Serious question: I Blue Origin actually doing anything else but celebrity joy-rides? If not, this has to be the most grotesque waste of resources I can think of.
They haven’t contributed to spaceflight advancement in truly innovative ways. At least SpaceX manages to catch some of their rockets when falling back to Earth. Blue Origin’s only claim to fame is that it’s a slightly more advanced vomit comet, which we’ve had for decades at this point.
vomit comet
I’m gonna pirate this.
It’s the old nickname for an airplane that basically flies up high, then nosedives for a while. They originally set it up so astronauts could train in free-fall (since they’re, y’know, falling for a few minutes), though it seems like you can just hire them for whatever now. OK Go did a music video featuring a ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWGJA9i18Co
They also filmed some of the zero-g scenes for Apollo 13 in the Vomit Comet.
It’s a bucket list item of mine to fly on and folks reaction to the name is never not funny
Their first orbital rocket, New Glenn, had its inaugural flight earlier this year. IIRC, it performed rather well in the “launch to orbit” aspect, but they lost the booster as it was coming back to land on a drone ship. It’ll take them time to iron out the kinks, but as long as they don’t scrap the project, I don’t see why it couldn’t become a contender in heavy lift.
It’ll take them time to iron out the kinks, but as long as they don’t scrap the project, I don’t see why it couldn’t become a contender in heavy lift.
So in about 30 years at their current peace?
Suppose we’ll see. Not unusual to have a long gap between the early launches, lots of data to analyze for the first time. Was 8 months between the first and second launch of Ariane 6, for example.
At this point they seem like joy rides. To start I remember them claiming they were using the data from New Shepard to learn how to best control and land the much larger and more expensive New Glenn rocket, which made sense. It’s not like SpaceX is going to share how they manage to nail the landings so repeatedly, it’s the secret to their success.
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Any woman who receives something good, did it by trading sexual favors
Aisha Bowe is an actual aerospace engineer, Amanda Nguyen an activist for sexual assault victims, and the rest are either rich, powerful, celebrity, or combination. Except Sanchez.
A PR stunt to deflect from Bezos’ permanent duck-faced fiancée getting a free ride does not mean the rest are strumpets who blew their way to the top. Exceptionally poor judgement yes, and they deserve derision for that.
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They also removed the comic they hosted about women astronauts…
Can you post it here?
Here is the archive.org page for it. It only got 2 issues out before they deleted it, but you can download them there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250314045755/https://www.nasa.gov/calliefirst/
she went with jeff bozo’s fiance. they basically polluted the fuck out the planet for no gain other than the egos of ultra wealthy twats. very inspiring
Are you guy caring after pollution now after encouraging people to burn electric cars for months
Really now
no and any sane person should agree with you. anyone who damages a random person car just because its brand is psychopathic and evil pos. I never even scratch someone’s else door in tiny parking lots because I wouldn’t like it to happen to me. You remember when conservatives boycotted the shit out of budlight and started shooting it and wasting it? Yeah that’s stupid too. I get what the boycotts accomplish but wasting something you already have is a negative. now imagine if they went out and destroyed/shoot someone’s else beers who just bought it in his shopping cart? scummy hurtful shit no sane person disagrees
Disney has increased their prices so much, that only rich people can afford it anymore. The really rich pay for private tours and special access. So what do they have to do to show that they are even better than the “average” rich person?
Go to space.
I hope this becomes the new staus symbol of the wealthy, and they start shooting up larger and larger tourist rockets, until one explodes and wipes out 100 Sociopathic Oligarchs at once.
Of course, they want Women In Space to be billboards, pretty things to look at and nothing more. Women are for procreation and decoration in their world.
Alternative title: Inspired to find a man to take you for a ride in his space penis
🎵 now I ain’t sayin she’s a gold digger
You just know Bezos’ in new pickup line is “hey baby, you wanna ride my dick into outer space?”
The orbit is a great place for all celebrities but they can skip the capsules.
