Cosmic Log
Some of the nearly 200 job opportunities posted by Blue Origin suggest Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture is preparing to sign up passengers for its New Shepard suborbital spaceflights.
One listing is looking for an astronaut experience manager to help create “a highly differentiated offering that culminates in the customer becoming an astronaut.”
Another listing calls for someone to run a training program for New Shepard flight controllers.
What will people experience when they rocket to the edge of space on the New Shepard suborbital spaceship that’s currently being tested by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin venture?
An 11-minute video, recorded inside the crew capsule during this week’s test flight in West Texas, gives you a pretty good idea.
You can even watch the flight’s effect on a test subject — in this case, an instrumented crash-test dummy nicknamed “Mannequin Skywalker.” (For those who have been on another planet for the past 20 years, that name’s a tribute to Anakin Skywalker, a central character in the “Star Wars” saga.)
One of the big takeaways is that there’s no crash: At the end of the ride, the capsule drifts down to the ground and lands with what looks like a relatively gentle floof.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his space venture, Blue Origin, launched the latest version of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship today for the company’s first test flight in 14 months, with an instrumented test dummy seated aboard.
“He had a great ride,” Bezos said tonight in a tweet.
The uncrewed, straight-up, straight-down trip was conducted at Blue Origin’s testing ground in West Texas. The video that Bezos included with his tweet showed the New Shepard blasting off and rising above a wide-open spread of ranchland.
In addition to the dummy, which was nicknamed “Mannequin Skywalker,” the New Shepard crew capsule carried 12 commercial, research and educational payloads, Blue Origin said.
Virgin Galactic said its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane today executed a successful gliding flight test that was “essentially a dry run for rocket-powered flights.”
“Our major first today though was that with the exception of the rocket motor fuel grain … we flew with all the spaceship’s principal propulsion components on-board and live,” the company said in a post-flight statement.
The hybrid propulsion system’s tanks were pressurized with helium and nitrous oxide, and the plane carried a ballast tank filled with a half-ton of water to simulate the weight and positioning of the solid-rocket motor. The pilots even practiced venting nitrous oxide while the rocket plane, christened VSS Unity, was still mounted on its White Knight Two mothership.
The mothership, known as VMS Eve, carried Unity to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet and released it for flight. Unity then glided back down to its home base at Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, has been toning down his predictions about the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane’s future trips to space. Until now.
During a trip to Hong Kong to inaugurate a new Virgin Australia route from Melbourne, Branson said the second SpaceShipTwo, known as VSS Unity, “will be back in space by the end of the year.”
“I plan to go to space next year,” he told Australian Business Traveller.
Bloomberg News quoted Branson as saying that rocket-powered tests would be scheduled every three weeks, culminating in test flights to outer-space altitudes by November or December. Commercial passenger operations should start by the end of 2018, after Branson’s inaugural ride, he said in an interview.
Virgin Galactic passed another essential milestone today in the flight test program for VSS Unity, its upgraded SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, by bending its wings into a “feathered” position for the first time in the air.
The company hailed the gliding test as a success in a series of tweets. Test pilots Mark Stucky and Mike Masucci were at VSS Unity’s controls, while Nicola Pecile and CJ Sturckow piloted the White Knight Two carrier airplane. Flight test engineer Dustin Mosher rode in the mothership as well.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Are you worried about having to pee while you’re flying on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship? Or getting sick? Billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has a word of advice: Fuhgeddaboudit.
During this week’s visit to the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos handled the standard questions about, um, bodily needs while in the confines of the suborbital spaceship that Blue Origin is developing.
Those questions have been addressed before, but perhaps not quite as authoritatively (or humorously). Watch our video, and then we’ll sum up answers to all the burning questions that arose.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.
Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.
Our guide for the sit-in was Ariane Cornell, a member of Blue Origin’s strategy and business development team. Five other journalists and I ducked our heads, stepped through the hatch and settled into the six seats placed around the periphery of a cabin that’s about the size and shape of a big igloo.
Charles Simonyi, the billionaire software executive who’s flown to space twice, says he doesn’t know who’s on SpaceX’s passenger list for a flight beyond the moon and back. But he knows at least one potential customer who’s not on it: himself.
Simonyi might seem to be in the sweet spot for the space adventure, which SpaceX billionaire founder Elon Musk says is in the works for as early as 2018.
The Hungarian-born computer scientist bought not just one, but two multimillion-dollar trips to the International Space Station, in 2007 and 2009. The Soyuz capsule he rode in 2009 is on display in the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. And thanks in part to his role as the architect for Microsoft Word, his estimated net worth amounts to almost $2 billion.
The folks who ride New Shepard, the suborbital spaceship being tested by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be given barf bags to tuck into their flight suits. But they almost certainly won’t need them.
That’s the word from former NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick, who is now working out what passengers aboard New Shepard will experience. His official title at Blue Origin is human integration architect.
Patrick and other Blue Origin employees showed off what the company’s done so far, and what it plans to do over the next couple of years, for a standing-room crowd of about 500 folks on Jan. 27 during an “Astronomy on Tap” presentation at the Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.