Hi, it's me Tim Dodd the everyday
astronaut. The time has arrived. We're at the start of a new
era of human spaceflight, commercial suborbital rides to the edge
of space. And what's crazy is there, isn't just one company doing this, but two companies are entering
service at almost the exact same time. Of course, we're talking about Richard Branson's
Virgin Galactic and their SpaceShipTwo space plane and Jeff Bezos's Blue
Origin with their New Shepard vehicle. And what's exciting is that each of
these guys decided to ride on the very first crewed flights of
their company's rockets. Both of these systems are capable of
giving customers an incredible once in a lifetime experience, taking them to the edge of space and back
providing them with approximately four minutes of weightlessness and
a view less than 600 humans have ever seen well for now. So today let's do a little overview
of what exactly suborbital spaceflight is, what you could expect on one of these
rides, and then go over each system, comparing them side by side
for the ultimate rundown. So here's the timestamps for each section. We also have links in the description. The YouTube play bar is broken up into
these sections and we have an article version of this video up
at everydayastronaut.com.
Okay, let's get started. Sub orbital commercial spaceflight. Now you might be familiar with the first
operational commercial spaceflight from the United States in 2020, when SpaceX took Bob Behken and Doug
Hurley up to the International Space Station for NASA on their
Crew Dragon spacecraft, riding a Falcon 9 rocket. Well, that was an orbital mission called
DM2 or Demonstration Mission 2. And that's a completely different task
than what Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are doing for now. An orbital mission requires a huge rocket, and once it gets its payload into orbit, that payload is not going to come
back down until it de-orbits, which could be months and months or years. Suborbital spaceflight
doesn't reach orbit. They're just exactly that
sub orbital less than orbit, but these rockets aren't trying to get
to orbit they're purpose-built space tourism machines. So if you're poking fun of these
rockets for not reaching orbit, that'd be like poking fun of a Honda civic
for not being able to pull as much as a semi-truck. It's not
designed to do that. So by poking fun of a
civic's toying capacity, it really speaks to more about your lack
of knowledge than it does the civics lack of a towing capacity. But the important thing here is
these rides do go to space. I mean, after all to go to space, you just go up
until there's virtually no atmosphere, and it's not like the
atmosphere just suddenly stops, it just slowly fades away until you've
hit an altitude where there's just pretty much no atmosphere. Like when
you drive a car up a tall mountain, it's not like, oh, all of
a sudden the air is thin. It just gets thinner and thinner,
the higher and higher up you go, keep going with that idea. And you reach a point where there's just
virtually zero atmosphere and that my friends is space. So space is
really just a lack of atmosphere, but it's not a lack of
gravity similar to air. It's not like you get up to space and
gravity is just suddenly turned off and you just stay floating
there. As a matter of fact, when you are at 100
kilometers in altitude, you're still being pulled by earth with
nearly the same amount of force as you would be at sea level. Specifically, gravity still pulls you at 9.4 meters
per second, squared of acceleration, as opposed to the 9.8 meters per
second squared here at sea level. But you'll actually start
experiencing weightlessness. The moment the engine shuts down, which is only about halfway up
your climb to space. That's right, even though you're still going up, you and the spacecraft are both
no longer accelerating you're coasting up experiencing
zero G or weightlessness, kind of like the peaks of a roller
coaster where you feel like you're leaving your seat for a little bit. That's
a brief moment of weightlessness. This is basically that, but you'll
experience it for a long time, all the way from engine shutoff up
through your peak altitude or Apogee. And even as you fall, until you finally begin to experience
deceleration from atmospheric drag, the fact that your spacecraft is slowing
down is what will push you back into your seat. Now we should point out these vehicles
are just basically going straight up at Apogee. They have virtually
zero horizontal velocity. They're more or less completely
stationary for a brief moment in time. If they were to try to stay in
space by getting into orbit, they would need to be traveling
at orbital velocities. So roughly 28,000
kilometers an hour sideways, that's about eight times faster than
their peak velocities during ascent. If you want a quick run down on orbit
versus sub orbit, check this video out. The Karman line is a common definition
of the edge of space and is defined as 100 kilometers. Although most would argue that 80
kilometers is just as much in space as 100 kilometers. So there are actually some considerations
to changing all international definitions of spaces,
