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Blue Origin's next flight will end in a crash-landing
While Blue Origin has shown it can successfully land a reusable rocket multiple times, the space tourism company will hit the ground a little harder on the next test. As Jeff Bezos announced this week, his space venture will intentionally crash the empty crew compartment to see what happens when the parachutes fail.
Watch Blue Origin's third landing from the rocket's point of view
Sure, you can watch reusable rocket landings from the ground as much as you want, but have you wondered what it'd be like if you were strapped to one of those rockets? Blue Origin sure has. Jeff Bezos' spaceflight outfit has released a video showing its third landing from the booster rocket's view (specifically, a vent), starting with the moment before it reenters the atmosphere. What's surprising is how the change in perspective underscores the speed of the whole operation -- you're looking at a dramatic view of Earth in one moment, and the American desert the next. This sort of camera angle will eventually become run-of-the-mill, of course, but it's worth watching while reusable rockets are still novelties.
ICYMI: Chocolate science, firefighter tech and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-876193{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-876193, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-876193{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-876193").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: You may want to switch careers after seeing the chocolate formula MIT researchers got to dig into; Georgia Tech came up with a heads up display for biometric tracking and environment information for firefighters; and Blue Origin landed its rocket for the third time, like bosses. Also someone made a drone with a functioning chainsaw and you can see the destructive video here. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Blue Origin posts video of its rocket's third flight
Another day, another suborbital spaceflight for Blue Origin's BE-3 rocket booster. The New Shepard reached an altitude of 103km during its third flight yesterday, before the capsule came home via parachute and its engine landed while restarting at about 3,600 feet above the ground. We're still waiting for those promised bigger rockets, but you can get your weekend's video dose of rocketry.
Next Blue Origin rocket carries two microgravity experiments (update: success)
We only just found out that Jeff Bezos & Co. are planning another round trip rocket flight for tomorrow, and now they've announced something extra. This time around the New Shepard vehicle will be carrying two microgravity experiments. Being able to conduct science not possible on Earth is part of Blue Origin's pitch for its rockets, and each setup takes advantage of the flight in different ways.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will launch its rocket a third time
Jeff Bezos' rocket company has already shown its product is reusable, but if it's going to launch "space" tourism, it will have to fly many times. As such, Blue Origin is working fly the New Shepard rocket for the third time on Saturday. According to Bezos, this time the engine will restart fast "just" 3,600 feet above the ground, leaving little room for error on its trip home from the edge of space. Plus, the company's previous tests have only been revealed after the fact, so that's another change. Still, we're not expecting any kind of SpaceX-style livestream, but Bezos says there will be drone cameras in place to get an aerial view of the flight. Whether or not it all works as planned, there should be some exciting footage to share so check back here tomorrow. Update: At least two microgravity science experiments will be along for the ride.
Amazon organized a secret robot, AI and space conference
Amazon brought a number of AI, robotics and space exploration experts together for a secret conference this week, according to Bloomberg. It was called MARS, or Machine-Learning (Home) Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration conference. Apparently, Jeff Bezos himself attended this very exclusive, invitation-only event in Palm Springs. He mingled with guests from various robotics companies, automakers like Toyota, research institutes like ETH Zurich and educational institutions, including MIT.
An interview with one of NASA's Curiosity Rover engineers
With his Elvis haircut, his fondness for cowboy boots and the way he'll launch into soliloquies about big ideas like how to bend humanity toward collective self-improvement, Adam Steltzner might come off at first as some kind of hipster philosopher. That's one of the things that makes him such a memorable ambassador for NASA, his employer. Steltzner is in fact an engineer with an improbable combination of geek cred and California cool who this October will have spent 25 years working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He looks like a rock star -- plays bass guitar, in fact -- and can forcefully insist on humanity's imperative to explore the stars and to press against the limits of the known universe with little prompting.
Jeff Bezos' space company plans to launch tourist flights by 2018
Blue Origin could be offering commercial suborbital space flights as soon as 2018. Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, has revealed his team's plans for the coming years during an event that showed off Blue Origin's headquarters to the press for the first time. Bezos' space company wasn't making as much noise as, say, SpaceX, until it successfully launched, landed and then actually reused a reusable rocket before anyone else. Clearly, that did wonders for the team's confidence.
Here's the view from Blue Origin's rocket as it lands
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin proved that its New Shepard rocket is indeed reusable by launching and landing it successfully a second time in January. While you've likely seen a footage or two of the suborbital trip, this one offers something more unique: it was taken by the camera mounted on the rocket itself. The Vine video below the fold shows the last six seconds of the vertical landing (sped up a bit) from the New Shepard's point of view. You can clearly see one of its legs unfold and its engines fire up as it was about to touch down.
