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This may come off as sour grapes, but it's really important for Musk to point this out. It's not just that you need to go sideways at mach 24 when you reach space to achieve orbit. It's that you need to carry the fuel up to space to be able to do that. Which means that any returnable vehicle is going to be way larger to carry all that fuel. So from an engineering perspective, the size of Blue Origin is a toy compared to the size of rocket that would return after achieving orbit. Not to mention the amount of additional fuel required to decelerate a much larger mass right before landing.
> This may come off as sour grapes, but it's really important for Musk to point this out.
It does come off as sour grapes and it absolutely wasn't important for Musk to point this out. His PR team needs to deal with this, not him. He can send out congratulations and rah-rah for another amazing achievement for humanity, but his PR needs to get on the ball and show what the differences in goals and achievements BO and SpaceX have. They also should look at this as a failure to explain what the whole landing phase means for both companies. He can stay above the the whole thing. Its not like Bezos is beloved (the whole Stark / Hammer comparison is not far off).
Sort of. The ascent booster separates from the crew capsule, which basically uses parachutes for its deceleration. For descent of the booster, there will be some fuel requirements, but most of the work should also be done by the parachutes (I think. It just says "guided flight", but it would be weird if it did not use parachutes), with fuel only needed at the end.
I don't see Blue Origin claiming 'orbit' anywhere so I fail to see why that bit needed any clearing up. It is the L bit that SpaceX seems to have had some problems with to date. Musk could simply congratulate Blue Origin and leave it at that.
I'm guessing that Musk felt the need to do that because some of the early reports about Blue Origin's success were using it as a platform to trash SpaceX for failing to land on the barges. This Gizmodo article (before they changed it due to all the comments complaining) was a good example: http://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-new-rocket-just-made-a-control...
It was significantly longer earlier today, but it contained a factually inaccurate comparison.
Here are a couple more examples:
Wired: "Jeff Bezos just accomplished the near impossible: one-upping Elon Musk"
But expecting journalists to even google something during their fact-checking these days is hopelessly optimistic. (Reminds me of Jon Stewart's recent inverview of Fresh Air when he was asked how the Daily Show is able to do such a great job of fact-checking and digging up contradictory statements -- Google and Lexis Nexis.)
With SpaceX it's really just because they didn't bother, though. Getting their test vehicle to space first probably would not have been too difficult, considering that it was adapted from something meant to go to space anyway. It's just that doing that wouldn't have been useful to their ultimate goal of recovering the first stage as part of an orbital launch.
I know this sounds like a typical "I could do that, I just don't want to" boast, but it's true. There's little point in merely going to space without also achieving orbit, unless you're selling people the opportunity to say "I've been to space." And getting to orbit is way, way, way harder. In terms of relative difficulty, Blue Origin's accomplishment is much closer to SpaceX's Grasshopper flights than to their (not yet successful) barge landings.
I made it as a member of hacker news for 1065 days with out having to listen to a penis joke; a miracle in the internet age. Oh well all good things come to an end eventually.
When stories with titles like "Your Move, SpaceX: Blue Origin Just Secretly Landed a Reusable Rocket"[0], "Blue Origin Beats SpaceX In Landing Reusable Rocket"[1], "Move over SpaceX! Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully lands a reusable rocket in Texas beating Elon Musk's firm to it"[2], are the main articles about it for me on google news, I can understand how he might feel the need to make the point to the general public that they've not achieved the feat SpaceX is attempting.
You're missing the point. The media is basically doing an apples/apples comparison with BO and SpaceX. The tweet was necessary to point out that they're not competing in the same space.
You are focusing on the word 'orbit' and not the overall meaning. The forest for the trees. You are being downvoted for arguing about something completely pointless.
If my comments are pointless arguing, so are Elon's.
Worse, Elon's are just factually incorrect (e.g. "The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit.") [and, yet, it remains, uncontested, at the top of this thread].
>It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
is a non-sequitor because no one seems to have confused space and orbit. Additionally, the comparable part of SpaceX's machines (the first stage of the Falcon 9) doesn't go into orbit (it is supposed to land not far from the launch site and does not loop around the Earth to do it).
What is the import of "orbit"? Elon is the one that brought the word into the conversation, not me.
>You are focusing on the word 'orbit' and not the overall meaning.
Then, please, what is the overall meaning of those tweets?
Everyone else has already told you, but I'll tell you again. The media is saying Elon was just beat at his own game. Elon tweeted to point out that it's a horrible comparison, what he's been trying to do is much harder.
End of story. If you can't see that, I don't care any more. I was just trying to help.
>The media is saying Elon was just beat at his own game.
