William Shatner is now the oldest person ever blasted into space. Here’s everything you need to know
“That was unlike anything they described,” Shatner could be heard saying on the flight livestream just before landing.
Their trip did not go exactly as the interplanetary jaunts Shatner captained during his acting career. New Shepard’s flight lasted just ten minutes from takeoff to landing, and gave the passengers about three minutes of weightlessness.
Shatner and his fellow passengers were expected to experience up to 5.5 Gs — which feels like five times their body weight pressing onto their chests — during their 2,000-plus mile-per-hour journey. Upon descent, a plume of parachutes then fanned out above the capsule to slow its descent, taking it from more than 200 miles per hour to less than 20 in just a few minutes.
Shanter’s new record as the oldest person to fly to space one-ups the record set just three months ago by 82-year-old Wally Funk, who was a former astronaut trainee but was previously denied the opportunity to fly before she joined Bezos on his July flight.
Shatner’s flight marked the second of what Blue Origin hopes will be many space tourism launches, carrying wealthy customers and thrill seekers to the edge of space. It could be a line of business that helps to fund Blue Origin’s other, more ambitious space projects, which include developing a 300-foot-tall rocket powerful enough to blast satellites into orbit and a lunar lander.
Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment about the safety allegations. But the company has repeatedly stated that safety is its top priority.
Powers, the Blue Origin vice president who will be flying on Wednesday, also responded to the safety allegations in an interview with CNN’s Erica Hill on Monday, saying the reports did not give her pause.
“I’ve been working at Blue on the new Shepard program specifically for the past eight years,” she said. “A team of very, very talented professionals and colleagues — some of the best that I’ve worked with in my 20 years in human spaceflight — have been committed to to the safe operation of this program.”
Is it safe?
Blue Origin has conducted more than a dozen uncrewed test flights of New Shepard, and Bezos decided to put himself on the first-ever crewed flight in July, in part to demonstrate that he trusts his own life with Blue Origin’s technology.
On Blue Origin’s website, it states the following criteria for passengers:
You must be between 5’0″ and 6’4″ in height and between 110 pounds and 223 pounds in weight.
You must be in good enough physical shape to climb seven flights of stairs in a minute and a half
You must be able to fasten and unfasten a seat harness in less than 15 seconds, spend up to an hour and a half strapped into the capsule with the hatch closed and withstand up to 5.5G in force during descent.
Still, spaceflight is inherently risky. Drumming up enough speed and power to defy gravity requires rockets to use powerful, controlled explosions and complex technology that always involves some uncertainties.
“I’m really quite apprehensive,” Shatner told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week. “There’s an element of chance here.”
From a physiological perspective, however, Shatner’s age shouldn’t be an issue, according to Dorit Donoviel, the executive director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), a Baylor College of Medicine-led research group that partners with NASA.
“They were perfectly fine,” Donoviel said. “The only thing — medical condition — that was of concern when they did those studies was really anxiety and definitely claustrophobia.”
Blue Origin passengers could experience up to 5.5Gs, which can also make it difficult to breathe or move their hands and arms. But they won’t have the stress of piloting New Shepard, which is fully autonomous, so they can basically just sit there and wait out the most stressful portions of the journey.
One thing that is absolutely crucial for them, however, is to get back in their seats as soon as mission control warns the passengers that the capsule’s three minutes of weightlessness are about to be over. As the spacecraft begins falling back to Earth, and the crushing g-forces return, passengers who aren’t strapped into their seat and oriented in the proper position could risk serious injury.
“If they’re facing the [wrong] way, the g-forces could pull all the blood away from the head and go down to the feet, in which case the person would pass out,” Donoviel said.
Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment about the safety allegations. But the company has repeatedly stated that safety is its top priority.
Powers, the Blue Origin vice president who will be flying on Wednesday, also responded to the safety allegations in an interview with CNN’s Erica Hill on Monday, saying the reports did not give her pause.
“I’ve been working at Blue on the new Shepard program specifically for the past eight years,” she said. “A team of very, very talented professionals and colleagues — some of the best that I’ve worked with in my 20 years in human spaceflight — have been committed to the safe operation of this program.”
What happened?
When most people think about spaceflight, they think about an astronaut circling the Earth, floating in space, for at least a few days.
That is not what the New Shepard passengers did. In fact, it looked very similar to Bezos’ flight back in July.
They went right up and came right back down, and they did it in less time, about 10 minutes, than it takes most people to get to work.
The rocket, flying separately after having detached from the human-carrying capsule, re-ignited its engines and used its on-board computers to execute a pinpoint, upright landing.
What’s the point of all this?
Blue Origin plans to use New Shepard to compete directly with British billionaire Richard Branson and his suborbital space tourism company, Virgin Galactic.
Virgin Galactic’s tickets cost about $450,000 — more than the median home sales price in the United States. Blue Origin has not publicly set a ticket price, though it did recently sell one at auction for a whopping $28 million. Shatner will be flying as a complementary guest, though Bezos said in July that the company has sold nearly $100 million worth of tickets in total.
It’s also not clear how much sustained interest suborbital space tourism will garner from the world’s wealthiest people. But Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic also plan to parlay their technologies into other ventures. In Blue Origin’s case, that includes building a massive orbital rocket for launching military, science and commercial satellites and a lunar lander. Though, Blue Origin’s bid to make a vehicle that will land the next humans on the moon was recently turned down by NASA and is now caught up in a court battle.
