Bezos brings space race to Kent as he plans a passenger rocket

Rand Simberg wrote:
On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:59:00 GMT, in a place far, far away,
Christopher made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Yet another suborbital flight company that'll probably go the same way
as Roton did.

Roton was not a suborbital flight company. And it didn't have
billions of dollars of its own money, as Jeff Bezos does. Other than
that your prediction is spot on (not).

Oh, when is he going to 'go for orbit'?

Presumably after he's sorted out suborbit. The mistake (including
NASA and the Air Force) everyone makes is to take too large a leap
before they've figured out how to do things cheaply and reliably. As
Jeff Greason has pointed out numerous times, it's much easier to
gradually expand the envelope of a low-cost reliable system (the way
we did with aviation) than to take an existing high-performance system
and make it low-cost and reliable.

And he's right, but not as folks like Rutan are doing it with new
vehicles for every significant advance in flight envelope. Greason
means building a vehicle theoretically capable of going all the way,
but having intact abort capability and recoverability so that it can be
tested like aircraft a taxi tests, takeoff tests, level flight
tests, maneuvering tests, gradual speed increment tests, incremental
altitude tests, etc. Rutan did a bit of this with ~14 test flights of
increasing altitude and speed, after doing some drop tests, but is
essentially building new vehicle designs for SS2 and SS3.

The X-37 and other projects are doing something similar, but nobody
with significant funding is building an orbital vehicle right now that
is capable of such incremental testing and intact abort landings. DC-X
and X-33 were the closest attempts at it thus far. DC-X followed
essentially the General Dynamics proposals of the 80's, the Y and I
vehicles would have been truly full envelope capable.