The media is not a single, conscious entity. Some Gizmodo blog may have claimed as such, but I think you'll have a very hard time producing any other person who would claim that what a Gizmodo blog says is what the entire media is saying.
>Elon tweeted to point out that it's a horrible comparison
Not really. There are comparables: stick goes up, stick goes down without crashing.
Elon only appears to have made a non-sequitor argument (unless someone shows where the media made the claim that space and orbit were the same thing).
Ultimately, this is probably a defect of Twitter's character limit. It is extremely difficult to put a fully reasoned argument into a single tweet.
Regarding the factually incorrect bit, could you elaborate? I was under the impression that the energy required was proportional to the square of the velocity, so a 10x increase in velocity (from ~Mach 3 to ~Mach 30) would result in a 100x increase in energy required, which seems to be what he's saying.
>The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit.
at face value. It is either claiming that 9^2 = 900 or, it either mistated the units for space or mistated the units for orbit. This is incorrect.
If you take into account the context of the prior sentence:
>Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30.
you can probably work out 3^2 = 9 and 30^2 = 900. However, as InclinedPlane said, that's only in an idealized number, in reality, you must expend even more energy than that to achieve Mach 30 from the surface of the Earth.
We can check back to the prior contexts:
>Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL on their booster
>It is, however, important to clear up the difference between "space" and "orbit", as described well by https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
To be short: you'd need to find where Jeff Bezos or the BO team claimed anything about "orbit".
Since others have already given up on this conversation, I probably will too.
Here's the thing. SpaceX already landed a rocket. Lots of people have landed lots of things. So saying Blue Origin beat SpaceX to something, you have to be more specific about what that something was. SpaceX isn't even trying to land a tiny test rocket (which they already have), they're trying to land real full size rockets on real launches that go to orbit. It's a huge difference.
In other words, nobody said "orbit". But they did say Blue Origin beat SpaceX, which doesn't make any sense.
I don't think it's immediately obvious for the lay person not familiar with space flight of the differences between the achievements of the two companies.
Let's face it, this is a huge PR stunt for BO. Congrats to them; however what they did is not the goal. Now the media, from all the articles I've seen, portrays what BO did as the same as Space X. It's unfortunate but yes, the lay person will see BO being ahead of Space X, when in reality, that's far from the truth.
Isn't Blue Origin aiming at space tourism? No orbit, you just go up on a rocket, get weightless, see the curve of the earth and the blackness of space through big windows, then land 10 minutes later. They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.
> They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.
You think putting passengers aboard, instead of the proverbial sand bags, will be trivial? You could afford to cut a lot of corners with an empty crew capsule.
As an aside, it's sort of bothersome that it's termed as space tourism (not your term, I know) because it sort of belies the inherent risks associated. I'm pretty worried about what the public reaction will be when one of these 'tours' goes horribly wrong.
Consider an airbag. It "only" increases the time for the deceleration of your upper body to O(0.1) seconds. The reason it's so effective is because O(0.1) is O(100) times larger the deceleration time without an airbag, making the acceleration O(100) times less.
The reason why an airbag is effective is prevents your head from traveling long distance so you don't break your neck. It's still painful and still can break your nose.
If they had retrorocket on the capsule, I suspect it failed.
The purpose of an air bag is to keep your head from smashing into the steering wheel or dashboard at 70MPH because the car stopped but your head kept going.
The air bag decelerates you to zero over a (relatively) much greater time, meaning much lower forces on your face, brain, etc.
Soyuz lands with a retrorocket and it looks exactly like this:
To me the BO launch-and-landing is very much like what SpaceX already did with Grasshopper, only from a lot higher up.
Anyway, let's hope that SpaceX manages to land the next time they put something in orbit, that would be a big step forward, I'm seeing a lot more practical value in SpaceX than in BO.
Compare the size of grasshopper to BO's little toy rocket. Grasshopper was a full Falcon 9 first stage, which is a production GTO capable rocket.
What exactly is BO's rocket capable of? Reaching 100km altitude?
No one is more embarassed than BO engineers by the comparisons with SpaceX. They are in completely different leagues. BO is playing with toys, SpaceX is hauling commercial payloads to GTO.
It's like me making a go-kart that goes 0-60 faster than an F1 car, and saying "I've built a faster race car than McLaren!". Anyone with an ounce of knowledge on the subject would be in tears from laughter.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this video was that this group did it before SpaceX without knowing SpaceX was trying to solve the harder problem.
