Or someone who does a 70.3 says they did the Ironman…
Eventually one of these are going to fail and the glam will come off.
True! You couldn’t pay me enough to go one one of these things.
to the space/rocket folks:
is BlueOrigin’s rocket designed to do anything more than up/down space tourism?
I’ve no real desire to defend this particular outing. It was a PR-driven tourism event. Glamorous, cynical, tightly controlled with no boundaries pushed and no science done. Fair enough.
I was gently playing devil’s advocate; and perhaps being overly generous to Bezos, Sanchez, Perry et al. I don’t think this flight was some great leap for mankind; it was a brand exercise wrapped in the language of exploration.
My point was that this is a pattern as old as exploration itself. When political will fades, when state ambition dries up, when the public loses its appetite for risk, frontiers are pushed by private capital.
The early days of air travel were exclusive, dangerous, and often dismissed as vanity projects for the rich. The same was true of trans-oceanic shipping and the same of the first great expeditions.
We do not have to like the system - I certainly don’t and feel that’s a separate debate, as I alluded to earlier. But the system we have is unlikely to produce Apollo 2.0… It produces this: space as a luxury product. Exploration mediated through wealth and spectacle.
And perhaps that is the real tragedy here; not that billionaires behave like billionaires, but that something as extraordinary as spaceflight has been reduced to brand strategy and PR activations.
The final frontier is not space - it is public imagination. That feels depressingly ‘earthbound’.
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This particular rocket, the New Shepard, can only do up/down suborbital flights. It is named after Alan Shepard who was the first American to reach space and did so on a similar system back in 1961. This is a much safer system and is reusable, but they aren’t pushing the frontier.
Blue Origin did learn a lot in the development of the New Shepard which they applied to the New Glenn. Named after John Glenn, the New Glenn is capable of reaching orbit. No publicly announced plans to launch crew on a New Glenn, but they are developing a system to land crew on the Moon.
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I would preffer the high altitude baloon trip. It is less glam as as no fire, rocked, power, speed is involved. And no space and weighltlessness off course.
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One of my early heroes was Joe Kittinger. The footage of him stepping off that ledge, calmly shuffling into the void at the edge of space, still raises the hairs. No soundtrack. No branding. Just a man, a balloon, and a terrifyingly personal understanding of altitude and consequence. It embodied something we seem to have misplaced: the courage to engage with the unknown for its own sake, not for the content package.
We’ve airbrushed the frontiers. Risk is now a PR variable to be managed, branded, and monetised.
I flew in the bush for a time. One morning, an American guest at a safari lodge insisted on going for a jog outside the fenced grounds. One of the Askari had to intervene; the guy couldn’t quite grasp that a sweaty 5k could end in a hyena or a lion. Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to believe that the world is padded and curated, with the sharp corners removed.
I’ve lost colleagues and friends in aviation. It doesn’t happen often, thankfully less so with jet aircraft, but it doesn’t take much to be reminded that gravity still works.
the very idea that “glam” has been absent from space travel underlines the poverty of the core values at work in this venture
space travel and rocketry has been ultraglam from the get go
it doesn’t need fake eyelashes and filler to help out.
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space, now Justin. Katy’s conquests never end
From the highest highs to the lowest lows…
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