Shepard’s daughters, Laura and Julie, were introduced at a press event a few hours later. Their flight lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds - five minutes shy of Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight in 1961.
“My expectations were high and they were dramatically exceeded,” Bezos said later.
Led by Bezos, they climbed out of the capsule after touchdown with wide grins, embracing parents, partners and children, then popped open bottles of sparkling wine, spraying one another.
The capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6 G’s, on the way back. Unlike Branson’s piloted rocket plane, Bezos’ capsule was completely automated and required no official staff on board for the up-and-down flight.ĭuring their several minutes of weightlessness, video from inside the capsule showed the four floating, doing somersaults, tossing Skittles candies and throwing balls, with lots of cheering, whooping and exclamations of “Wow!” The Bezos brother also joined their palms to display a “HI MOM” greeting written on their hands. The 60-foot (18-meter) booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright. The two private companies chasing space tourism dollars, though, have drawn criticism for catering to the rich while so many are struggling amid the pandemic.ĭuring Tuesday’s flight, Blue Origin’s capsule reached an altitude of about 66 miles (106 kilometers), more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico and beat him to space by nine days. Named after America’s first astronaut, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket soared on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. “Best day ever!” Bezos said when the capsule touched down on the desert floor in remote West Texas after the 10-minute flight. The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas - the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space. Musk and Bezos and their comrades deserve much harsher consequences for their celestial entitlement than ridicule, but so long as we stop short of saving our world for ourselves and wait for someone to stop us from buying things off Amazon from inside our variously overheated and overcooled homes, ridicule is what they shall have.VAN HORN, Texas - Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft. Elon Musk, future captain of his own gigglesome rocket, got plenty of stick recently when he shared an earnest little poem that took aim at the haters: “Space represents hope for so many people,” he bleated, as he took fire from those justly furious at the billionaire class’s relative indifference to the climate emergency. It’s their self-seriousness as much as anything else that deserves to be mocked. Bezos and his ilk are doomed (or blessed) to live in a post-Freudian culture where anything remotely long or straight is one unfortunate contour away from design disaster, and no amount of money will change that. And millions of years later, here we are laughing at Jeff Bezos’s rocket, wondering half-seriously whether or not he really didn’t notice its shape as he climbed aboard.ĭreaming of human endeavors beyond the upper atmosphere is not incompatible with snorting at a self-serious billionaire’s space phallus.
Think of that: a millennia-long evolutionary saga whose eventual protagonists spend a shocking proportion of their tiny lives obsessing over their genitals.
0 kommentar(er)