There's nothing magical about 100 km that makes Blue Origin's rocket more useful. 100 km is just a round number. It's not useful until it's literally 100 times more powerful so it can get to orbit. Implying that Blue Origin's achievement is comparable to what SpaceX is attempting is disingenuous. But, predictably, that's exactly what the news media is doing.
100km is the edge of space. Reusable human transport payloads that go to space and back are sufficient for a space tourism ecosystem to start forming, which may be the orange Bezos is chasing (to Musk's "payloads to orbit and beyond" apple).
In that sense, this is exciting news for Blue Origin, as it gets them one step closer to the insane-but-possible goal of profitable space tourism---with the world's money being as disproportionately allocated as it is, one can imagine actually being able to find six people willing to pony up enough cash to get launched into the edge of space purely for the delightful view.
I imagine that doesn't matter. I can't imagine that people who would actually buy their services would not actually know the difference, so I don't see this as a big marketing/PR hit. It's not like the people who would buy these services are clueless managers who make bad IT investments. The people who'd buy these services or make investments (e.g. NASA) would know the difference as to what's what.
But, to the public who elects the representatives who control the budgets of the agencies that make the investments, it does matter. It can be critical.
We have people elected congress who don't believe in things like evolution or climate change, which affects national policy, budgets, and investments. Same thing.
Or just the representatives themselves. How long will it be before some Congressmoron asks, "Why are we giving Elon Musk $300 million to take our people to the space station when Amazon is doing the same thing for $3 million?"
How cool is it that there are currently two billionaires competing to build a better reusable rocket. For all the problems with capitalism, this is a great benefit.
The main reason for that was the fact that SpaceX launched several rockets with the same goal and failed to land. Most people won't know the difference between getting to space and getting to orbit and will conclude that SpaceX failed. If you clarify however that New Shepard is a toy compared to the Falcon 9 it changes the perspective.
There are at least two tweets. The first one to congratulate, followed by the "clear up" tweet. I assume parent is referring to both, not just the first in isolation.
>Musk could simply congratulate Blue Origin and leave it at that.
Thats not his style. Plus I'm pretty sure SpaceX is pretty pissed at BlueOrigin for allegedly stealing staff. So can't say I'm surprised at the snarky response.
I don't know. Clearly SpaceX was gunning for a 'first' here and they simply lost that to BO. I like Elon Musk a lot and especially because they are competitors I'd be nice if he was gracious about this and not use it as an opportunity to toot his own horn.
If they wanted to make a valid criticism then they could have simply said 'but we could already do this with Grasshopper' and left it at that.
What do you mean "way to make a valid criticism"? The criticism IS valid and that is obvious. This is a tiny and light rocket, and any VTOL system that would work for a big heavy rocket would be very different from this one and a much harder thing to engineer.
You are saying SpaceX lost a 'first' here to BO but that is not really true and that's Elon's entire point. This is not the first VTOL rocket landing either, maybe it is the first rocket to officially reach space and then subsequently VTOL land but that is not as big of a 'first' as most people are thinking it is.
Which is not to diminish what BO just did, it is just to see it in an accurate context.
Blue Origin has announced an orbital booster, and will be using at least the engine from New Shepard for its upper stage (presumably with some tweaks for improved efficiency at high altitude). They've hinted at much grander plans, although not with the specificity of SpaceX's "we're going to Mars". So it's reasonable to grade them on the same curve.
For suborbital space tourism, BTW, that New Shepard engine is phenomenally over-engineered. Even the fuel choice is surprising; liquid hydrogen is the highest-energy chemical fuel you can get, but it is nasty stuff to handle. (For starters, it diffuses right through the crystal grids of many metals, making your piping brittle and creating an invisible fire hazard outside of it.) So even the design of the current vehicle hints at building tooling for a much grander vision; if a large suborbital sounding rocket was all they wanted, they could have gotten it much more quickly and easily than by building what they have.
The liquid hydrogen is one reason you'll never see me near this thing, let alone on board. One facility that I know about that was used for liquid hydrogen production was basically built on the assumption that it would explode, and not just once...
They don't claim orbit, but they claim (rightfully so) landing a rocket.
People with basic scientific backgrounds will make the link with SpaceX and think: "wow, they've just done something that SpaceX hasnt been able to do so far, with less funds and less attempts..."
While this is comparing apples to oranges ofcourse.
Big congratulations to Jeff Bezos & Team, but it's still quite a big difference indeed
Thanks for noting Musk's clarification, this did leave me confused for a moment. The difference between what they are trying to do is indeed quite huge.
I feel still a bit unclear on this though: hasn't SpaceX been trying to land just the first stage module (which presumably doesn't try to achieve that Mach 30)? If so, what is the main difference -- just the size of the payload, or is the 1st stage of SpaceX itself already going a lot faster than the BO rocket? (or perhaps both).
