Blue Origin Flight Coverage
Blue Origin Launches Four Commercial Astronauts To Space And Back (with video)
“Blue Origin successfully completed New Shepard’s first human flight today with four private citizens onboard. The crew included Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, who all officially became astronauts when they passed the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.”
Keith’s note: FYI I will be live on BBC World News starting around 9:00 am to co-anchor live coverage of today’s Blue Origin flight. I will be on BBC at noon to do a recap. I will be on Al Jazeera Arabic between 2:35-2:55 pm and then on Deutsche Welle just after 3:00 pm. and then ABC News Live at 3:15 pm. Then its a limo ride into DC and CNN’s Situation Room some time between 5-7 pm, a limo ride home, DW again at 7:00 pm, CGTN (US) just after 8:00 pm, CTV at 8:30 pm, and then CGTN (Beijing) at 10:00 pm. Then I crash.
Strange that a @BlueOrigin employee spent nearly all of the "press conference" talking and asking the questions – with dozens of actual news media there – and then only 3 actual media questions were allowed. Talk about running out the clock. #BlueOrigin
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 20, 2021
Blue Origin gets a lot of credit from me for taking Wally Funk – one of the original Mercury 13 – along. In most other areas they have fumbled or dropped the ball.
Just curious…how have they “fumbled” or “dropped the ball”?
They haven’t been able to deliver a working BE-4 engine to ULA for their Vulcan rocket.
Fair point, but I what I have been able to find, there has been a bit of requirements creep on the part of ULA related to Atlas “form factor” conformity. Let’s just say that the fumbling pejorative has a large family tree here. We’ll have to see how this shakes out in the coming months:
https://spacenews.com/blue-…
I also admit that in addition to choosing Wally Funk, Blue Origin was the first to have a totally reusable spacecraft. They just did not move forward with it to either orbital flight or many more sub-orbital flights.
Without question, ULA has its problems as well. I wish the best for all US space efforts, but do not see a lot of excuse for humans not leaving low earth orbit since 1973. As you said, “We’ll have to see how this shakes out in the coming
months.”
I consider calling New Shepard (or SS2) a spacecraft no more justified than calling a submarine an aircraft. A submarine can rise up to the surface of the water and touch the air, but not travel through it. New Shepard has no capability for travel through space, it can only briefly visit the region of the upper atmosphere where we consider “space” to begin.
Calling these vehicles “spacecraft” is misleading, implying they are far more than they actually are. Actual space travel is orders of magnitude more difficult than climbing into the mesosphere for a couple minutes, and these craft don’t even attempt to solve the problems that make it difficult. Perhaps “mesocraft” would be a useful distinction, though even that has the issue that they aren’t capable of any sort of sustained or prolonged flight in that region.
There is a list of things you asked about in this article.
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
Thanks for that link, Jack. I usually follow Eric, but hadn’t got to reading that Ars Technica article yet.
-Sputnik reached orbit in 1957 – something Blue Origin has yet to obtain.
-They have given funds to republicans who have voted to overturn the last election.
-They have had longer than Space X and accomplished much less.
-When they lost the moon contract because they vastly over charged and under performed instead of reforming they sent lobbyists to congress and hired lawyers to sue. They need to focus more on engineers and less on lobbyists and lawyers.
-They hide all their work. (if they are even doing any meaningful work)
-They do not seem to know how to do public relations. Instead of regarding others as friendly competitors – as Branson, Musk and Rocket Lab do – they ran a nasty ad against Branson that also seemed to imply that rich people are better than peons and those who could not afford a 15 minute space ride did not deserve one.
-Bezos running of Amazon borders on the inhumane.
Not only is SpaceX way more productive than BO, did you see the difference in the quality of their webcasts?