Some questions about the Blue Origin New Shepard flights

[Bill Ryan]

Dear Friends, I have a few questions, with an open invitation for anyone to offer answers. I'm NOT saying the Blue Origin flights are faked — not at all: of course, they're real — but as many readers may know, there's been a tsunami of hilarious and merciless criticism all over the internet of the recent NS-31 feminist PR calamity which made quite a few involved look like they were characters out of Idiocracy.

Most of the uninformed online criticisms of the technical aspects of the flight are easily explained away. But I have a few questions of my own which I can't yet answer to my own satisfaction, despite knowing quite a bit about both space flight and aeronautics.

Can anyone with better understanding than mine shed light on the following?

1)
The maximum velocity of the rocket + capsule (before they separate), is 2,300 mph. This is on record, easily checked online.

But the thing looks like this: (shown horizontally)



In comparison, here's a very well-known plane (the famous Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird)) that also flies at 2,300 mph:




The friction generated at that speed (2,300 mph/ Mach 3) generates so much heat — even with its hyper-streamlined shape — that the skin temperature of the aircraft reaches 315º—480º C (600º—900º F). The whole plane gets so hot in Mach 3 flight that the titanium airframe expands as much as several inches in length.

So a triple first question:

Q.1a) How can the very blunt New Shepard capsule nose withstand that speed and heat?
Q.1b) If it gets that hot, where does the heat go? (Is the capsule cooled? It doesn't seem like there's A/C in there, a serious note.)
Q.1c) And what does the speed and heat do to the VERY large, fairly thin windows — and also to the parachute compartment, which is at the very top (or nose) of the capsule?

2)
Here's a still frame from the widely publicized video of one of the women looking out the capsule window.



She's looking straight at the sun. None of them are wearing (or are even equipped with) dark glasses or goggles, and as far I can see the windows are not tinted. As best I know (do please anyone correct me if I'm wrong) the sun at that altitude above the earth (62 miles/ 100 km, where there's barely any atmosphere at all), should be blindingly bright.

Q.2) What am I missing?

3)
After the capsule reaches its apogee (the highest point, like a ball being thrown up in the air), it drops back down to earth like a falling rock. Nothing's slowing it down until it reaches terminal velocity, and at 3,000 feet the 3 parachutes open.

That all seems fine at first glance, but the capsule is hardly aerodynamic. It looks like this as it falls to earth before the parachutes open: (a screenshot from the CBS news feed, enhanced with added contrast)



The thing to bear in mind is that there are no control surfaces, and no means of thrust vectoring. That means that it's literally dropping like a dumb rock and can't be steered or pointed/oriented in any way.

The combined weight of the 6 passengers, all strapped into reclining seats during descent, can't be perfectly evenly distributed. They look like this:



Q.3) So what stops the thing from starting to wobble, or going into a wild tumble as it falls? (If that were to happen, it would be a major problem for the deployment of the 3 parachutes, as they'd stand a significant risk of getting tangled.)

These are serious physics questions. I'm sure there are good answers (there have to be! ) but I don't yet know what they are.

[Jim_Duyer]

I agree that your questions relating to the reasonableness of the craft design and its flight deserve serious answers. I have a difficult time when the capsule was shown upon landing with no burn marks - indeed, with an almost pristine paint job.
But even more telling - if this were designed to showcase the Bezos space vehicles, why not, upon landing, give a shout out to thank the crew controlling the flight, the makers of such a "fine" product, and a bit about how they were thankful that space flight has now proven to be within the realm of even ditzy pseudo-stars.
Instead we see them attempting to portray the ride as nearly a jungle adventure into Jurassic Park without weapons.
What happened during the flight that our attention was directed away from?

[norman]

Obviously much fakery.

The question is why. Are they trying to nudge more people awake in haste to save humanity, or are they just drunk of nihilistic hubris ?

[Jim_Duyer]

Posted by norman (here)
Obviously much fakery.

The question is why. Are they trying to nudge more people awake in haste to save humanity, or are they just drunk of nihilistic hubris ?

Good question. Perhaps the reason revolves around the idea of going into space as being something that is very easily achievable - and not as big a deal as many think. This would tend to be a side shot towards denigrating Elon Musk, and his many accomplishments, both in rescuing the crew of the space shuttle and his future ground-breaking space flights.

[Bruce G Charlton]

I just watched the Fox newsreel purporting to show the take-off, and it seemed such a very obvious, artificial-looking, fake that it made me laugh - almost like watching Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds in the 1960s!

