Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to travel to space.
Amazon founder jeff bezos has announced he's heading to space with his brother next month on the first manned flight launched by his rocket firm blue origin they'll join whoever wins the auction for a seat on the new shepard spacecraft on july 20. the world's richest man says he's dreamed of going to space since he was five blue origin is facing stiff competition from elon musk's space x richard wurtz is a professor of aerospace engineering at the university of california at los angeles and directs its plasma and space propulsion lab he's joining us from los angeles thanks for your time with us how big a deal is this um it's not really a big deal from the sense of aerospace technologies or or launch vehicles this is really about just commercial.
 |
| Jeff Bezos |
Space
uh space flight for for wealthy people
that would like
to launch into say it's really a high
altitude you're not launching into orbit,
so it's not really a big deal because
you're really just launching to a high
altitude
and then coming back to earth right.
Also we understand that bezos won't be in space for that long just about 11 minutes so is that what you're referring to yeah yeah so he'll he'll be just in space for 11 minutes basically he's going to up to about 100 kilometers he'll and then he'll just come back down right gravity pull instead of it to go to orbit takes about 10 times the rocket so to go into orbit you would need to go something like 27 000 uh kilometers per hour in the direction perpendicular to vertical right to the side and then you go into orbit around the earth so it's good for people who want to say they've been to space but this is not going to orbit got it so tell us about the rocket the new shepard i understand that this particular rocket is reusable what does that exactly mean um what what we're doing these days with launch vehicles which we haven't done uh too much of the space shuttle was the first rocket to really demonstrate a high level of reusability meaning the rocket that you go up on can come back down be refurbished and then relaunched and so that it is very important,
 |
| Space-Capsule |
Also it's an important idea
however it's it's been demonstrated
before
quite successfully by space-x,
so there's not really a significant
a significant technological
advancement here
do you foresee any challenges with this
trip
i do and i would say that
it's it it is interesting that
uh i think there's a little bit of a
publicity stunt here or maybe a lot of a
publicity stunt trying to
show a level of confidence with his own
technology
which which others may perceive as a
good idea
but the way it usually works with launch
vehicles and especially when we're
launching humans
is it's not about the expense or
of of the last person to go on uh or the
value of that person it's more about how
many times has that rocket
been launched before successfully
without a failure and
most importantly without a loss of life
got it and what do you think the
messages
behind all of this and of course we have
to mention that there's elon musk space-x
there's also richard branson's
uh virgin galactic as well do you think
that they might do the same thing, as report said.
He also said he think it's
something that uh
jeff bezos wants to to put his company
on the map and say we're here
and we're ready to launch people into
space and he's confident enough to put
himself on top of the rocket and do this
and i there definitely are always
challenges this is this is a dangerous
industry um and i
i would i would be concerned honestly um
i don't think it's important that the
ceo goes up on a rocket before
other people go up i think it's much
more important that we do a lot of safe
launches
before that with with or without humans
on that rocket because there's so many
things that can go wrong
with the rocket because a rocket is
essentially a controlled explosion
and so it's more important that we do
many launches
many safe launches than it is that we do
a launch with a particularly confident
individual okay thank you so much very
interesting to speak to you richard
wurtz
joining us from los angeles okay thank
you.
Comments
Post a Comment