Blue Origin's rocket is returning from a bit above 300,000ft and roughly zero speed. Falcon 9's first stage is returning from a similar altitude but at mach 6.
That adds a lot of difficulty just in terms of getting rid of that speed without destroying your hardware. Plus you need to aim from a lot farther away. The Falcon 9 includes hypersonic grid fins to steer towards the landing site, for example. (Failure of these due to running out of hydraulic fluid is what caused the first landing attempt crash.)
Just getting to that state requires a lot more of the rocket as well. If getting to that altitude is the equivalent of going mach 3, then the Falcon 9 first stage is putting in the equivalent of mach 9, so that's 9x more delta-v, which means the rocket needs to carry vastly more fuel and be vastly lighter.
All in all, the Falcon 9-R is trying to optimize for two things at once, which is always difficult. Landing a rocket vertically is not that difficult. Landing a rocket vertically while having that exact same rocket also be useful as the first stage of an orbital launcher is way harder. It's a bit like building a flying car: there are good cars, and good airplanes, but trying to build a machine that's good at both is far more difficult. Hopefully SpaceX's effort works out better than flying cars have.
For one thing, the trajectories are very different -- New Shepard is pretty much up and down, while the SpaceX booster's velocity is mostly horizontal at stage separation; it requires a substantial amount of maneuvering to cancel that out. For another, SpaceX's landing attempts have been on a barge, not flat land, which means that targeting is a much harder problem. (The latter is speculation on my part, but the New Shepard booster went through a lot of gymnastics just before landing; that sort of thing can be a whole lot easier if you just have to wind up level with zero velocity, without having to target a particular spot on the ground as an added constraint.)
EDIT: some observers claim that the New Shepard is hovering. If so, that does two things: first off, it indicates that either the stage is ballasted, or Blue is taking advantage of their engine's very deep throttle range. (SpaceX's first stage can't hover, as even fully throttled-down thrust of one engine exceeds weight of the stage at landing; so long as an engine is firing at all, the stage is accelerating up.) Second, it obviously makes the targeting problem much easier. (Note that the ballast could just be extra fuel; they've clearly got extra to burn in the landing maneuvers...)
The point is reuse of a core stage of a launch vehicle. Both Blue Origin's vehicle and SpaceX's are launch vehicles, one is sub-orbital the other is orbital. Reusing either makes their respective launches cheaper and easier, but because the launches themselves are vastly different the implications of that reuse are also vastly different.
Are the SpaceX boosters that Musk want to land going to orbit? No.
Is the extra fuel needed to make such a landing a big part of going to orbit? No.
The extra weight a enerby needed to land vertically has nothing to do with a 900 factor. Musk's tweet is thus equally disengenuous. It makes it sound like vertical landing a booster for a rocket going to orbit is tremendously harder than what BO did. It is not, it's the same ball park.
An orbital rocket takes a lot more fuel and has to go a much faster. You are being disingenuous by implying that there is no significant tradeoff when designing a much larger booster designed to take payload into orbit.
But they have to carry a lot more load which then goes to orbit, making them much more heavier, hard to control and to land. And indeed the separation velocity is Mach 6 - Mach 10 for Falcon 9, so Space-X booster needs to go faster.
I agree for the most part. I guess the Airbnb landing page is an obvious counterexample. I'm confident that they A/B tested it to death. In that particular case the transitions are very subtle and don't detract from the CTA (even though it's in the middle of the carousel images). The images themselves serve the purpose of "showing, not telling" what the product is.
I agree that the way I work is definitely not for everyone, and I only accept projects where I am confident that the client sees eye to eye with me. It wouldn't work if I was the only developer working on the project. There are several other, more junior developers on the team who work more hours than I do.
The client is very happy with the arrangement because it ends up costing much less than if I was on the team full-time and he is sure that every day I work is a day where things actually move forward significantly. He rather gets frustrated when freelancers charge several days of work and little progress seems to occur. There is at least a perception of lesser waste of time/money when work is concentrated over a small period of time, and I would argue that there is less actual waste.
Well, my own startup is also making a little money, and I resort to a couple of life hacks to get extra income and reduce costs. I'll write another post about that soon.
Sevendays is an international community of digital professionals working on cutting edge digital projects.
We are looking for a dynamic data engineer with a hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset. You will be working on both customer projects and exciting internal initiatives around data and AI/LLM agents.
We offer a chance to work on great projects with a competitive international package and a caring and supportive team.
Job page: https://sevendays.io/careers/data-engineer-europe/