The Wild Blue Yonder

There is a lot of nonsense about NS-31, e.g. the Blue Origin mission to send famous women on a rocket for the benefit of public relations. I was never impressed with Gayle King but her comments after her cannonball ride revealed her incompetency to an even worse level. She falsely claimed her ride was the same as Alan Shepard’s flight. It was certainly not. Both were sub-orbital paths, true. The NS-31, however, reached an apogee (highest point) of 62 miles, while Shepard’s apogee in his 1961 Mercury-Redstone 3 flight was nearly twice that at 117 miles. Blue Origin chose the 62 mile height to be able to claim its passengers went into “space”. NASA put the flight path of Shepard’s flight to be roughly the same as needed for Earth orbit (about 120 miles).

How did 62 miles become our definition of “space”? It turns out above this height, the atmosphere is thin enough that different physics comes into play and, therefore, different engineering is needed to design spacecraft and control their flight.

From this simple idea of height differences comes several observations:

a) There is no scorching on the New Shepard capsule because it didn’t really “leave” the atmosphere. It just got to the boundary of it. For example, if you look at pictures of the Space Shuttle’s solid boosters, you’ll see them nice and white — that’s because they were cut loose from the shuttle at a height of about 42 miles. You can also see the Blue Origin capsule didn’t get into space significantly by looking at its design. No heavy-duty heat shield was needed because the speed at which it was falling wasn’t nearly as great as that of a spacecraft coming to Earth from an orbit. In fact, at 62 miles up, the Blue Origin had a vertical velocity of zero mph while a returning orbiting spacecraft would already have a velocity of something like 3000 mph (yikes!).

b) This height difference between Gayle’s flight and Shepard’s is also the reason why the Blue Origin ride didn’t require the same type of physical constraints on the humans inside the capsule as on Shepard’s flight. The Blue Origin rocket didn’t have to lift the capsule as high and therefore the passengers were not under the same stressing acceleration as actual astronauts. In other words, the space tourists on the Blue Origin sub-orbital flight will never feel the same amount of g-forces as actual astronauts. In fact, it’s likely the women on NS-31 wouldn’t have been able to playfully scream and shriek in their descent had they actually followed Shepard’s path because the g-forces would have been too great to allow for it.

c) There is nothing unusual with landing an orbiting craft on ground with parachutes. The Russians have been doing it since the dawn of space travel itself. The NS-31 capsule was descending from a height even less than an orbit so landing with parachutes on solid ground represents no issue.

I’m left with two special feelings of frustration. First, despite claims to the contrary, the Blue Origin NS-31 was a ride and the passive occupants inside the capsule had zero control over it and were essentially human cannonballs. It’s like the ultimate carnival ride if you have a few hundred thousand bucks to spend. Second, those looking for conspiracies that the event was faked, have little or no knowledge of physics or spaceflight. In their own way, they are equally as ignorant as the women of NS-31.

Finally: at the dawn of spaceflight, the Mercury Astronauts demanded to have control over their craft and it was an uphill battle with NASA. The prevailing theory at NASA was the occupants of the capsule (and the astronauts hated that word for their craft) would be doing little more than providing data on humans in space — any actual flying would be done automatically. “Spam in the Can” as it was called by other pilots. In fact, Shepard’s spacecraft didn’t even have a window as there was no time to modify his vehicle before launch. Nevertheless, the astronauts were quality pilots by background and insisted on craft control. This turned out to be very important and, on many occasions, a human was needed to fix and tweak aspects of the craft’s flight path. There is no such possibility of control with the Blue Origin launches as currently configured. It presently is like getting on a jet airplane with no personnel from the airline onboard.

As a technologist, I know systems fail despite our best efforts. I sure as hell wouldn’t trust Blue Origin’s engineering to be 100% perfect — especially as I see how Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos cuts corners in shipping me goods on Amazon. Moral to the story: don’t believe the hype about space tourism. Nothing is routine about space travel. Nothing.