|
As of April 2, 2016, Jeff Bezo's Blue
Origin company has
flown the reusable New
Shepard suborbital space vehicle three
times above the 100 km border to space.
The New Shepard consists of a rocket booster
powered by the company's Liquid Hydrogen/Liquid
Oxygen BE-3 engine. A crew capsule, which
can hold up to six people, sits atop the
booster and is released at apogee and comes
back down separatel for a landing via parachutes.
The booster lands vertically on the flame
of its rocket engine
Here is a video of a test flight to 103
kilometers on April 2, 2016:
..
The crew capsule landed safely while the
booster waited to fire its engine at a much
lower altitude than before. In the video
you can see the rocket coming down really
fast before it quickly slows and lands softly.
The company plans in a year or two to fly
people to space. In the meantime, science
experiments and technology R&D payloads
will ride the vehicle during its test flights.
See the post
here for two videos about experiments
that flew on the latest flight.
SpaceX
continues to make progress with its space
transports as well. Back in December the
first stage of a Falcon 9 booster made a
powered return to a landing pad on Cape
Canaveral. The upper stage took a payload
of 11 satellites on to orbit. Here is a
video of the dramatic landing:
..
The booster was laster test fired on a
launch pad at the Cape. It will not be used
to fly a payload to space. It will instead
be saved for a museum as the first orbital
rocket booster to fly back for a landing.
Attempts to return and soft land a Falcon
9 booster onto a sea platform have come
close to success but not yet perfect. Some
payloads are so heavy the booster will not
have enough fuel to return to the launch
site. So learning how to do sea landings
is important.
Follow the latest developments in this
NewSpace era with a subscription to NewSpace
Watch.
|