This is brilliant, where this from?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon
Very first sci-fi film ever made after a story by Jules Verne. They use a giant cannon to launch someone into lunar orbit and back. Pure fiction but touched upon basics of actual science, and was definitely the inspiration for actual space exploration.
Would it theoretically be possible to send payload this way to the moon?
With a cannon you can’t go much faster than 4-5x the speed of sound, unless the space in between the payload and the explosive is filled with a lighter than air gas like helium. Like in a light gas gun. But even then the acceleration needs to be extremely high since the only thrust the payload gets is at the beginning. So it would destroy most things especially squishy humans. A light rail gun would be a better solution and is in theory possible, since it can accelerate the entire length of the rail. If you just make it long enough you can accelerate to any speed in a vacuum at survivable G-forces. But the end of the barrel needs to be in space in a vacuum as well other wise the payload will explode the moment it exists the barrel and hits atmosphere if it’s going fast enough to reach the moon.
As long as the force of the launch is enough to reach escape velocity, I guess so. But since the acceleration would be immediate, I guess a human occupant wouldn’t be able to survive the immense g-force generated.
So what you are saying is a bunch of billionaires would be “human paste” from this method?
I’m seeing no downside here…
Escape velocity including atmospheric drag!
A more practical method would be some type of mass accelerator. A canon implies very fast acceleration. We can shoot garbage in to orbit like that. But if we are puting delicate stuff in orbit, we need to spread the acceleration over time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
The only time we might have sent an object in orbit via an explosion
. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of meters into the sky.[8] During the Pascal-B nuclear test of August 1957,[8][9] a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) iron lid was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast, despite Brownlee predicting that it would not work.[8] When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found.[10] Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere.[8] A high-speed camera, which took one frame per millisecond, was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting.[8] After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame.
This shit is so fucking cool lol
Solar orbit lmao
The company Spin Launch is doing someone not that dissimilar to this, except they’re not using explosives to shoot it up, but are accelerating it in a circle until it gets the right speed
The more famous and recognizable image from that film is the projectile in the moon’s face.
Hilariously, it’s theoretically practical for lobbing “durable” loads to space.
The US already shot a shell high into the atmosphere with a gas gun. Some startups are pursuing the “orbital gun” idea now, to decent success on shoestring budgets.
It’s actually a more interesting solution for doing things the other way around: have some kind of mining operation on the moon and use a “cannon” (most likely a rail gun) to accelerate payloads from the surface of the moon into Earth orbit or even down to the surface.
But yeah, even that one wouldn’t be for squishy payloads such as people.
PS: That said somebody else is pointing out existing experiments were the object is accelerated around and around by a mass acellerator and then release at the appropriate speed, which might work for human payloads.
The escape velocity of the moon is 8,600 kilometers per hour. That would be a big, very expensive gun to set up and achieve that velocity. But yeah, if the “shells” and guidance could be manufactured on the moon, it would be an efficient system once its operational.
Again, the emphasis is that everything is several orders of magitude cheaper if you do it on Earth, especially if its something with a lot of mass. For the price of a single lunar space gun, one could build many enormous orbital guns on Earth.
There is an episode about this movie in Tom Hanks’s „From the Earth to the Moon” which I can’t recommend enough. This scene always moves me: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XA9e1LTFZHo
The first ‘female-only crew’ in space is technically Valentina Tereshkova (she went alone). Not these women.
Evil Russian Communist so she doesn’t count
Communists aren’t evil. That stinks of red scare propaganda. Though apparently she did vote for the Ukrainian invasion, which sucks. And no, that doesn’t devalue the achievements of the Soviet Space program. It does count.
Also she actually had to do some work. Where’s the fun in that?
is this supposed to show people everything is alright, there is no sexism and misogyny? wow billionaires are really so out of touch with reality
inspired to do what?
inspired to do what?
insert duck chasing meme
Oops, all ads
Buy things, and receive cosmetic surgical treatments from Jeff Bezos
Sounds like a fun ride, but there was no orbit, nor were they flying the ship. I feel more inspired by the women who have went into orbit far above the Karman line and have flown spacecraft.
something something Circuses
I understand a trip into orbit is hard to pass up, but how could you not know what riding on Bezos’ rocket would look like to the rest of us. It’s just so gross.
