What else was it? Seemed like pure space tourism, though perhaps Branson makes the line a little sharper.
Timex
4536
Commercial flight started as zeppelin flights for rich people doing sightseeing tours, because they were too expensive and slow originally to really do any kind of functional transportation. Yet it was a step towards the commercial airline industry we have today.
There is no “functional transportation” aspect to spaceflight, primarily because there is nowhere to go.
When Arthur C Clark tried to patent the concept of the geostationary satellite the patent office rejected his application because it was silly and had no possible real-world application.
Menzo
4539
I disagree with your absolutism here. What if one of these companies had a breakthrough with fuels or materials that made suborbital trans-continental flights easy and cheap? Fly from NYC to Paris in 45 minutes!
It seems ludicrous, but none of us know what’s going to come of the work these companies are doing. These sorts of breakthroughs have happened before.
Maybe, but that doesn’t seem to be what Bezos is building. The Blue Origin ‘spacecraft’ is a comfortable version of the Apollo capsule, with large viewing windows for rich tourists, and without the engine module or avionics or flight controls of any kind. It’s a viewing platform you launch just barely into space, then it falls back to earth. It isn’t designed to do anything useful at all. It isn’t even a good taxi service to low earth orbit platforms.
So it’s a fancy Vomit Comet.
I don’t think it take much research at all to know that his recent flight was not the end goal of Blue Origin.
magnet
4543
Most of this also applied to zeppelins.
We like to make the joke around here that a bunch of us are old men yelling at clouds and, well… sometimes it’s true.
Thrag
4545
He totally has the wrong idea. You need to build luxury self-sustaining orbital stations for the rich flee from Earth to when it becomes uncomfortable to continue to inhabit.
Freeside - Why wait?
At a spending pace on the order of $1b per year, I’m not at all sure it matters what their end goal is.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, you can argue that the reusable first stage rocket booster has some long-term utility, but the spacecraft itself is useless in any serious attempt to explore or colonize space. It’s a junket box.
Timex
4547
I don’t think you’re right, dude. There’s nowhere to go, because there’s no way to get there. Getting people up into orbit means that you can build more stuff in orbit.
Blue origin’s goal here is not to send rich people into space for sightseeing tours. That’s just PR stuff, as part of a longer roadmap. It demonstrates the feasibility of a commercial entity doing this.
Someone would have to be an idiot to think that Bezos did all this because he wanted to take a trip into space.
Bezos spend a bunch a money on something outrageous? It is to laugh.
This seems like a meaningless response whose only purpose looks like defending some initial snark with more snark.
‘Seems’ is doing a lot of work there, Mark.
We spent real money on manned space exploration back in the day, an average of $20 billion in current dollars per year, and as I said earlier, what Bezos is spending is a tiny fraction of that. That he’s managed to not even equal the achievement of Alan Shepard’s mission of 60 years ago is hardly surprising, and it doesn’t really bode well for whatever he says Blue Origin’s plans are.
Now, that’s an argument you can disagree with if you like, but what you can’t do is pretend it isn’t being offered. If that’s what you want to do, just go ahead and put me on ignore. That’s a far easier way to pretend I’m not saying anything, and less annoying for both of us.
Thrag
4552
I mean he really doesn’t seem the type of guy to spend loads of cash on weird vanity projects.
Do we need space tourism for those breakthroughs, or will they come from the commercial exploration/exploitation of space? I’m not a rocket naysayer, I’m just naysaying that space tourism is particularly important, especially since it’s just blowing millions of dollars to scrape the upper atmosphere and get your rich person card punched. If there was a space hotel or a moonbase or something then yeah, you’ve got a transportation angle.
There’s a sequence in Summer of Soul where people in the audience are being interviewed about the moon landing and expressing skepticism about all of it while there are very real problems down here on Earth. So this debate is an oldie but a goodie!
One especially insightful segment is devoted to the Apollo 11 moon landing nationally televised during the summer of 1969. Questlove cuts away from grainy black and white NASA videos to show Walter Cronkite and other TV reporters interviewing unimpressed black festival goers. One articulate interviewee declares that the moon landing is in no way more important than the speakers and musicians celebrating black unity at Mount Morris Park. Another young man cooly condemns the waste of taxpayer money on space exploration when it could be used to eradicate poverty and racist oppression here on Earth.