altitude to 80 kilometers. That being said until that number changes, only one of these two rockets will
actually get you above the Karman line or 100 kilometers. Which
one is it? Well for that, let's dive into each system. First up. Let's talk about
Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic is a suborbital
tourism launch company. Now don't confuse this with Virgin Orbit, who is a small sat rocket company
who launches their LauncherOne rocket from a Boeing 7 47. Now at one point
they both were part of Virgin Galactic, but now they're separate entities. Virgin Galactic currently has one
system composed of SpaceShipTwo and its carrier plain WhiteKnightTwo
just to mitigate some confusion. Here, there is also a newer production
ready version called SpaceShip III. It's virtually the same thing as two, and it hasn't flown as of the making
of this video. So from here on out, I'm just going to refer to
the vehicle as SpaceShipTwo. SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo are
scaled up versions of the original SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne. And now those were built by Scaled
Composites and won the 2004 Ansari, X prize of $10 million by
successfully flying to space and back twice in just five days. But it was just after their first powered
flight to space that Virgin Galactic announced they'd licensed the
technology and sponsor SpaceShipOne, and then they would start building their
own bigger versions for space tourism. So Virgin Galactic, co-founded the Spaceship Company
in 2005 at a 70% ownership with Scaled Composites owning 30%. The spaceship company's goal was to scale
up the spaceship one and its carrier plane to maximize their commercial
spaceflight potential. In 2008, the company would roll out their
new WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane, which was about three times larger
than the original WhiteKnight. It features a full twin
fuselage with four jet engines. What's cool about this is one of the
fuselage is actually a replica of SpaceShipTwo's interior. So they can train
passengers at a very reasonable cost. And the other fuselage can be used
for cheaper trips to 18 kilometers, almost double that of a standard airliner, which is high enough to be
able to see the dark blue sky, the first SpaceShipTwo or technically
the first Scaled Composites model 339 SpaceShipTwo was revealed
on December 7th, 2009. And it was named VSS enterprise. It sported a much larger design
capable of two pilots and six passengers, but it shares many similarities
with the first spaceship vehicle on ascent. It features an upgraded version
of their unique hybrid rocket engine. The engine uses HTPB rubber
based solid rocket fuel, but unlike a traditional solid rocket
booster, it can be shut down mid flight. This is where the hybrid comes from. The solid rocket propellant will only
remain firing when liquid or gaseous nitrous oxide are present in the motor. So the pilots can light the engine with
an igniter and then nitrous flows from an oxidizer tank into the
solid propellant. As long
as the nitrous is flowing, the rocket will continue to run, but shutting off the supply will shut
the engine down. That's super cool. Despite being able to turn the engine
on and off, it cannot actively throttle. It is a fixed thrust output for a bit
of time at Virgin Galactic played around with a different solid fuel called
thermoplastic polymer with nitrous and a little methane for combustion and helium
for shutdown but they would switch back to HTPB following the first and
only flight with that new engine, which unfortunately wound up with the
loss of the vehicle and the tragic loss of one of the two test pilots. But the breakup of the spaceplane had
nothing to do with this new engine. The breakup actually had to do
with a staple of its design, the feathered re-entry system. This happened when one of the test pilots
accidentally prematurely unlocked the feathering system
resulting in the vehicle, breaking up at supersonic speeds
while still under powered flight. Now, obviously they fixed that and made it
so it's impossible for that system to prematurely activate, but overall, the shape of the space plane is super
unique and has stayed basically the same and features those pneumatically tilted
tails and horizontal stabilizers. The twin tails of the rocket plane
have what they call a carefree re-entry profile, which takes inspiration
from a badminton shuttlecock. This is a passively stable design that
provides a large amount of drag and makes the vehicle want to reenter belly down
each time. Even if it, for some reason, began to reenter upside down. Once the vehicle is subsonic and then
the lower portions of the atmosphere, it straightens its wings back out and
glides back to the runway for a fairly standard landing. Or you might notice it's missing a
front wheel and instead it uses a simple skid that acts like a
brake pad on touchdown. It's really interesting about this vehicle
is that humans are 100% in control. I think it's super impressive that
these are fully flown by skilled pilots. That's right. There is no autopilot.