It wasn’t even a trip into orbit. Their rather short voyage was a sub-orbital hop. A low orbit of Earth requires a speed on the order of 8 km per second - Blue Origin can make about Mach 3, from what I read, which is circa 1 km per second. You go up, you go down. That’s it. They don’t even go particularly high (~100 km), and the apogee doesn’t keep you “above the atmosphere” (LOL) for long. Given the risks, I’m not sure it’s worth it, personally.
If we really want to inspire people by pointing out women’s accomplishments in spaceflight and space exploration, maybe we should be talking about people like Eileen Collins (astronaut on key shuttle/station missions), Lindy Elkin-Stanton (science lead for Psyche, the first to a metallic asteroid), Maria Zuber (lead the GRAIL mission to the Moon, co-discovered the rifts in the Ocean of Storms), or Mimi Aung (lead engineer for the Ingenuity 'copter on Mars 2020). And I’ve only mentioned a few Americans with recent work here; the rest of the world has plenty of enterprising female space scientists and aerospace engineers.
I share the general distaste in this thread and on Lemmy generally for this sort of celebrity stunt, and I’m glad to see the criticism. I do sometimes think, however, that for a certain kind of person, Bezos and Musk are becoming associated or even synonymous with spaceflight/exploration generally, which is a dangerous association to make. People have many, diverse and very legitimate reasons for going to space - there’s a lot more going on than joyrides and ego trips.
I do sometimes think, however, that for a certain kind of person, Bezos and Musk are becoming associated or even synonymous with spaceflight/exploration generally, which is a dangerous association to make. People have many, diverse and very legitimate reasons for going to space - there’s a lot more going on than joyrides and ego trips.
I do want to elaborate on that, if you don’t mind.
I’m all for spaceflight and mars settlement because it has many advantages. One of the most relevant ones is that it can stimulate the economy. Think about what the 1960s Moon mission did to the US: It inspired people and created jobs. Now think mars settlement could do something similar, but bigger. That in itself is a big win for the US, though there are more reasons to go, such as technological breakthrough and getting rid of the billionaires from Earth. There are more reasons to go, ofc, such as distracting Trump from wreaking havoc on the environment and minorities (remember: trump bashes against minorities because he needs to keep his voters voting for him by demonstrating power. If he can do something less destructive to demonstrate power, such as helping make settlements on mars, that hopefully is enough to satisfy his voters and makes it easier to shift his focus away from minorities).
I’m waiting for one of these propaganda stunts to end like that submersible that imploded and turned all those rich bitches into goo.
And I’ll laugh.
Yeah if anyone had a rocket fragment dropped on their head and I wouldn’t mind it , it probably would be you
The funny thing is news sites are barely, if not all, talking about the only two female scientists on board. If you don’t know their names, you will not even be able to find it in most articles because all they talk about are Katy Perry and Laurent Sanchez. lol truly a historic victory for the common female
“Look girls, IM REALLY RICH! Bezos might have destroyed thousands of women’s lives, but he sent ME to space! Idolize me for being so rich I get everything for free! Bow down peasants!”
I wish it would have exploded and so people could dance in the rain of her blood.
What would Katy Perry going to space even inspire girls to do? Get popular writing queer-bait songs and release mediocre pop albums? Become a dark horse? Look at that girls, if you can write mid-tier songs and wear skimpy outfits you too someday can become a passenger on a billionaire’s cock rocket!
I encourage anyone who doesn’t already know who Max Martin is, to google him. He is a sweedish producer and songwriter. He has written a staggering amount of pop hits from 2000 on and a massive chunk of Katy Perry’s most well known songs. This girl boss owes her success to a man.
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can become a passenger on a billionaire’s cock rocket
for 10 full minutes, no less
Suni Williams would like a word.