[happyuk]

Yeah I'm not buying it. Similarly, rewinding to 1969, I've always had deep reservations about the practicality of the Apollo 11 lander. Even to someone like me, with no background in aeronautics, it looks more like a flimsy, tinfoil-covered theatre prop than a functional spacecraft. (That said, I do believe someone made it to the Moon — just not with that thing. If anything, I suspect the real mission relied on classified or undisclosed technology we still don't know about.)

I think the 2025 mission is marginally better at withstanding modern scrutiny than the 1969 setup, but not by much!

[Johnnycomelately]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Dear Friends, I have a few questions, with an open invitation for anyone to offer answers. I'm NOT saying the Blue Origin flights are faked — not at all: of course, they're real — but as many readers may know, there's been a tsunami of hilarious and merciless criticism all over the internet of the recent NS-31 feminist PR calamity which made quite a few involved look like they were characters out of Idiocracy.

Most of the uninformed online criticisms of the technical aspects of the flight are easily explained away. But I have a few questions of my own which I can't yet answer to my own satisfaction, despite knowing quite a bit about both space flight and aeronautics.

Can anyone with better understanding than mine shed light on the following?

1)
The maximum velocity of the rocket + capsule (before they separate), is 2,300 mph. This is on record, easily checked online.

But the thing looks like this: (shown horizontally)



In comparison, here's a very well-known plane (the famous Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird)) that also flies at 2,300 mph:




The friction generated at that speed (2,300 mph/ Mach 3) generates so much heat — even with its hyper-streamlined shape — that the skin temperature of the aircraft reaches 315º—480º C (600º—900º F). The whole plane gets so hot in Mach 3 flight that the titanium airframe expands as much as several inches in length.

So a triple first question:

Q.1a) How can the very blunt New Shepard capsule nose withstand that speed and heat?
Q.1b) If it gets that hot, where does the heat go? (Is the capsule cooled? It doesn't seem like there's A/C in there, a serious note.)
Q.1c) And what does the speed and heat do to the VERY large, fairly thin windows — and also to the parachute compartment, which is at the very top (or nose) of the capsule?

2)
Here's a still frame from the widely publicized video of one of the women looking out the capsule window.



She's looking straight at the sun. None of them are wearing (or are even equipped with) dark glasses or goggles, and as far I can see the windows are not tinted. As best I know (do please anyone correct me if I'm wrong) the sun at that altitude above the earth (62 miles/ 100 km, where there's barely any atmosphere at all), should be blindingly bright.

Q.2) What am I missing?

3)
After the capsule reaches its apogee (the highest point, like a ball being thrown up in the air), it drops back down to earth like a falling rock. Nothing's slowing it down until it reaches terminal velocity, and at 3,000 feet the 3 parachutes open.

That all seems fine at first glance, but the capsule is hardly aerodynamic. It looks like this as it falls to earth before the parachutes open: (a screenshot from the CBS news feed, enhanced with added contrast)



The thing to bear in mind is that there are no control surfaces, and no means of thrust vectoring. That means that it's literally dropping like a dumb rock and can't be steered or pointed/oriented in any way.

The combined weight of the 6 passengers, all strapped into reclining seats during descent, can't be perfectly evenly distributed. They look like this:



Q.3) So what stops the thing from starting to wobble, or going into a wild tumble as it falls? (If that were to happen, it would be a major problem for the deployment of the 3 parachutes, as they'd stand a significant risk of getting tangled.)

These are serious physics questions. I'm sure there are good answers (there have to be! ) but I don't yet know what they are.

Hi Bill. I think I have a good answer to Q1-a, which takes care of b and c.

In short, not much heat was generated.

It took about 4:25 from liftoff to max height, which was 345,000 ft. Max Q (maximum dynamic pressure) occurred one minute from liftoff, so maybe 40,000 ft (345 divide by 8, guessing, to account for slow at first). Then things get easier. I didn’t look for speed vs. time or altitude data, just watched the WWLTV vid, lo-fi MSM fare.

The Blackbird cruised at 80,000 ft. I don’t know its temperature vs. time at speed profile, but clearly this Blue Origen time at max Q was comparatively teeny, and its max speed was way up in thinner air. Rockets’ engines are usually throttled back during max Q, then increased as that hazard is passed.

Q2, about eyesight hazard by the brighter sun up there, dunno. Good question.

Those big windows look dark from the outside, maybe they are special tinted for blocking UV, and maybe everyone was advised not to look directly at the sun.

Q3, about the stability of this falling ~capsule, reminds me of the similar shape of one at a museum from my youth, don’t remember if Gemini or Apollo. Also don’t know if those pioneers had attitude-assist thrusters, but recall reading that stability was designed into the shape. Maybe there are thrusters that align it proper before it hits the denser air.

