Shatner breaks the age barrier, goes where no nonagenarian has gone before with Blue Origin rocket trip Four travelers successfully flew to the edge of space and back on Blue Origin’s second commercial spaceflight including William Shatner, making the 90-year-old Star Trek actor the oldest person to leave Earth yet. The nonagenarian was joined by Audrey Powers, VP of Blue Origin’s New Shepard flight operations, Dr Chris …
My senses have been stripped....My hands can't feel to grip.....
I'm pretty sure that he just took a ride in a silver machine ...
Lemmy, I owe you all the beer if we ever meet on the other side ...
and say "out of all the cast why him?"
But what I really want to say is that I want Nimoy, Kelly, Doohan, to still be with us, and able to take a flight as well. Leonard Nimoy especially had a way with words, and I would have loved to hear what he would have thought.
People (in the US) say they remember where they were when they heard Kennedy was shot. I remember being in the restaurant for lunch when I saw that Nimoy had passed.
Unfortunately the Bezos pr machine is more focused on out SpaceXing SpaceX, than explaining the benefits of this kind of stuff, so that even the royals trying to out environment cred each other can take pot shots at it.
Reusable rocket technology, and every successful launch & landing improves its reliability & capabilities, will lead to a massive reduction in the costs to access space, cheaper access to space unlocks science & technology knowledge & opportunities for making the Earth a better place,and solve some of the insolvable problems we face.
These New Shepherd launches are a step on the way to discovery,and bigger things, just like the first forays in aviation history, the Wright brothers or Montgolfiers experiments in flight have led to a global industry of flight that literally saves thousands of peoples lives daily, through better quicker access to emergency healthcare ,medicines,transportation of food and water, fire suppression.
Shatner in his own words has described the fragility of this planet and its environment that is only something you experience in space, you can call it a joyride on a bouncy castle if you like but this IS inspiring a generation to take up STEM topics and make the world a better place.
"the fragility of this planet and its environment that is only something you experience in space,"
Absolutely. If you get up there and remember what little there is protecting you when you're down on the ground, then you might be minded to look after it a bit better.
And all the way into orbit rather than just sub-orbital. Of course, then Bezos will have to one up Musk by flying Shatner round the moon, and so on.
Poor Shatner! He just wanted a quiet retirement, and now he's going to be used as a way of keeping score between billionaires in a new Space Race.
Shatner was particularly moved by his Amazon Warehouse and Delivery experience.
“Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the world needs to see this," he told Bezos the Bald Chimp, choking up.
"People monitored by tracking-and-timing devices, given no rest, and compelled to pee into soda bottles and to defecate on the side of the road."
“It was unbelievable.”
"Fk those dirty, lazy underachievers. You have restored my faith in ruthless greed, overt narcissism, and the upper class."
Trying to make this brief:
There's a great episode of The Universe, maybe 808, the title might be 'How Big, How Far, How Fast'. This super pleasant astrophysics guy constructs The Universe on a scale of 1ft:1million miles.
The Sun becomes an 8 inch bowling ball. The largest star around something like Alpha Centauri (sp?) is a weather balloon with maybe a 40ft diameter. The Earth is a tiny blue bead between his thumb and forefinger. Terrifying. Suddenly my field of f@#*s lay barren. If I wake up alive it's a good day, full stop.
Shat'll never watch that TV show. Had to drag his ass to space before he knew that fear, but now he does. Plus, his soapbox is bigger, so maybe he'll get that across more than me trying to relate a TV show from eight years ago to you. We gotta get the word out and stop screwing around.
So happy to have him back on terra-firma.
Not quite. NASA threw away the multi-million dollar launch vehicle each time and didn't bother reusing the flight vehicle either. On the other hand, the electronics and computing powers probably wasn't up to a 1st stage landing with level of likely success, not to mention reliably re-lighting the engines. BO is going slowly compared to SpaceX and both are building on the shoulders of the giants who proceeded them (as NASA themselves did), and they are both doping it better and cheaper. I do hope BO catch up to SpaceX since it's clear the other incumbents don't seem to have a clue how to do re-usability.
Even ESA are looking at a re-usable demonstrator flight by 2023, although they only signed the development contract (a continuation of something already happing, possibly only in theory at that stage) last December. That'll be a while away, but their roadmap shows a first flight in 2023 and full "flight envelope" test flight in 2025. Sounds a bit optimistic to me. There's a list of all known reusable rocket programmes on wikipedia.
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