I don't think it's immediately obvious for the lay person not familiar with space flight of the differences between the achievements of the two companies.
Let's face it, this is a huge PR stunt for BO. Congrats to them; however what they did is not the goal. Now the media, from all the articles I've seen, portrays what BO did as the same as Space X. It's unfortunate but yes, the lay person will see BO being ahead of Space X, when in reality, that's far from the truth.
Isn't Blue Origin aiming at space tourism? No orbit, you just go up on a rocket, get weightless, see the curve of the earth and the blackness of space through big windows, then land 10 minutes later. They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.
> They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.
You think putting passengers aboard, instead of the proverbial sand bags, will be trivial? You could afford to cut a lot of corners with an empty crew capsule.
As an aside, it's sort of bothersome that it's termed as space tourism (not your term, I know) because it sort of belies the inherent risks associated. I'm pretty worried about what the public reaction will be when one of these 'tours' goes horribly wrong.
Consider an airbag. It "only" increases the time for the deceleration of your upper body to O(0.1) seconds. The reason it's so effective is because O(0.1) is O(100) times larger the deceleration time without an airbag, making the acceleration O(100) times less.
The reason why an airbag is effective is prevents your head from traveling long distance so you don't break your neck. It's still painful and still can break your nose.
If they had retrorocket on the capsule, I suspect it failed.
The purpose of an air bag is to keep your head from smashing into the steering wheel or dashboard at 70MPH because the car stopped but your head kept going.
The air bag decelerates you to zero over a (relatively) much greater time, meaning much lower forces on your face, brain, etc.
Soyuz lands with a retrorocket and it looks exactly like this:
To me the BO launch-and-landing is very much like what SpaceX already did with Grasshopper, only from a lot higher up.
Anyway, let's hope that SpaceX manages to land the next time they put something in orbit, that would be a big step forward, I'm seeing a lot more practical value in SpaceX than in BO.
Compare the size of grasshopper to BO's little toy rocket. Grasshopper was a full Falcon 9 first stage, which is a production GTO capable rocket.
What exactly is BO's rocket capable of? Reaching 100km altitude?
No one is more embarassed than BO engineers by the comparisons with SpaceX. They are in completely different leagues. BO is playing with toys, SpaceX is hauling commercial payloads to GTO.
It's like me making a go-kart that goes 0-60 faster than an F1 car, and saying "I've built a faster race car than McLaren!". Anyone with an ounce of knowledge on the subject would be in tears from laughter.