[Johnnycomelately]

For anybody who thinks this event was staged, fake, I wish you well. IMO, you are just another flavour of flat-earther, caught up in delicious denial of officialdom.

Here, take a 53 minute break, and have some pure laughs about this thing, before you go back to digging your hole.

The 10-Minute Mission: Katy Perry and the AstroNOTS

Josh Johnson
1.61M subscribers

Posted 4.22.25

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q0pMHmzH52Y

[Bruce G Charlton]

"For anybody who thinks this event was staged, fake, I wish you well. IMO, you are just another flavour of flat-earther, caught up in delicious denial of officialdom."

I can only speak for myself. When I see something that looks to me like a fake then I assume it is a fake, and move on to other matters. Why waste time on it?

My strong assumption - based on many experiences and assumptions about the Establishment - is that whatever it is, the official story is always false in at least some very important respects (whether factually, or in interpretation - or both); but that it is only very seldom we can ever know what is true.

I therefore know what it isn't, but not what it is.

Also, I believe things have NOT always been as they are now - in particular I recognize (because I was active as a scientist over more than 30 decades) that Things Have Changed, especially over the past 60 years.

Real science began to die in the 1960s, and survived dwindling into the 90s - but has dwindled to almost nothing since around the millennium. Some selective aspects of technology have continued to improve, but we some decades into a decline in overall net capability at a large scale, due to many reasons.

These are my assumptions, and it doesn't really bother me what other people think! I know that argument is very seldom effective at reaching the truth, except among close and trusted colleagues.

[Bill Ryan]

I don't believe the flight was 'staged', not at all. I just think like a physicist (at least, sometimes! ). It was merely that there's been so much wild discussion about this on social media (much of it warranted ) that I found myself asking those questions.

I still think the capsule looks super thin and flimsy for such stresses (don't large windows weaken any curved structure?), even if those stresses don't last for very long. (@Johnnycomelately, many thanks for your thoughts.)

Re the lack of 'reentry burns', that's not an issue, as anything descending from orbit does so at over 17,000 mph, generating a huge amount of heat. The New Shepard capsule was just free-falling from a height, starting from zero at its apogee and then gradually accelerating to terminal velocity.

I do have to say, though, I'd not be completely surprised if at some point in the future this thing fails in some unanticipated way. If so, there'd be absolutely no hope of survival for the poor folks inside, whoever they might be. (The design of the Titan submersible comes to mind. )

[9ideon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I don't believe the flight was 'staged', not at all. I just think like a physicist (at least, sometimes! ). It was merely that there's been so much wild discussion about this on social media (much of it warranted ) that I found myself asking those questions.

I still think the capsule looks super thin and flimsy for such stresses (don't large windows weaken any curved structure?), even if those stresses don't last for very long. (@Johnnycomelately, many thanks for your thoughts.)

Re the lack of 'reentry burns', that's not an issue, as anything descending from orbit does so at over 17,000 mph, generating a huge amount of heat. The New Shepard capsule was just free-falling from a height, starting from zero at its apogee and then gradually accelerating to terminal velocity.

I do have to say, though, I'd not be completely surprised if at some point in the future this thing fails in some unanticipated way. If so, there'd be absolutely no hope of survival for the poor folks inside, whoever they might be. (The design of the Titan submersible comes to mind. )

The thing is that apparently the Moon is in the wrong spot and should be in the other side of the Earth at that time of "day", since they were not above the curve of the earth, the Moon should have stayed hidden from them, seems plausible to me. If this is the case then the whole thing was faked.

Also found that door to come across as poor quality.



Whatever the case, Astronauts ( or 1st Female whatever type crew) they are not, if I sit in a train, am I suddenly magically a traindriver?

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by 9ideon (here)
Also found that door to come across as poor quality.

It really looks like that. The door seal has to be one of the things that's critical up there. Many of the YT comments compared the capsule to a Temu kids' playhouse. The scathing humor was pretty merciless, some of it really quite funny.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I still think the capsule looks super thin and flimsy for such stresses (don't large windows weaken any curved structure?)

The Blue Origin engineers, who one has to assume are very well qualified, first designed the windows to be far smaller. Bezos kept on demanding them to be larger, and then larger still.

The issue is an important one for engineers, and it seems I'm far from the only person to have wondered about this. Just now I found this article, which discusses the window question in depth:

• https://space.com/39691-window-sizes...-galactic.html

The article states:

For spacecraft builders, putting in windows was once viewed as offensive to an engineer's sense of structural integrity.

