![]() ![]() ![]() “You’ve got to imagine there was a meeting where someone went, ‘Do you really want to fly looking like this?’ But I’m guessing an engineer got up and said, ‘This is what the math says. ![]() Still, “they can’t not have noticed,” McDowell said. Was there any subtle aesthetic messaging involved? “I don’t know if I would have made the design this way, but I’m sure it was driven entirely by physics” as well as cost savings, said Forczyk. That’s there to accommodate a “ring-shaped fin” that is fundamental to the re-entry process, counteracting the effects of the fin at the bottom as the booster travels in reverse.Īll this adds up to some particularly memorable optics. He pointed to other examples of rockets with slightly flared tops, including the Atlas V Starliner, expected to launch next week.Īdding to those “anthropomorphic” qualities is a ridge near the top that is “very, very obvious”, Manley said. “It comes down to optimizing two different things and not being able to make them quite match,” McDowell said. These competing concerns can lead to a capsule that is wider than might originally have been envisioned. “It is easier to balance a long and skinny cylinder than it is to balance a thicker, fatter cylinder,” Forczyk said. “And this is the shape they came up with, this dome shape.”Īs for the booster, engineers work to minimize its mass, making it as small as possible. “They went through a lot of iterations coming up with the perfect shape to give them the most volume, the best windows, and wouldn’t kill anyone onboard,” said the astrophysicist Scott Manley in a private video shared with the Guardian. It also needs a “big, flat bottom” for stable re-entry, McDowell said. New Shepard’s interior is designed to “maximize the interior volume” to hold six passengers, said Laura Forczyk, the owner of Astralytical, a space analytics company. Just like the tips of passenger and military jets, capsules come in all different shapes. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.” “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, said McDowell. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. It was also the first crewed launch for Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.Īboard the ship with Bezos were his brother, Mark, along with an 82-year-old former test pilot and an 18-year-old student.New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. Blue Origin’s rocket New Shepard blasts off carrying Star Trek actor William Shatner, 90, on billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company’s second suborbital tourism flight near Van Horn, Texas, on. I can't wait to see what it's going to do to me," Bezos said.īezos' launch, while unbelievably memeworthy, made history Tuesday as the first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew. Related: "People who go into space say that they come back changed. Other memes of the day included comparing Bezos' appearance to fictional characters who explored space, including Jean-Luc Picard from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," as well as Dr. User wrote, "Is it just me or is Jeff Bezos' #BlueOrigin rocket look like a weiner? Someone's compensating." Another user, posted, "The biggest compensating for something in the history of compensating for somethings." ![]()
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