Comment by blackeyeblitzar
15 days ago
The live stream needed a lot of work. The first stage may have exploded but it was unclear because the video if it stopped before it even got close. The second stage apparently reached orbit, but it was a very low orbit (100 miles). Not bad for a first attempt, but still a ways to go.
Blue Origin is a rocket company, not a live streaming company. The low orbit is the target orbit, and they will attempt to boost it to medium earth orbit later in the flight.
By any standard getting to orbit on the maiden launch of a new vehicle is an incredible achievement. You have to give them a pass on the live stream.
I am not sure if they hit their target orbit, since they didn’t declare that beforehand (at least on the stream). When they announced reaching orbit on the stream, they were only at 100 miles, below where Sputnik 1 was, and technically very low earth orbit. Note that the second stage actually dropped in altitude from its peak (above 120 miles). I saw your other comment saying this is typical. I do agree 100 miles is suspiciously exact. It would be interesting to see if they had declared their goals clearly somewhere.
It took SpaceX about 1-2 years to nail landings on the drone ships, and about 3-4 to nail video feeds of that happening. There’s something kinda funny about that.
Nothing funny about it. How would you get the signal out? Plasma from re-entry is a near-perfect radio shield. We only get nice crisp images from starship now because of Starlink.
Remember all the old Apollo and even Shuttle missions where the Mission Control would be calling out "____, do you read me" during a landing attempt? This is why.
I know why, but it's funny because connectivity is essentially a solved issue in the modern world (most people don't sit under landing rockets), whereas rocket science is... well, ... rocket science.
And now they use Starlink for their video feeds.
Per the linked page, the final orbit is 19,300 x 2,400 km (i.e. a medium orbit) and that should take at least a couple hours to reach, because of that raised periapsis. They haven't yet achieved that, despite the livestream ending. Low orbit is not this flight's goal.