I think one reason for resentment is because astronauts used to earn their “I went to space” laurels the hard way. Now you can get to space just by being rich, but your name goes down into history on the “list of humans who have been to space” all the same.
It’s like rich people who brag about “I went to the top of Everest” when in fact they merely just paid $50,000 to have a team of Sherpas almost all but carry them on piggyback to the summit.
I was a bit surprised at that, too. On the other hand, as passengers they could have taken something for motion sickness before going up.
Two much hype for too little. Shepard’s suborbital flight was an accomplishment for NASA and paved the way for bigger things later. Virgin’s flight has no scientific value and paved no new ground. But the networks all fawned over him like he was Ferdinand Fucking Magellan. Yawn yawn yawn.
Yes, the Karman Line is the internationally-recognized standard for “space”, but it’s still just an arbitrary standard. If aliens from Harxabln were to hear of this flight, they might very well say “Impressive, but it still fell short of the 216 snekt altitude that constitutes the Flargn line, the boundary of space” (where a snekt is, of course, a Harxablnic unit equal to approximately 0.6 km). Orbit, though, is orbit: There’s nothing arbitrary about that.
And I, for one, am all in favor of billionaires buying seats on dick-measuring flights, precisely because I have an idealistic hope for space travel. I want to see the future where a trip to the Moon costs five hundred dollars, economy class. And the path to that future passes through the future where rich bastards pay 500 thousand dollars for a suborbital hop.
I just wish that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin were further along. SpaceX making orbital rockets is great, but it’d be even better if there were multiple companies competing for orbital spaceflight.
I have no problem with your answer. That’s why I asked.
But all that money spent on Apollo could have been spent at home, too. Or so they told us at the time:
Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ‘bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
This pretty much sums up my irritation with the Billionaire Race to Space:
The fucking guy didn’t even pay for the spaceport (actually, just a runway), instead letting the local fools foot that bill.
What is it with these guys having to lie about things that they really don’t need to lie about?
They may not have been up there long enough for motion sickness to set in, either.
Speaking of which, I’m actually surprised they didn’t invite Valentina Tereshkova, one of my childhood heroes (“Yes, girls CAN be astronauts!”) but maybe they did and she declined, because she had horrible spacesickness and several times begged to be brought back ahead of schedule. She was selected for the astronaut corps because she was an expert parachutist, and there were rumors that she was actually pregnant when she went into space. If she was, she had a miscarriage shortly afterwards; she married another astronaut a few weeks later, and had her only child about a year after that.
From the article about the fake bike ride:
It was unclear whether the disclosure that the Sunday cycling ride was fictional would complicate Virgin Galactic’s cross-promotional deal with Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycle Corp. Trek had claimed that Branson rode one of its custom-made bikes to the spaceport on launch day.
Representatives of Trek were not immediately available to comment on the matter.
Geez, the pathetic guy even has to monetize his f-ing bike ride to the launch site! 
What is it with these penny-pinching billionaires? It’s like a disease.
That’s no doubt the reason the bike ride was faked. He needed to shoot the perfect ad video for his deal with the cycle company.
I think you mean 100 km. New Shepard goes up to somewhere around 65-67 miles, which is in the neighborhood of 105 km.
They’ve sent up some experiments on a number of New Shepard test flights. The time of zero g on them is three or four minutes, which is much longer than the 30 seconds or so the Vomit Comet gets. (I don’t know if they’re going to put any on the upcoming flight or not.) They also have a contract with NASA to send up new astronauts for the same reason. And there was something about testing centrifugal gravity for NASA on New Shepard.
I’ve never been to space or ridden the vomit comet, but back when I was actively flying we sometimes played around with making things float in the airplane, basically a few seconds of zero g, sort of what you might get on a roller coaster. Based on that experience, the motion sickness can kick in amazingly fast in some individuals. But you’re right, most people don’t puke immediately. Some people don’t feel bad at all. It’s quite variable and how you react to other forms of motion, like riding in a car or a boat, are apparently not predictive of how you will react to zero g.
For reference, a vomit comet is about 25 seconds of zero g.
Branson supposedly has ridden in a vomit comet some years ago and probably knew if he’d get sick from this or not - I’m sure he wanted to be photogenic enough for a soundbite and not get filmed puking into barf bag.
Could not have said it better and could not agree more. Fuck these guys.
I was under the impression that Branson was going to make some big announcement from the ship during the weightless phase of the flight. But all I saw was a few seconds of grainy video of from within the ship, without any audio.
Was I mistaken, or did something not go to plan?
I haven’t seen the real-time footage, but one of my Facebook friends noticed a sudden cutaway during the ascent and wondered if this was why.
The back cover of the Doobie Brothers’ album “Minute By Minute” shows the band in zero g’s. I don’t remember the whole story behind it, but they did more than one parabolic loop, and managed to get pictures before anyone went beyond just turning green.
Then there is this music video from a few years ago In a “making of” video for this they mention the use of anti-nausea drugs, and also something numerous instances of puking in the crew which did not make it into the final footage.
Another cartoon:
Just a nitpick: Dropsickness is not the same thing as motion sickness. Motion sickness comes when your inner ear is giving you one perfectly sensible set of acceleration cues, and your eyes are giving you some other perfectly sensible set of cues, and there’s a mismatch between the two (most often because you’re looking at the inside of a vehicle that’s moving with you). You can prevent motion sickness just by keeping your eyes closed. Dropsickness comes when your inner ear is giving you acceleration cues that aren’t sensible: It feels like you’re in free-fall. Because, of course, you are. What you see is irrelevant; free-fall is bad no matter what you’re seeing (or not seeing).
One can be susceptible to one but not the other.