[smackfu]

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.

[Luc]

> 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.

[JoeAltmaier]

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.

[TrevorJ]

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.

[discardorama]

> 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

[greglindahl]

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.

[mod]

The near-instant deceleration would feel rougly the same, regardless of whether it was caused by retrorocket or earth, wouldn't it?

[semi-extrinsic]

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.

[takeda]

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.

[mikeash]

The purpose of an air bag is to keep your head from smashing into the steering wheel or dashboard at 70MPH because the car stopped but your head kept going.

The air bag decelerates you to zero over a (relatively) much greater time, meaning much lower forces on your face, brain, etc.

Soyuz lands with a retrorocket and it looks exactly like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2X2kaqYatI

You don't need a long burn to cushion a drop like this. A fraction of a second will suffice.