Posted on 10/13/2021 10:26:00 PM PDT by Trillian
New footage shows Star Trek's William Shatner marvel at his view of Earth from his mission orbiting the planet aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
Shatner, who is famed for his role as Captain Kirk in the 1960s sci-fi series, and newly minted astronauts Chris Boshuizen, Glen de Vries and Audrey Powers, ventured 351,186 feet above Earth's surface where they spent three minutes in weightlessness.
They were captured floating weightlessly in wonder and excitement as they looked down on Earth.
A new clip of the epic journey shows Shatner and crew adjust to their new conditions, with Shatner seemingly taken aback by being weightless and repeating 'oh, Jesus' while his fellow crew members played around with floating toys.
Eventually Shatner adjusts and is heard laughing joyfully and says 'no description can equal this,' while looking outside a window at the amazing view of Earth.
His crewmates seem just as overjoyed, giggling and repeating 'this is nuts!' and 'holy hell!' while Shatner just looks at them with a look of astonishment, uttering 'oh wow.'
While his younger crewmates took turns looking out the window upside down, the 90-year-old Shatner pulled his face as close to the window as possible to soak in the once-in-a-lifetime few.
Once Shatner, who is now the oldest person to go to space, made it back to terra firma he came back with a message: 'What we're looking down upon is Mother Earth and it needs protecting in the world needs to see this'.
'That point of view is you're looking down on the earth and looking up into space but you're also looking up at the future and looking down at the past,' he said during a post-flight press briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“Orbiting the planet?”
I thought this was a sub-orbital mission, where all the rocket does is go up and come down, like the Mercury missions of Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom.
he’s really 90? holy cow. Born 1931. I’m really happy he’s happy. What a view! And what an experience!
Steady as she goes now.
Other than a few more feet higher, the same thing could have been accomplished with the bunch of them inside the fuselage of an descending aircraft from 40,000 feet.
A valid point with one major omission. The part about going up and back down in one piece is the qualifier there. He boldly went and came back alive!
He has unquestionably led a full life.
“Oh Jesus” - an unexpected remark from a Jewish actor.
Except for the view.
Good catch. LOL. I bet would have a good laugh at that one.
Clearly he was overwhelmed.
Yes, a bit ahead of themselves. This was simply up and back down at the same location area. They may have orbited a cloud.
After landing, Shatner kept comparing the trip up and down again to life and death, as though life is a thin membrane of atmosphere that only takes a few seconds to go through, and then you’re dead, I guess. I don’t know why he saw it that way.
I once told a fellow worker, when we flew to Atlanta from Salt Lake City. “Well another good landing”, he asked how I knew it was a good landing? I told him “you walked away din’ja?”
My question is this:
In a descending aircraft, it is only the illusion of weightlessness because one is falling at the same rate as the aircraft. Gravity is still pulling on one's organs the same was as on the ground. This is probably why people throw up, because their bodies feel the directional pull of gravity but their eyes are showing a different experience.
In true outer space, people are far enough from the gravitational pull of the earth to be in true weightlessness. Blood flow is harder without the pull of gravity, digestion is harder, excretion is harder, and so on and on.
In this case, was the capsule far enough from earth to be true weightlessness or was it simply at the top of a parabola?
-PJ
A lot of effort for such a short time. The other folks go up for days now. I'm trying to figure out why Bezos is still spending money for this suborbital effort--18 launches--compared to over 130 orbital launches by SpaceX.
They took a ride on a ship that looks like Bezos's penis, and everybody knows what that looks like, because his girlfriend's brother uploaded the pictures Bezos had texted to her.
That launch and landing was amazing. That rocket went up far faster than I expected, having grown up watching Gemini, Apollo, and space shuttle launches that just took about forever, it seemed, to lift off.
I was very impressed with the way that rocket landed itself and the capsule came down.
It was the stuff out of the sci-fi novels I used to read as a teenager come to life.
If the pilot is capable of maintaining the proper parabolic trajectory, weightless is experienced on both the ascending limb and the descending limb of the arc.
Regards,
From the article:
[...] the 90-year-old Shatner pulled his face as close to the window as possible to soak in the once-in-a-lifetime few.
Regards,
Why sub-orbital? Well because that whole re-entry thingy gets to be a bit of a scorcher. The Bezos penis with windows is quite an accomplishment but it lacks the rigor of a re-entry vehicle from an orbit.
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