ICYMI: UAV for land and sea, Boeing's super rocket and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-501148{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-501148, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-501148{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-501148").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The Drones For Good competition turned out a dual-purpose drone submission for use in search and rescue operations. The Loon Copter can both fly through the air and dive underwater -- a useful trait for evading other bad guy drones in any upcoming spy movies, we're certain.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sent its rocket to space... again
As Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos continue their battle to develop re-usable rocket technology first, the Amazon man's company has news to announce tonight. Its video shows its New Shepard rocket -- that previously flew to suborbital altitude of 100km -- doing it all over again. According to Blue Origin, instead of just being the first rocket to cross the Karman Line and then land vertically back on the Earth, it's now the first one to have done it twice. There are still arguments that what Blue Origin is doing is easier than SpaceX's attempts (not actually going into low-Earth orbit and it's moving slower), but it's still an amazing achievement.
ICYMI: Pollution sea vacuum, SpaceX's success and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-999936{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-999936, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-999936{width:570px;display:block;}try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-999936").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: SpaceX successfully landed its reusable rocket, from a height of 125 miles-- then Elon Musk and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos traded Twitter jabs for our entertainment. Scientists from Cambridge University found that oil droplets change into artificial shapes like octagons when frozen in soapy water, then return to their normal shape when heated. And a nearly $4,000 gadget for sailors aims to clean up the dirty marinas where debris and oil spills often mar the seafaring beauty.
Jeff Bezos' fourth tweet promises to #sendDonaldtospace
I've sent out plenty of Twitter replies to haters, but you'll have that after 38,000~ posts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is relatively new to the service, and as such he has used one quarter of his tweets in responding to a Donald Trump tweetstorm. Trump claimed Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post is a scam, meant as a deduction to keep taxes down at his "no-profit" retail shop. Since Bezos, not Amazon, owns the Post and Amazon is (at least for the moment) profitable, this seems to be just another Trump statement that has little to no relationship with truth or facts of any kind. This evening Bezos fired back by bringing his third company Blue Origin into the fray, promising to reserve Donald Trump a seat. There's no word on if that seat comes with a return trip.
Inhabitat's Week in Green: Tesla Model S recall, and more!
When a problem comes along, you must fix it. This week Tesla noticed a defective seatbelt in one of its Model S sedans, so the automaker immediately issued a recall for all 90,000 vehicles on the road out of "an abundance of caution." In other transportation news, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin beat out Elon Musk's SpaceX in the race to develop a rocket that can return intact from space. Porsche announced plans to offer a hybrid version of one of the most-loved sports cars of all time. We also spotted several outlandish infrastructural hazards: a three-day traffic jam snared drivers in Kenya and a highway suddenly lifted towards the sky and splintered into pieces in California.
Jeff Bezos beats Elon Musk's SpaceX in the reusable rocket race
Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has just dropped a huge gauntlet in the race to develop a reusable rocket. It just launched its New Shepard space vehicle (video, below), consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule, to the edge of space at a suborbital altitude of 100.5 kilometers (62 miles). The capsule then separated and touched down beneath a parachute, but more importantly, the BE-3 rocket also started its own descent. After the rockets fired at nearly 5,000 feet, it made a a controlled vertical landing at a gentle 4.4 mph.
Blue Origin subjected rocket engine to over 100 rounds of testing
Blue Origin joined forces with Boeing's/Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance to build its BE-4 rocket engine last year. Now, the American-made component has completed over 100 staged-combustion cycles, which "included a representative BE-4 preburner and regeneratively cooled thrust chamber using multiple full-scale injector elements." Since we're not all rocket scientists, it just means the Jeff Bezos-backed space corp put its parts through rigorous testing before it starts full-engine tests.
Boeing and Jeff Bezos move closer to putting US rockets in orbit
United Launch Associates (ULA), the rocket enterprise from Boeing and Lockheed, has ramped up its commitment to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket engines. The two companies agreed to expand production capability of Origin's BE-4 rocket motor, "an important step toward building (them) at the production rate needed for the Vulcan launch vehicle," said Bezos. Last year, the two companies formed a pact to develop an engine that that can replace the Russian-built RD-180 engines originally planned for Vulcan -- ULA's successor to the Atlas V. Due to a US congressional ban on Russian products, ULA can no longer purchase RD-180s.
Jeff Bezos' first proper test rocket has successfully launched
Elon Musk may be the most famous tech billionaire with an interest in spaceflight, but he's certainly not the only one. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also has a company, Blue Origin, which is doing similar research into reusable craft to get us to-and-from the heavens. The normally secretive outfit has just revealed that its first test vehicle, New Shepard, made arguably its most important, partially successful test flight yesterday. In the experiment, the priapic craft took an (empty) crew capsule to a height of 307,000 feet before releasing it to float gently back to earth.
Here's the next rocket that will carry US satellites into space
You may not be familiar with United Launch Alliance, but it's about to handle a large chunk of US space launches -- and that makes the rocket you see above particularly important. That's Vulcan, ULA's newly unveiled launch system for satellites and similar payloads. The two-stage vehicle is designed to be the "most cost-efficient" rocket of its kind, helped in no small part by new recovery tech (Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology, or SMART) that captures the booster main engines in mid-air. Vulcan also eliminates an earlier dependence on Russian powerplants by relying on low-cost, reusable liquid natural gas engines from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. You probably won't be happy with this machine if you're rooting for SpaceX, but it'll be a big deal if its affordable design gets more equipment into orbit and beyond.
