The New Shepard crew capsule fires retro rockets as it touches down. The New Glenn’s mainstay BE-4 rocket engine is currently being produced at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and undergoing tests at the West Texas facility. But Blue Origin hasn’t yet set a ticket price or taken customer reservations for those crewed flights.īlue Origin is building on its experience with the New Shepard suborbital program as it proceeds with its New Glenn orbital program, which could start flying as early as 2020. Paying passengers - including tourists as well as researchers - will eventually climb aboard the autonomously piloted spaceship. The current round of uncrewed flight tests is aimed at clearing the way for Blue Origin’s test astronauts to start taking their turns around the end of this year or early next year. Yet another payload, provided by New Mexico-based Solstar, was aimed at testing a Wi-Fi system that could be used by suborbital spacefliers.įor now, however, Mannequin Skywalker was the only one filling a seat. Scientific payloads were flown in the capsule for NASA’s Johnson Space Center and German research teams.
Meanwhile, the capsule floated down at the end of three parachutes and set down in the desert with a retro-cushioned floomph. A double sonic boom heralded its approach, and the booster set down smoothly on its landing legs in the designated landing area.īlue Origin’s rocket booster touches down at the end of an uncrewed test flight. Under autonomous control, the booster maneuvered its air brakes and relit its hydrogen-fueled BE-3 rocket engine to slow its speed. PT), things escalated quickly.ĭuring a 10-minute flight, the booster sent the capsule straight upward into partly cloudy skies at supersonic speeds, separated, coasted to its apogee and then plummeted back toward the ground. But once New Shepard’s booster lit up at 12:06 p.m. “Mother Nature threw us a couple of thunderstorms,” webcast commentator Ariane Cornell explained.Įquipment checks added to the countdown holds. Liftoff from Blue Origin’s suborbital launch facility in West Texas was delayed for more than three hours, in part due to weather.
#Jeff bezos spaceship update
Update your settings here to see it.Ī test dummy nicknamed Mannequin Skywalker was placed in one of the crew capsule’s six seats for the purposes of collecting flight data, just as it was for December’s flight. Musk and Bezos and their comrades deserve much harsher consequences for their celestial entitlement than ridicule, but so long as we stop short of saving our world for ourselves and wait for someone to stop us from buying things off Amazon from inside our variously overheated and overcooled homes, ridicule is what they shall have.This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Elon Musk, future captain of his own gigglesome rocket, got plenty of stick recently when he shared an earnest little poem that took aim at the haters: “Space represents hope for so many people,” he bleated, as he took fire from those justly furious at the billionaire class’s relative indifference to the climate emergency. It’s their self-seriousness as much as anything else that deserves to be mocked. Bezos and his ilk are doomed (or blessed) to live in a post-Freudian culture where anything remotely long or straight is one unfortunate contour away from design disaster, and no amount of money will change that.
And millions of years later, here we are laughing at Jeff Bezos’s rocket, wondering half-seriously whether or not he really didn’t notice its shape as he climbed aboard.ĭreaming of human endeavors beyond the upper atmosphere is not incompatible with snorting at a self-serious billionaire’s space phallus. Think of that: a millennia-long evolutionary saga whose eventual protagonists spend a shocking proportion of their tiny lives obsessing over their genitals.
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