Lars, thanks for the flightclub link -- extremely useful. That will help
me reconcile my earlier description with the actuals.
Interesting tidbit; looking at the "booster profile" graph, it looks like
that uprange-halt burn at about 48 km AGL was in fact nearly straight
overhead (departure pad 40 is 9 km from recovery pad 13). Not only that,
but there appears to have been a bit of overshoot -- part of that burn may
have been over the Banana River (it looked like it at the time, though I
didn't really believe it). I'd expected a trajectory that would have
allowed flight-termination debris to fall into the Atlantic -- this one
instead would have put termination debris in some pretty surprising places,
depending on winds.
As soon as I saw that thing light up above us, a tiny corner in the back of
my mind boggled at the regulatory and paperwork achievement. I was
thinking we're likely to see some shifts in the investment landscape due to
this flight, but the same thing might be true of the paperwork as well.
Steve
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 2:41 PM, James Bowery <jabowery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Erratum: "by now emphasizing orbital launch" -> "by NOT emphasizing
orbital launch"
(trying to help someone with Windows 10 remotely without screen share at
the same time yields erroneous typing reflex macros)
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 4:38 PM, James Bowery <jabowery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No one has reusable orbital stages. The gating problem is a reusable
booster. Even if both SpaceX and Blue Origin have, from the start, placed
equal engineering priority on making their boosters to be reusable, the
"out of their own pocket" expense of testing reusability (of which return
landing is only a part) is limiting on the learning curve and the learning
curve is limiting on first-to-orbit on a reusable booster.
It seems to me that Blue Origin, by now emphasizing orbital launch, has
greater freedom to emphasize low cost tests of reusability of their
booster. Once they have that, they can basically just scale, purchase an
orbital stage and be done.
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 2:14 PM, Stephen Van Sickle <sjv2006@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 7:34 AM, James Bowery <jabowery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I think it quite possible if not probable that Blue Origin will be the
first to launch a commercial satellite to _orbit_ on a reused first stage
and do so economically.
How do you figure that? Blue Origin isn't close to orbiting anything at
all at this point, whereas SpaceX does so routinely. Having now recovered
intact a first stage from an orbital launch, SpaceX could give it a try on
their very next launch, if it were a high enough priority for them to do so
out of their own pocket with a dummy payload. More likely they will take a
conservative approach and test the hell out of several recovered stages
until a paying customer comes along willing to use a recovered stage. But
even that could be less than a year.