Blue Origin to fly another 90-year-old into outer space

Blue Origin has announced the crew flying on its NS-25. Former US Air Force Captain Ed Dwight is among the six aiming to travel aboard the reusable rocket past the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. The sub-orbital spaceflight mission is slated to launch later this year using the New Shepard …

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue Origin in association with SAGA Travel

Essential note for foreign readers: SAGA is a British company largely focused on tours for the older generation. Nobody knows what SAGA stands for, but it's been a mild joke for many years that it was derived from "Sex And Games for the Aged".

Offer up your best new bacronym for SAGA below.

[Roj Blake]

Re: Blue Origin in association with SAGA Travel

In this case, it might stand for Sending Another Geriatric Astronaut

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Blue Origin in association with SAGA Travel

If they're keen on sending the zimmer frame generation skywards, perhaps they should accommodate a couple of presidential hopefuls, ideally with a one way ticket?

[Version 1.0]

Re: Blue Origin in association with SAGA Travel

Space Again is a Great Adventure ...

LOL I was listening to Sopwith Camel playing "Monkeys On The Moon" this morning, such a great old song that describes everything I saw then but never thought about it until today. If I was flying in space I'd be playing it all the time!

[sedregj]

Suggestive thrusting

♫ Flash ... aaah aaah ♫

[Periquet dels Palots]

Space tourists should probably go to hell for their beyond lavish waste of resources and blatant disregard for the world's welfare. But hey, if I had to fly into hell to flaunt my triumph over lesser men, an erect penis shaped rocket would definitely be the way to go.

[Zebo-the-Fat]

SAGA

Send All Grannies Away!

[GraXXoR]

Not to be pedantic but …. /instantly enters pedant mode/

Into •deep• space? I thought Blue Origin barely makes it into space at all, by various definitions.

It’s literally (in the original, non-ironic sense of the word) just beyond the Karman line, the lowest point that is internationally considered space at all.

Moreover while it’s just above the densest layers of the atmosphere, it’s still within the tenuous outer ”thermosphere” (which extends out to 400 miles or so) and well below the point where air resistance would allow it to remain in space for any reasonable length of time even if it hit orbital velocity and trajectory.

If I am not mistaken, deep space kind of refers to stuff well out beyond the Earth/Moon orbital distance, or even further, beyond the Earth’s gravitational well something like arbitrarily 1,000,000 miles or 2,000,000 km or something like that.

/pedant

I’m absolutely not trying to shit on the achievements of Blue Origin reaching space in any way, which is really quite a remarkable feat, but just trying to keep some perspective in a world where so much in the media tends to be unnecessarily exaggerated…

[John Brown (no body)]

"If I am not mistaken, deep space kind of refers to stuff well out beyond the Earth/Moon orbital distance, or even further, beyond the Earth’s gravitational well something like arbitrarily 1,000,000 miles or 2,000,000 km or something like that."

IIRC, A.C.Clarke said something along the lines of in the future, the word ship will mean space ship and only for a short time near the start of human history did ship mean something floating on the water. In a similar vain, I suspect "deep space" will change over time to mean at least beyond the solar system, anything inside the Kuiper Belt or maybe the Oort cloud being "local space" :-)

[ldo]

Re: the word ship will mean space ship

Unless quantum teleportation progresses to working with larger clumps of matter than just a few subatomic particles, and over a longer range. Give it a hundred years, two hundred years, who knows? Then the whole concept of “starships” becomes obsolete.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: the word ship will mean space ship

"Unless quantum teleportation progresses to working with larger clumps of matter than just a few subatomic particles"

Wait...what? When did quantum teleportation become more than a theory and the transfer of quantum states turn into the ability to transfer actual sub-atomic particles? Got a link? Sounds very interesting.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: quantum teleportation

The key feature of quantum teleportation is it improves the chances of a hard to explain physics experiment reaching main stream news. (See: "It could be Aliens" from an astronomer.)

You are quite right about it meaning transfering the quantum state of one single particle to a different particle some distance away. At best it would be the digital conveyer(*) version of beam me up: utterly obliterate the target and assemble a copy elsewhere. The only plus side is that if it can be scaled to a huge number of particles then there is no way to make two identical copies who argue over who owns the bank accounts.

* digital conveyer is the Galaxy Quest version of Star Trek's transporter beam. If you have not seen it, the first three minutes will make you think I am insane to recommend it. I promise it gets interesting shortly afterwards.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: quantum teleportation

"* digital conveyer is the Galaxy Quest version of Star Trek's transporter beam. If you have not seen it, the first three minutes will make you think I am insane to recommend it. I promise it gets interesting shortly afterwards."

I have, and I fully agree with you :-)

[xyz]

It's the same as the definition of an "all nighter" which has been tweaked too. These days an all nighter is when you work to midnight and not through the night. Deep space these days really means quite high.

[werdsmith]

It’s literally (in the original, non-ironic sense of the word) just beyond the Karman line, the lowest point that is internationally considered space at all.

Further pedantry, the Karman Line is a proposed suggestion of a somewhat arbitrary number (100km) and not universally accepted and nothing official about it. US armed forces and FAA use 80km, and this is a US rocket.

[Anonymous Coward]

Typo!

Looks like you capitalized the adjective "black," which, in fact, is not a proper adjective.

[ragnar]

Re: Typo!

Why not?

"a word naming an attribute of a noun, such as sweet, red, or technical."

If red counts, why not black?

[Spazturtle]

Re: Typo!

Because he is black AND an astronaut, he is not a black astronaut as if that were something different to being an astronaut.

[Spherical Cow]

Re: Typo!

The article says "first Black astronaut" which should be "first black astronaut". It's a perfectly valid adjective, but not part of a proper name in this instance.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Boy, talk about mixed feelings. . .

While I'm at best ambivalent about Jeff Bezos's rocket jockey joyrides, I'm glad that Captain Dwight will finally get the chance to go into space, albeit briefly and as a passenger, not a pilot.

Having grown up during the whole space race and watched every launch on TV, from Alan Shepard's suborbital through the last Apollo mission, and in general being a great lover of all things NASA (I even worked at one of the research centers for a short period of time as a contractor and had the honor of contributing a small bit of software to one of the programs at JPL), it pains me to no end to read how Capt. Dwight felt he was forced to leave the astronaut program due to racial "politics," which is probably a polite way of saying racist bigotry.

I hope he makes it up and down in one piece and in good health.

I just wish he had had his chance to fly the real thing and make his contribution when it would have made a real difference.

Good luck and happy landings, sir!

[ldo]

Re: probably a polite way of saying racist bigotry.

Well, remember at that same time, Katherine Johnson couldn’t even use the same toilets as the white folks at NASA. Ed Dwight would have been subject to the exact same thing.

“Politics” seems rather a mild word for that sort of treatment.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: probably a polite way of saying racist bigotry.

Precisely.

[Dostoevsky]

Re: probably a polite way of saying racist bigotry.

I know I'm a little late to the party, but NASA had already desegregated well before she arrived. That whole "ran a ½-mile to use the restroom" thing was added by the screenwriters.