There's not even fly by wire. The pair of pilots control the vehicle
directly through either electronically controlled trim at supersonic
speeds or cables and rod linkages at subsonic speeds. It's kind of crazy to me that such a
beautiful 21st century spacecraft also so old school. I actually
kind of love that in space. They have some cold guests thrusters
to control orientation outside the atmosphere. Cold gas thrusters are just compressed
air and are very simple and effective. They can control each axis of the
vehicle. So pitch yaw and roll. And there's a pair of each
thruster for redundancy. One of the coolest things about this
vehicle is Virgin Galactic's attention to detail for the passengers.
They've done an amazing job, making sure the customer
experience is top notch, like by using 16 cameras on board. So you don't have to fiddle
with your own camera, which can help you live in the moment. These beautiful back displays to help
you stay up to date with every portion of the flight, the seats are also dynamic and set their
angle to maximize comfort and safety at all different portions of flight.
And the 17 windows all have a halo edge, so you can easily grab onto them to
maximize your viewing experience. Something that I think is
extremely important. In 2016, Virgin Galactic built their second
SpaceShipTwo called VSS unity, which flew three times to space
before being ready for passengers. And that's what's flying
currently. And on March 30th, 2021, Virgin Galactic showed off their
first spaceship three called VSS. Imagine. So that's the rundown on Virgin
Galactic's SpaceShipTwo at the end, we'll compare its exact specs
to Blue Origin's New Shepard, but first let's do a
rundown on that vehicle too. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has
been around for a very long time. In fact was founded before
SpaceX way back in 2000. Blue Origin's philosophy
is gradatim ferociter, Latin for step-by-step ferociously
and their slow and patient approach to spaceflight development
certainly shows that before New Shepherd saw the light of day Blue Origin was
demonstrating many technologies with a rocket powered vehicle
named Goddard in 2006, after Goddard Blue Origin began
developing the New Shepard system, which is a space capsule and a booster
New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space who
performed a suborbital flight. Their next rocket New Glenn is named after John Glenn, who was the first
American to go on an orbital flight. So as the name suggests
that rocket will be orbital, but back to new shepherd, the capsule was tested at the end
of 2012 with a pad escape test of their launch abort system
demonstrating their pusher, solid rocket motor abort system, and the ability to fully deploy the
parachutes for a soft landing at a low altitude. You may have noticed what looks like a
large center console in the middle of the spacecraft. Well, that's not
just a table or something. That's actually a solid rocket motor
capable of pushing the capsule away from a failed booster in a hurry, aiding in the
safety considerations of the vehicle. In 2015 Blue Origin announced they had
completed acceptance testing of their BE3 engine. That would be at the
heart of the New Shepard booster. The BE3 is a combustion tap off
cycle hydrolox powered engine. The tap off cycle is pretty unique. It's where you basically just punch a
hole in your combustion chamber and let some of the internal pressure of the main
combustion chamber spin the turbine to power your pumps. It's definitely a bit
of a head-scratcher when it comes to, how does it run? I mean like how do you even start an
engine that has the combustion chamber running the pumps and the pumps are
running the engine and then the engines running the pumps. I mean, yeah, well,
we'll save that for another video. What I like about the BE3 is that they've
kind of split it out inefficiently on the base of the New Shepard. So although the packaging isn't tight and
it's probably not very mass efficient, it is much easier to access all of the
parts and potentially tweak or repair when necessary. This allows them to quickly refurbish
and then learn the engine quite literally inside and out. Meanwhile, they can help use this knowledge to
shape their BE3U vacuum optimized, open expander cycle version, and that's going to be used on their
new Glenn orbital rocket in the future. The BE3 powers the rocket from their west
Texas launch site at about 1200 meters above sea level, all the way up to about 50 kilometers
or so when the vehicle hits main engine cutoff, and then it's going to coast
up the rest of the way to space. 80 seconds before Apogee the vehicle
stages into its two separate components, the booster and the capsule, the capsule will reenter and fall
back down slower than the booster, which is skinnier with less surface area. And here's where the
booster does something. I think that we all just simply love
to see on the way down it deploys fins to help steer it. Then it deploys some air brakes
to help scrub off velocity. Then when only about three
kilometers above the ground, it lights up it's BE3
engine to propulsively land. One impressive thing about their engine
is it can actually throttle down below 20% of maximum thrust, which can allow the rocket to hover and
then perfectly redirect itself over its targeted landing area. For reference SpaceX's Merlin engine on
