Fucking A bruv. One of the ships even looks like a fucken’ dildo. Both are utterly useless. At least Musk is actually building useful stuff. The others… not so much.
That’s slightly unfair. Blue Origin isn’t just trying to get into the tourism industry, they are trying to be a competitor in the rocket engine space. ULA is planning on using their engines for their new rockets.
Of course, ULA is getting frustrated at delays caused by Blue origin but that doesn’t change the fact that they are trying to create a useful product.
To me it doesn’t help that Amazon is such a blatantly evil corporation. What with their hellish distribution centra, godawful race-to-the-bottom inducing market behavior and 19th century style worker exploitation. Fuck him and fuck his spaceship.
Blue Origin would be good for space if SpaceX didn’t exist. They’ve always been focused on reusability, something that ULA and the rest of the aerospace companies never were concerned with because as long, as NASA or European Space Agency were footing the bills, there wasn’t a financial incentive.
After reading Christian Davenports book Space Barons, I think Blue Origins is moving a bit faster than Lockheed, Boeing, Draper etc, But SpaceX speed has just been phenomenal.
In non-millionaire-wanking news:
dtolman
4518
Less than 30 minutes to Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed space flight (with Billionaires and Millionaires in tow). Watching on nasaspaceflight stream
138
4519
The morning news is all abuzz with stories of the “historic” Bezos flight scheduled for later this morning. I wish news outlets would stop treating this as some important newsworthy event, and instead question why Bezos and Branson don’t instead use their vast wealth to better the human condition. What good comes out of these projects? What advances do we make? What do we learn? Short answer: Nothing.
The optimistic answer is that this is equivalent to the barn storming civilian plane stunts of a century ago - crossing the Atlantic, going around the world, etc. They were vanity projects for rich dare devils. This could be the prelude to opening up sub-orbital space for widespread civilian uses in the 21st and 22nd centuries - space flights from NY to Tokyo in an hour, etc.
Guys, this is nothing new. We’ve had Pigs in Space since the Muppet Show.
Yeah, because planes don’t create enough CO2 already and there are no risks with take off and landing anywhere near a city carrying highly flammable fuel.
No, it’s pure vanity.
Because the way forward isn’t to step back.
Actually not really.
Blue Origins is pretty green
That’s nice, actually, as it’ll be ready for a future transition, but, for now, that’s just shifting where the CO2 is produced. For the foreseeable future, it’s only green in the sense of a bitcoin mining operation powered by dams being green.
But it was nice that one injustice was lessened
JD
4526
Technically not ‘in space’ anymore, but hey.
So cool. Would be kinda fun hunting for meteorite fragments.
RichVR
4528
It would be awesome to find a big chunk of one. And they are worth a lot of money.
Wishing for bigger Marsquakes, what could go wrong? But seriously, cool science being done, expanding our planetary knowledge beyond N=1.
There was an emergency at the space station today as the newly-docked Russian Nauka (“Science”) module suddenly fired thrusters and wouldn’t stop until it ran out of fuel. Seemed to be handled pretty well, they counter-fired thrusters on the old Zvezda module and on a docked cargo ship to counter it and keep control. However, it may have done some slight structural damage, and has definitely delayed tomorrow’s test flight of Boeing’s commercial crew vehicle until they can do inspections.
Houngan
4532
That’s some book stuff there, I read Project Hail Mary and have started reading Larry Bond’s Jerry Mitchell submarine series, so I’m all about clever force neutralization and super-smart people doing super-smart things.
