Blue Origin New Shepard NS-22 Flight

[johnwalker]

Replay: New Shepard Mission NS-22 Webcast

Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space tourism vehicle is scheduled to lift off at 13:30 UTC on Thursday, 2022-08-04. (New Shepard countdowns tend to have holds at seemingly random times for undisclosed reasons, so take that time as a “no earlier than”.)

This will be Blue Origin’s third flight of 2022 and the sixth New Shepard flight with passengers. Everyday Astronaut has a pre-flight preview with additional information.

The flight will carry the full complement of six paying passengers. There is no “celebrity guest” this time. Passengers include what are claimed to be the first Portuguese and Egyptian citizens to fly in space, as well a guy named Coby Cotton who runs a YouTube channel called “Dude Perfect” with 57 million subscribers and won his seat through a crypto site called “MoonDAO” whose goal is to put a colony on the Moon by selling a crypto token called $MOONEY. Stay classy, Blue Origin.

[johnwalker]

Webcast is currently running, but with no audio. Jeff Foust of Space News tweets:

Blue Origin is starting their webcast with a reminder that, in space, no one can hear you stream.

[Roxie]

Given the vapidity level of the passengers, I almost wish I’d not had sound. That said, glad they landed safely.

[gms]

@johnwalker

The flight will carry the full complement of six paying passengers. There is no “celebrity guest” this time. Passengers include what are claimed to be the first Portuguese and Egyptian citizens to fly in space, as well a guy named Coby Cotton who runs a YouTube channel called “Dude Perfect” with 57 million subscribers and won his seat through a crypto site called “MoonDAO” whose goal is to put a colony on the Moon by selling a crypto token called $MOONEY. Stay classy, Blue Origin.

Current events strike me more and more as coming directly from a Cory Doctorow novel. The character names, the name of the companies and even the plot line would have seemed so incongruous twenty years ago. I must be getting old

[johnwalker]

@gms

… would have seemed so incongruous twenty years ago. I must be getting old.

Some time after he discovered them, James Van Allen was asked, "What use are the Van Allen belts?” The professor answered, “Well, I make a living out of studying them.”