their Falcon 9 and Heavy can throttle down to about 40%, which is also why the Falcon 9 can't
actually hover and has to do a fairly aggressive hover slam maneuver. But
a fun little fact here, Blue Origins, New Shepard actually became the
first rocket to reach space and then propulsively land. They did this about one
month before SpaceX landed
their first Falcon 9 booster. Now of course, one of these rockets is orbital
reaching a peak velocity of about 3,500 kilometers an hour while traveling
mostly straight up with virtually no horizontal velocity at all. And the other rocket Falcon 9
is an orbital rocket booster traveling at up to 8,000 pounds
kilometers an hour sideways, well carrying a large upper stage about
the size of the entire New Shepherd vehicle, but let's give credit where
credit is due 100% here because this is no easy feat and it's
still easily one of the coolest things a rocket can do, period. You may also notice that the booster has
a ring that the capsule sits on top of. I love this design because not only
does it serve a purpose for aerodynamic stability during re-entry, but it also has reliefs
for the abort motor. This means if they had to light the abort
motor while attached to the there's a place for that hot gas to go lessening
the chance of the solid rocket motor exploding, the booster below
it. As a matter of fact, they did exactly that for an in-flight
abort test when they lit that abort motor, while it was still on top of the booster
and miraculously quite literally, I think to everyone's surprise,
not only did the booster survive, it actually still came
back and landed softly, which was absolutely incredible. Okay. Now back to the capsule that of
course has the passengers on board. So the booster pushes it up towards
space and lets go of the capsule shortly after it shuts its engines down, then both the booster and the capsule
will coast up to peak altitude or Apogee, and then they both
will begin to fall back down. The capsule will return slower
than the booster though. Thanks to its larger surface
area and blunt body design. Since it has humans onboard, it uses a tried and true system
parachutes. At about two kilometers. It deploys three drogue chutes followed
by three main chutes at just about one kilometer in altitude. Now, despite the
capsule coming down super, super slow, it only about 25 kilometers an hour. They make the touchdown even softer by
firing some retro thrusters at the very last moment to create
a nice cushion of air. You might notice a bunch of dust
getting kicked up right as it lands. That's not coming down hard, that's it coming down so soft and just
gliding on a nice little cushion of air. It's similar to what the Soyuz capsule
does when it's touching down too it helps absorb energy before hitting the ground. And what's crazy is the New Shepard
could actually lose two of its three main parachutes and still land slowly
enough to be able to be survivable. And that's also thanks to shock
absorbing seats, unlike SpaceShipTwo. In fact, completely
opposite of SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard is 100% autonomous. This means all 6 seats on board can be
filled with passengers and there is no need for any of those seats
to be taken up by pilots. And each of the six passengers
are treated to massive windows. In fact, they are the largest
windows to ever fly to space, which would definitely be important when
the entire purpose of this flight is to see some incredible views
that you've never seen before. New shepherd successfully flew 15
times before putting humans on board. They lost their first booster on
their first attempt in early 2015, but safely recovered their capsule. Then the second booster would fly
five times before being retired. The third booster and second capsule flew
seven times successively before being retired and then the fourth booster
and the third capsule flew twice before being ready to be the first
to fly humans now. Okay. I think that about does
it for new shepherd. Now let's put these two vehicles up side
by side and compare their exact specs. [Inaudible]. Okay. Let's get these two vehicles up side by
side so we can get a sense of just how big they actually are. SpaceShipTwo is 18 meters long
with an 8.2 meter wingspan and a tail height of 4.6 meters. It's about as long as New Shepard is tall, which is 19 meters tall and about
3.8 meters wide. And just for fun, let's throw in a Falcon 9 for scale too, which helps give you a
sense of perspective. Falcon 9 towers over these vehicles
with its 70 meter height next their engines, which we're showing their propellant and
cycle types along with their thrust and efficiency measured in
seconds of specific impulse, Blue Origin's BE3 definitely has an
impressive thrust and specific impulse. The burn time of these engines is quite
different due to the fact that New Shepard launches on the ground and
SpaceShipTwo launches mid air because of this new Shepherd's BE3 runs for
aboruaut two minutes and 20 seconds or so compared to just about one
minute for SpaceShipTwo, I should probably point out here that
the hydrolox running New Shepard is very clean burning and has very very
little environmental impacts since its by-product is just water vapor. But that same thing can't really be
said for SpaceshipTwo's solid rocket propellant, which is pretty nasty,
