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Jeff Bezos's Space Company Reveals Some Secrets
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Bezos's commercial spaceflight company, Blue Origin, has kept its plans secret to better compete with rivals such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. But in order to build its launch facility in West Texas, it has revealed some details of its future operations: Blue Origin's Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) will carry three or more passengers on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet above sea level. It will launch vertically and land vertically, and will use hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as propellants. It will operate autonomously under control of on-board computers, with no ground control. Blue Origin plans a maximum rate of 52 launches per year."
Approximately 1/3 of astronauts get space adaption syndrome. Basically, when you're in microgravity, the fluid in your inner ear doesn't settle, and so doesn't give your body a proper sense of balance. This does cause nausea and disorentation (lasting for up to a few days) in some people. Since these sub-orbital hops only give a few minutes of weightlessnesss, this will hopefully not be an issue.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, The Baroque Cycle, etc.) has taken a part-time job as a consultant for Blue Origins.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
There are a few standard hospital diagnosis codes for spacecraft accidents:
spacecraft accident ground crew
spacecraft accident occupant
spacecraft accident person (non-crew)
falling in a spacecraft (I guess that means floating into something)
and the generic spacecraft accident
Being almost too young to remember Challenger we'd kid around about these at work until Columbia.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'