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Blue Origin Launches Its First Test Flight of 2018 (mashable.com)
After several delays on Sunday morning, a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket blasted off from the west Texas desert just after noon Central Daylight Time, sending a crew capsule carrying a dummy named "Mannequin Skywalker" on a brief trip to space. For the eighth time, Jeff Bezos' commercial space company successfully tested the system it hopes to use to send paying passengers on suborbital flights in the coming months. From a report: The rocket reached a maximum altitude of 350,000 feet during the test flight, which took roughly 10 minutes from liftoff to the rocket and capsule touchdowns. This test marks the first test flight of the New Shepard system in 2018. The launch of the capsule and rocket was the eighth overall test flight of New Shepard, and the second time this rocket and capsule have flown to suborbital space together. The capsule also carried "Mannequin Skywalker," the test dummy outfitted with sensors used by Blue Origin to give flight engineers a sense of what a person might experience during a flight to space aboard the New Shepard.
Eventually, Bezos hopes that New Shepard will take paying customers up about 100 kilometers into the air, where they will experience weightlessness and be able to see the Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule falls back to the ground under parachutes. But Bezos' ambition stretches far beyond sending tourists to suborbital space. Blue Origin also has plans to build larger rockets that will be able to send big payloads and crews of people to orbit and beyond.
Eventually, Bezos hopes that New Shepard will take paying customers up about 100 kilometers into the air, where they will experience weightlessness and be able to see the Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule falls back to the ground under parachutes. But Bezos' ambition stretches far beyond sending tourists to suborbital space. Blue Origin also has plans to build larger rockets that will be able to send big payloads and crews of people to orbit and beyond.
Video of the whole flight is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Alright, I'll say it because everyone already senses it anyhow... this rocket's special distinction is that it uses the blood, sweat and tears of warehouse workers for fuel and the hopes and dreams of mom n' pop store owners for an oxidiser.
From WikiPedia:
Gravitational acceleration at the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space which lies at an altitude of 100 km, is only about 3% lower than at sea level.
If I weigh 100kg (ok, 100lb, this is /.) then I would weigh 97 at 100km. The majority of the 'weightlessness' is just free-fall; sort of a massive erect vomit-comet. :)
Actually, let's be honest here: Don't Use Metric. Those Europeans landers have had some real problems. Meanwhile, the ones from the US seem to land just fine. But as soon as the US added a little bit of the metric system to a probe? Whammo!
Y'see, when those units are so easy to convert, you start making mistakes. When you know it's tough, you check things out more thoroughly.
(And, yes, I'm being facetious for those of you who are missing it...)
True, but no different than being in microgravity during orbit. This is also due to being in free-fall.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj