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.
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"
Link: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/jeff-bezos-brags-on-rocket-land...
Engadget: "Jeff Bezos beats Elon Musk's SpaceX in the reusable rocket race"
Link: http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/24/blue-origin-reusable-rock...
Edit: I see the Musk posse has arrived at this comment.
[0] - http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/your-move-spacex-blue... [1] - http://www.popsci.com/blue-origin-beats-spacex-in-landing-re... [2] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3331885/Move-...
The reusable part of a Falcon (assuming it actually lands undamaged)[0] doesn't go into orbit either.
Edit: Stay classy HN.
[0] "I don't expect the Falcon 9 to have a reusable upper stage" http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-at-mits-aeroast...
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?
End of story. If you can't see that, I don't care any more. I was just trying to help.
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.
SpaceX did that years ago:
Is my understanding inaccurate?
>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.
You seem to understand it later, where you say that 3^2 = 9 and 30^2 = 900, so what's the deal?
I assume you stopped reading mid-sentence.
Getting to orbit from the surface of the earth requires more energy expenditure than "the square" of getting to space.
In other words, nobody said "orbit". But they did say Blue Origin beat SpaceX, which doesn't make any sense.
Right, which is why this entire thread is so confusing.
>In other words, nobody said "orbit".
Exactly. This makes the tweet a non-sequitor.
>But they did say Blue Origin beat SpaceX, which doesn't make any sense.
Yes, anyone who said that is incorrect. However, Elon did not directly address those people (at least not in these tweets).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxKWh7kLDzw
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you see how hard the capsule landed? Look at around the 1:39 mark on the video: https://www.blueorigin.com/gallery#youtube9pillaOxGCo
If they had retrorocket on the capsule, I suspect it failed.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2X2kaqYatI
You don't need a long burn to cushion a drop like this. A fraction of a second will suffice.
Reddit has a nice delta V chart: http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...)
There's also the linked NASA version: http://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEOs=on&NEA...
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.
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.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/24/blue-origin-reusable-rock...
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.
If you actually read his tweet, copied in full in the post you are responding to and in the article, you'll see that he did exactly that.
Ok, fair cop. It looks like he didn't do just exactly that. The article I saw only gave his first tweet. My apologies.
Either way, a vertical landing is pretty neat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That to me is way worse than what you claimed to be inappropriate.
The very best thing would be to either say nothing or to congratulate without any reservations.
They aren't even close to the same thing.
First space rocket landed successfully? That's been done many times, starting with the X-15.
First successful vertical rocket landing? SpaceX has done it already.
First successful vertical landing of a stage of an orbital rocket? Nobody has done this yet, and that's what SpaceX is gunning for.
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