Blue origin vs spacex7/28/2023 It should also be noted that New Shepard is small/nimble enough that it can throttle down its engine and hover above a landing site, allowing for a controlled landing and/or aborting a landing attempt and re-trying if it's not right. Grasshopper / New Shepard were "throwing a tennis ball high in the air and catching it".įalcon 9 was "Shoot a cannonball at supersonic speed, sideways, with topspin, so that it curves through the air, bounces off that building over in the distance, comes back at you at 3x the speed and still lands exactly where you threw it from." In terms of the difficulty involved and the commensurate level of achievement, today's landing is in a whole different league to anything that's come before. The Falcon 9 has to handle 1.5 million pounds of thrust, reaches a maximum altitude of 300 km, takes a payload into space, at the time of detachment is travelling mostly horizontal to the earth's surface, at twice the velocity (and 10x the mass so 40x the kinetic energy), and has to then turn around!, re-enter the atmosphere, and land back at the launch site. Specifically, New Shepard accelerates straight up to 40km, at 100,000 pounds of thrust, then coasts to 100.5km and comes straight down again. *Technically*, both landings count as "Launched a rocket into space and successfully re-landed".īut the first two were, essentially, "Fly straight up and come straight back down at sub-orbital speeds". The Falcon 9 launch was a fully-fledged orbital rocket, delivering a real payload on an actual mission, operating at a level of difficulty an order of magnitude greater than the previous achievements of either company. Grasshopper / Blue Origin were comparatively short, slow, experimental proof-of-concept flights. It's a comparable size to Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft and SpaceX's Grasshopper (which accomplished a similar feat 6 times, around 3 years ago, but didn't *technically* enter space).
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