But I may be a decade and a half behind the times. The consensus now is that large windows in spacecraft (including in the ISS) are safe and reliable. On Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, he had a little periscope he could use to peer out into space, as well as two 6 inch portholes. The Russian Vostok capsules in the early 1960s also only had small thick portholes. And until 2010, nearly 50 years later, even the ISS only had very small portholes to see outside.

[seehas]

First of all they never went to space, they just went up a little in the atmosphere that is also the main reason that there is no heat issue. Just do not look straight into the sun and there is no issue.

And I totally agree that the agenda behind this is very close to the flat earth or "we never went to the moon" theory im still surprised this is working so well.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by seehas (here)
First of all they never went to space, they just went up a little in the atmosphere

Yep. The diagrams shown in the media are super-misleading. This is a typical one:




I thought it'd be interesting to draw it to true scale. The Earth's diameter is 12,756 km at the equator. The Karman Line (where 'space officially starts') is 100 km high.

So here's a diagram drawn accurately to scale.

[Ben]

Wow, folks. All I needed was a few glimpses of the photos and accompanying descriptions to know it's fake.laughably and obviously so. I'm not tied to any particular theoretical agenda, but seriously WTF. Take a step back, and look at the whole show with an open mind.

[norman]

Posted by Ben (here)
Wow, folks. All I needed was a few glimpses of the photos and accompanying descriptions to know it's fake.laughably and obviously so. I'm not tied to any particular theoretical agenda, but seriously WTF. Take a step back, and look at the whole show with an open mind.

MP3 clip, less than a minute
"It's not enough to say it's nuts"

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Ben (here)
Wow, folks. All I needed was a few glimpses of the photos and accompanying descriptions to know it's fake.laughably and obviously so. I'm not tied to any particular theoretical agenda, but seriously WTF. Take a step back, and look at the whole show with an open mind.

Ben, if you have a few minutes (or maybe longer if you find yourself having fun ), take a look at the comments in the dozens of blisteringly scathing videos that have been published about this in the last week or so. They're easy to find: just Google something like "Blue Origin latest flight", or anything similar to that.

Many of the comments are brutally funny, except for one or two serious ones that point out that Ham the Chimpanzee did better than this back in 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first women in space, did 1000x better two years later in 1963. But not that many commenters (or content creators!) know a lot about space flight engineering, which is why I started this thread.

[norman]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
But not that many commenters (or content creators!) know a lot about space flight engineering, which is why I started this thread.

But, Bill.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I don't believe the flight was 'staged', not at all. I just think like a physicist (at least, sometimes! ).

It's another one of those "then which is it, Bill" posts.

On the other end of the 'physicist' angle on this story are the illogical human aspects around the pop star featured. My first awareness of this was when I saw a short video that was only interested in the pop star and her nonsensical part in it. I immediately knew something bogus was going on. Your 'physicist' observations only add to that, in how I've become acquainted with this thing.

"Staged" might mean different things to different people, and that's ok but there's some crockery going on with this at the human end of it too.

My inclination at this point is to let others hammer this out for a while and I'll get on with the other strands of fakery I'm aware of that've been amped up dramatically in the last few years, probably since the technology to mass produce it has become cost effective and much more easily inserted into the increasingly mediafied mass consciousness.

Otherwise I'm just watching half a pair of socks going round and round through the little glass door, mesmerising myself and becoming too giddy to walk a walk.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by norman (here)
But, Bill.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I don't believe the flight was 'staged', not at all. I just think like a physicist (at least, sometimes! ).

It's another one of those "then which is it, Bill" posts.

It was a real flight. Not a green-screen/CGI thing at all, as many have claimed. There've been 10 other manned New Shepard flights before this one, with celebrity passengers such as William Shatner from Star Trek, who was humbled and very deeply moved by his experience, kudos to him.

Including this recent flight, there have been 58 passengers in all, including 4 who have flown twice. It's just this flight that attracted such a lot of media attention because of the absurd (and catastrophic!) feminist PR stunt that it became.

Because of the over-hyped blanket coverage of the whole debacle, I found myself with a few things that I realized I didn't quite understand. (I've been a space flight buff since I was a kid, so I often follow this stuff. )

Other questions I have: (and others have asked them too)

1. Why hasn't there been any video published of the interior of the capsule during take-off and landing?
2. The visitors (and other celebs!) attending the launch were asked NOT to film anything personally as they'd be provided with plenty of HD 'official video' later. (Huh??)

And I'm still worried about the flimsy capsule with its huge windows!

[Vicus]

more:

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