[arrrg]

If there‘s any freefall involved there will be weightlessness, orbit or not.

[hackujin]

> while the booster drops back down, kicking in the landing gear and rocket-powered breaking system to land on the ground, unscathed. The capsule, meanwhile, using a pair of parachutes to coast back to Earth

Nope. No weightlessness at all.

[dandelany]

The capsule experiences ~3 mins of freefall/microgravity/“weightlessness” - in fact, they’ve already flown payloads that depend on this.

https://www.blueorigin.com/news/news/first-commercial-payloa...

[hackujin]

I can experience that jumping out of a plane and for way longer than 3 minutes.

[rory096]

No, you can't. You'll feel the force of air resistance (drag) as soon as you exit the plane, increasing until you hit terminal velocity and 1g.

[losvedir]

I think you misunderstand weightlessness. The Blue Origin capsule got to about 75 miles altitude and low earth orbit starts about 100 miles, while Earth's surface is about 4,000 miles from the center of gravity. In other words, the force due to gravity is essentially the same for all of these. Weightlessness is falling, that's it.

[sctb]

It's time to stop with the dismissals in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[stouset]

I’m sure there’s some period between booster cutoff and the parachutes. They’re not sending the chutes out while the capsule is still on the upward part of its parabolic arc.