9 first stage did later.
I think it’s fair to classify Luna 9’s landing as soft because at 14 mph it was survivable, though other landers where softer. LM was an achievement not just because humans, but also because it could take off again without maintenance.
BE-4 has been delayed, true, but if it were looking like a failure, ULA would have dropped them a long time ago.
I think 2022 will clear up lots of things for everyone. SLS, BE-4, New Glenn, etc... Till then there is no sense of dooming anything.