...Monday now - that could be a busy day!

Launching 0750UTC

...another scrub. Minor sub-system glitch that's going to take longer than their launch window to fix :(

Nice little interview with Jeff before the launch attempt

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorize...-ourselves-up/

That was cool. So, so slow off the pad but reached orbit on first attempt which is impressive. Not sure we'll be seeing stage #1 again though! Those flips and landing burns tricky....


Replay from NSF
https://www.youtube.com/live/9hmOwYOO1G4?si=KuyWsuPJw_bE4KVc

That was great. Right about that thrust:weight ratio though. Seemed to take an age to clear the tower.

No details on what went wrong on the booster descent yet.

Might take a while to resolve - remember SpaceX lost the first Starship booster even having the expertise learnt through over 300 successful Falcon landings.

It took SpaceX a while to get a Falcon 9 to soft land too. Good effort by Blue Origin though. 1st attempt to orbit success. Not to be sniffed at.

General view is that the TWR was around 1.1/1.2 - and that with a light payload. Probably wouldn’t have survived even a single engine failure at lift off.

Not sure if they deliberately had the engines throttled back to reduce loads on the second stage or had a more generic issue. But seeing as their planned payload is only about 45T, they’ll have to work to generate more thrust in future.

Suspect the cost of Glenn-1 a heck of a lot more than the whole booster/Starship stack - on the Everyday Astronaut tour it looks much more like a traditional aerospace construction than SpaceX's efforts and I'm sure it's got a corresponding price tag. Hardware rich development all well and good if the hardware is a) Cheap enough to throw away and b) Can be built rapidly.

Wonder how long until they have something for their next launch....?

Reports of massive redundancies at Blue Origin.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/s...-zo5Mpm0NnT-eg

Blue Origin is laying off 10% of its workforce, CEO Dave Limp tells employees in an all-hands this morning.

"We just came to the painful conclusion that we aren't set up for the kind of success that we really wanted to have," Limp said.

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Katy Perry set for space with all-women crew on the Jeff Bezos space phallus
 

BBC: Katy Perry set for space with all-women crew on Blue Origin rocket / the Jeff Bezo space phallus

"Pop star Katy Perry and five other women are set to blast into space aboard Jeff Bezos' space tourism rocket.The singer will be joined by Bezos's fiancée Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King.

The New Shepard rocket is due to lift off from its West Texas launch site and the launch window opens at 08:30 local time (14:30 BST).

The flight will last around 11 minutes and take the crew more than 100km (62 miles) above Earth, crossing the internationally recognised boundary of space and giving the crew a few moments of weightlessness."

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....ccc346a8ae.png

A crew of high achievers, that's for sure.

Blue Origin New Shepard 31 website

Well this is all very sexist, woke,broke, leftwing,rightwing, bias....oh my goodness. Where are the correction squads now ? I have written to Jeff & asked if I don my Air Europe Hostess uniform, can I go too ? Oh, and I want to sit right next to Kate !

Crew?
 

Surely they’re not crew, just SLF (aka passengers)?

A342

What is the purpose of this space flight today ? Is it to entice other HWI's to splash the cash and book a slot for the near future ? As they already did the same with JB and Captain Kirk, it can't be for technical reasons to any great extent. It does seem a bit fluffy for my taste, but I'm probably in the minority.

Yep, and that's true of SpaceX craft too. With the amount of money and hubris involved, I'm not going to quibble about titles.

Crew, pax whatever. You have a former NASA rocket scientist and someone who worked on the last NASA shuttle
mission STS-135, so I'd say some of them are more crew than pax. Whatever floats your boat.

The intention is for them to go along for the ride, for 11 minutes.

Well, Perry's objective seems straightforward enough, "Perry also shared some snaps of her own, vowing to put “the ‘ass’ in astronaut” in the coming hours in a post with Ms Sanchez." (The Independent: Katy Perry takes last-minute astronaut lessons before rocket to space)