Earth Has Four New Astronauts
"I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it. It's so much larger than me, and life, and it has nothing to do with little green men. It's about the enormity."#WilliamShatner who became an #astronaut on #BlueOrigin #NS18 #StarTrek pic.twitter.com/QbxZVVEHnd
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) October 13, 2021
This was the voyage of the RSS First Step today. Its mission: encounter Earth from incredible views at apogee pic.twitter.com/Gzsnkv97K9
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2021
nice stunt, but show me how this moves us closer to (at least) landing on the moon ?
It won’t move us closer to landing on the Moon. That is already in-work, whether by Artemis or SpaceShip or whatever the Chinese are doing. BUT…what it may do is inspire youngsters and even some adults to become involved in space exploration and development…just as some youngsters who flew in some barnstormer’s open-cockpit fliers in the 1930’s and later, even though there were Ford Tri-motors and even DC-2’s/-3’s ferrying paying passengers around. Some of those kids went on to fly in World War II and Korea. A few even became astronauts!
The point is, these flights, as relatively primitive as they are, can be inspirational.
Ad Astra!
The problem is that those kids in the 1930s did fly themselves (well, fly in the plane with the barnstormers). With only one or two exception, that isn’t analogous to the sixteen people who have flown on commercial or space tourist missions in the past months. Your logic counts on young people being inspired by getting to watch much older and much richer people fly into space. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. Especially since the path isn’t into space; if they are inspired and want to do the same thing, the lesson is to get rich or famous doing something which isn’t space related. (I don’t count acting as space related, even if it’s a part in a science fiction show.)
always knew Jim was a cowboy ?
Glad to see he has done this!
I don’t definitively know the reasons (I can easily entertain some) but I find myself caring less and less about these suborbital jaunts. I’d have never imagined such a thing even a few years ago given my lifelong passion for things space and especially space tech.
Maybe because they’re lame when compared to Inspiration 4.
Contrary to Shatner’s typical sardonic demeanor, he seemed truly awed by the experience when the flight was over. He was even emotional at times during his nearly ten minute long conversation with Jeff Bezos immediately after deboarding the capsule, seemingly oblivious to the celebrations going on around him. Shatner had certainly experienced the overview effect, but he said that what specifically caught him off guard was how beautiful and yet thin the atmosphere is. It was obviously the biggest takeaway for him, as he downplayed the other more common enthusiasms of first-time space travelers in comparison (weightlessness, the blackness of space, looking down on Earth).
Somewhat humorously, when Shatner asked Bezos how thick the atmosphere is, Shatner guessed, “is it a mile, two miles?”. I guess he does better estimating distances when travelling at warp speed. But even funnier was when Bezos answered, “Depends on how you measure it, it thins out at maybe fifty miles, not even.” I am guessing that Jeff wishes he could somehow go back and edit that response.
Why? Depends on what you mean by ‘thins out’. Breathing vs. aero surface lift vs re-entry are different ‘measurements’.
Because Bezos has previously ribbed Virgin Galactic for not reaching the Karman line. To quote Blue Origin:
“Only 4% of the world recognizes a lower limit of 80 km or 50 miles as the beginning of space.”
“From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.”
So regardless of technical accuracy it just sounded funny hearing Bezos say that the atmosphere is only about fifty miles thick.
It’s a great shame that Blue wasn’t ready to capture his reactions with a proper microphone. This was the first time that someone with Shatner’s acting chops has been up. (He first did Shakespeare at Canada’s Stratford Festival in 1954.) You would have thought that someone on the Blue team might have anticipated that his immediate impressions would have been worthy of capturing. And to see Bezos more interested in playing with a champagne bottle than in listing to what Shatner was sharing was deeply cringe-worthy. Perhaps Bezos can find something to do on launch days other than photobomb.
It seemed to be an impromptu moment, and fortunately a camera was there with a microphone to capture their conversation in its entirety, which could have easily not happened considering the situation and what was going on around them. And the camera stayed on the two of them the entire time instead of panning over to the other people who you could hear celebrating in the background. Audio was reasonable, at least you could clearly hear what they were saying.
At risk of saying anything nice about Jeff Bezos I think he handled it gracefully. He let Shatner talk, never interrupted him, never tried to shorten the conversation or try to steer Shatner over to join the party that was going on nearby. At the very beginning when Shatner hadn’t really started, Bezos paused for a moment and turned towards the others and joined in the champagne celebration very briefly, but then said “I want to hear this” and he turned back to Shatner and stood and listed to him talk for nearly ten minutes with no other interruptions. I think if they had waited and gotten Shatner onto a stage with the others like is normally done it probably wouldn’t have had the emotion and spontaneity that it did hearing him literally moments after he stepped out of the capsule.
I do agree that the spontaneity was key. I work with AV folk, so am very sensitive to questions of audio setup. They had a camera ready to capture him. Why not have a good microphone, too? I should watch it again. It sure seemed to me that Bezos cut him off to mess with the champagne bottle. Perhaps I was too busy cringing to get the nuances. (And, for me, the celebration going on with others was a huge distraction and made it really hard for me to understand what Shatner was saying. Granted, my hearing is not fantastic, but it does underscore the low signal-to-noise ratio in that video.)
Bezos did cut him off just as Shatner was starting to talk. I cringed also for a moment wondering if Bezos was just going to come back and start maneuvering Shatner into the party or for photo ops, but when I heard Bezos say “I want to hear this” I thought oh boy I think we are in for something here. I watched the playback again and you are right the background noise of everyone celebrating is louder in the audio than I remembered, I guess I was just so focused on listening to Shatner that I wasn’t aware of it. The Cosmic Perspective website made a transcript of Shatner’s comments so that should help.
Yeah, I don’t think anybody, including Shatner or Bezos, anticipated that Shatner was going to get hit by the Overview Effect that hard.
So I can forgive Bezos for initially trying to stick with what I assume was the original plan, i.e. champagne showers, high fives, photo ops, and semi-rehearsed speeches about the experience. Once he realized that Shatner was not acting, he rode the changing moment well enough.
A bit of a shame, if not surprise, to see Audrey Powers not often mentioned in coverage of this flight. She’s done great service to the commercial spaceflight cause as an advocate for intelligent regulatory approaches and through her work at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.