British billionaire Richard Branson, whose own space company, Virgin Galactic, is planning on conducting flights to suborbital space for ultra-wealthy thrill seekers and competing directly with Blue Origin. Not even Elon Musk, whose SpaceX builds rockets powerful enough to enter orbit around Earth, has announced plans to travel to space aboard one of his companies human-worthy crew capsules. If all goes according to plan, Bezos - the world’s richest person with a net worth of $187 billion - will be the first of the billionaire space tycoons to experience a ride aboard the rocket technology that he’s poured millions into developing. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to auction ticket for first space tourism flight Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images Matthew Staver/Bloomberg/Getty Images Bezos has been reinvesting money he made at Amazon since he started his space exploration company more than a decade ago, and has plans to launch paying tourists into space within two years. and founder of Blue Origin LLC, speaks at the unveiling of the Blue Origin New Shepard system during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. So this is what we’re gonna fly.Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Inc. “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 says. 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, says 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. Photograph: Blue Origin/AFP via GettyĪdding to those “anthropomorphic” qualities is a ridge near the top that is “very, very obvious”, Manley says. He points to other examples of rockets with slightly flared tops, including the Atlas V Starliner, expected to launch next week.īack on Earth: Jeff Bezos climbs out of the New Shepard capsule after his space flight. “It comes down to optimising two different things and not being able to make them quite match,” McDowell says. These competing concerns can lead to a capsule that is a bit 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 says. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.”Īs for the booster, engineers work to minimise its mass, making it as small as possible. “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, says McDowell. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had such a distinctive shape.Īs social media erupted with innuendo, we contacted a few experts to find out why it looked, in the words of one astrophysicist, so “anthropomorphic”.Īt one major research institution, the press officer refers us to the gender-studies department, but Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is able to shed some light on the topic. Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”.
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