especially for the ozone layer. Now that said it's really comparable
per passenger to a transatlantic flight. If you need a deep rundown on what exactly
comes out of rockets and what impact they have on our environment,
definitely watch this video. It's a super, super deep dive
on that topic. As we mentioned, SpaceShipTwo can carry eight people, two pilots and six passengers
and New Shepard can carry six passengers. Next total flight time from
takeoff to landing New Shepard is a much shorter ride. Only about 10 minutes
from takeoff to landing. Whereas SpaceShipTwo's usual flight time
is about two hours from wheels up to touchdown. But a lot of that time is either the long
slow climb up while being attached to WhiteKnightTwo, or the
slow glide back down, both vehicles still end up
spending roughly the same
amount of time experiencing zero G of around four minutes. But one notable difference between the
two vehicles is their maximum altitude. The highest VSS unity has ever
flown is just shy of 90 kilometers, which does mean it has never
crossed the Karman line, although it's frankly arbitrary and
doesn't really change anything as far as your experience goes, it is worth noting. A New Shepherd on the other hand does
cross the Karman line and has an Apogee of about 105 kilometers. Another fun and really important to note
about these systems is that they are both fully reusable. I think this is vital in
bringing the costs down. I can't imagine the cost if they were
throwing away hardware each and every launch, which brings us to the price. Now this isn't something that's
actually really that well published yet. We do know most people who have paid
for rides on SpaceShipTwo have paid $250,000, but unfortunately we don't really
know what's the price of a ride on new shepherd. There's really been
only one example of price so far, and it's a customer who
bid $28 million to fly on the first flight alongside Jeff Bezos, his brother mark and
aviation legend, Wally funk. But I think it's safe to assume the
standard price will be much closer to that $250,000 mark, similar to SpaceShipTwo.
Although some sources have reported, it might actually be significantly higher, but I guess we'll just
have to wait and see, but that about does it for the rundown
of these two awesome suborbital vehicles. All right. I think it's
time for a summary. I just love. That we're at a time when there's two
wildly different solutions for suborbital spaceflight tourism, and they're going online at
almost the exact same time. Both systems are honestly
beautiful in their own way. I love the safety redundancy
and simplicity of Blue Origins, traditional capsule based New
Shepard, but at the same time, I love the elegant and beautiful
solution with air launching and feathered re-entry like
Virgin Galactic spaceship. As far as which one would
I rather ride on though? That's really hard to answer. Sincerely. I think before Virgin Galactic
showed off their interior, I, I really wasn't that interested, but
once I saw that gorgeous interior, those awesome seats, the attention to detail on the lightings
and cameras and just the whole thing, I really could finally
picture myself riding on it. I also liked the idea of it
being a longer flight after all, even the ride wall is still
attached to WhiteKnight. Two would be pretty amazing and
the slow glide back down from space seems pretty fun as well. You might as well soak up as much time
as possible in that seat since you paid for it. I also really liked how the spaceship
oriented itself to look back down on earth so you can look straight down.
I think that's really cool, but I'm blown away and honestly, half annoyed at how cautiously Blue
Origin has developed New Shepard. I mean, it's obviously for the better and I'd
have a lot of confidence riding on a vehicle that has had such us absolute
stringent testing regime with 15 successful uncrewed
flights. Not to mention, I love the fact that New Shepard has a
lot of redundancy and a full envelope launch abort system. And
I love those massive, massive windows on New Shepard,
but at the end of the day, I think both systems seem to
offer just an amazing ride. And they've both focused on the customer
getting a really incredible experience and I'd probably hop on the opportunity
to ride on either system in a heartbeat. And I can only hope that in the future, we might all get to experience something
as incredible as these rides. I mean, imagine if the price came down enough
that it'd be similar to like skydiving or some other really fun experience. You
just go take a quick little ride to space. Wouldn't that be incredible. So what do you think when you ride on
either of these vehicles, both of them, neither of them do you think we'll see
long-term commercial success and this is just the start of a new era
of commercial spaceflight, or do you think this is not going to last, let me know your thoughts and
questions in the comments below. I owe a huge thank you to my patreon
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Thanks everybody. That's going to do it
for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut bringing space
down to earth for everyday people.
Pretty fair comparison. Don't forget to tune in Sunday AM at 9 EDT for the launch of VG.
Every time I see a screen grab of New Shepherd I feel like the pic should be labeled NSFW