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by Cshelton 3865 days ago
Let's face it, this is a huge PR stunt for BO. Congrats to them; however what they did is not the goal. Now the media, from all the articles I've seen, portrays what BO did as the same as Space X. It's unfortunate but yes, the lay person will see BO being ahead of Space X, when in reality, that's far from the truth.
1 comments
smackfu 3865 days ago
Isn't Blue Origin aiming at space tourism? No orbit, you just go up on a rocket, get weightless, see the curve of the earth and the blackness of space through big windows, then land 10 minutes later. They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.
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Luc 3865 days ago
> They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.

You think putting passengers aboard, instead of the proverbial sand bags, will be trivial? You could afford to cut a lot of corners with an empty crew capsule.

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JoeAltmaier 3865 days ago
Its hard to untangle cause and effect. I think the space tourism is to fund the engineering effort, which now can be used in other vehicles.
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TrevorJ 3865 days ago
As an aside, it's sort of bothersome that it's termed as space tourism (not your term, I know) because it sort of belies the inherent risks associated. I'm pretty worried about what the public reaction will be when one of these 'tours' goes horribly wrong.
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discardorama 3865 days ago
> They just did a perfect demonstration of that flight.

Did you see how hard the capsule landed? Look at around the 1:39 mark on the video: https://www.blueorigin.com/gallery#youtube9pillaOxGCo

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greglindahl 3865 days ago
Doesn't look hard to me -- are you being confused by the big cloud of dust? That's mostly caused by the last-second retrorocket.
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mod 3865 days ago
The near-instant deceleration would feel rougly the same, regardless of whether it was caused by retrorocket or earth, wouldn't it?
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semi-extrinsic 3865 days ago
Consider an airbag. It "only" increases the time for the deceleration of your upper body to O(0.1) seconds. The reason it's so effective is because O(0.1) is O(100) times larger the deceleration time without an airbag, making the acceleration O(100) times less.
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takeda 3865 days ago
The reason why an airbag is effective is prevents your head from traveling long distance so you don't break your neck. It's still painful and still can break your nose.

If they had retrorocket on the capsule, I suspect it failed.

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