With differing longer-term ambitions and goals, the three billionaires have collectively upended the traditional government-funded and directed model for human spaceflight and are shaping a thriving new commercial space era, according to Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School professor and an expert in the economics of space. The company is already regularly flying astronauts to the international space station, and is renting out its Dragon space capsule this fall for its first private spaceflight, taking a crew of four on a three-day orbital odyssey. “Jeff started building in 2000, we started building in 2004 & now both are opening up access to Space – how extraordinary! Watch this space … ”Ībsent from Branson’s tweet was any mention of Musk, whose nonconformist Space Exploration Technologies Corporation – better known as SpaceX – has grown from a shaky start in 2002 to become the dominant player in the commercial space sector, and a key partner of the US space agency, Nasa. “Many congratulations to Jeff Bezos & his brother Mark on announcing spaceflight plans,” Branson said in a tweet directed at his rival. On Thursday, the bidding reached $4.2m for the 11-minute round trip. On Saturday, the winner of an auction for a seat to accompany Bezos and his brother Mark on next month’s big space adventure will be announced on the Blue Origin website. But beyond what some might see as vain billionaires using real-life rockets as playthings, the episode underscores how close the lucrative yet still fledgling commercial space industry has come to routinely launching paying passengers into outer space and achieving a goal two decades in the making. So this is what we’re gonna fly.Branson’s team was quick to downplay the possibility, insisting a date for his first spaceflight had yet to be determined. “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”.

Jeff bezos rocket image