Katy Perry and co. went to space. Why did they only stay up there for 10 minutes?

r/

If you’re going to go to lengths of being blasted into space, which is neither cheap nor easy to do, why would you only stay up there for 10 minutes? Why not spend a few hours up there to really get value for money?

Comments

  1. GrandFrogPrince Avatar

    The spacecraft they used is only capable of a suborbital flight. It doesn’t even get close to orbital velocity. Consequently, it is a pretty short trip.

  2. brock_lee Avatar

    Getting them into space for a few hours, for Bezos, is impossible. They literally just touched the height that is considered the beginning of space and fell back. Bezos’ rockets don’t have the fuel, life support, or guidance to do anything else.

  3. AgentElman Avatar

    They don’t go into orbit. They go just high enough to qualify as being in space.

    And the cost gets much higher per minute you spend, not less, because of how rocket fuel works.

    Suppose you have enough fuel to get a rocket 1,000 feet high. You want to get it another 100 feet high. You need enough fuel to get the rocket another 100 feet high. But you also need enough fuel to get that extra fuel 1,000 feet high.

    So every bit extra you want to go requires the fuel for that plus the fuel for getting that fuel up to where you already were.

  4. Jim777PS3 Avatar

    They did not go into orbit, they simply went very high up and came right down.

    Something like this

    Not like this

    The former will get you into space, but you just fall right back down. The same as if you throw a ball straight up in the air.

    The second is what gets you into orbit, you are moving around the earth so fast you stay there. It requires much more fuel.

  5. PokemonThanos Avatar

    It was a sub orbital flight so never reached an orbit that would last that long. It requires more energy and thus fuel to go into an orbital flight it also is more technically difficult to achieve, for tourist flights like this it’s easier and safer for it to be suborbital and let the passengers tick the box that says they went to space.

  6. Alesus2-0 Avatar

    The New Shepherd rocket they use isn’t capable of anything further. Stay in space for any length of time would require a considerably more expensive vehicle.

  7. noggin-scratcher Avatar

    Space isn’t all that high up, in the scheme of things, but staying up there for long, or entering a stable orbit, requires going very fast: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

    That would make the flight very expensive (because of all the fuel you have to burn) compared to a brief visit that mostly just shoots straight up then falls back down.

  8. Woodsy1313 Avatar

    I can only stay up for 10 minutes as well.

  9. EvolveOrDie444 Avatar

    Because this was a giant PR campaign for Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. This is not groundbreaking or impressive and it’s definitely not feminism like Katy Perry wants us all to believe. It’s a really really expensive distraction and an absolute joke. We could’ve fed so many hungry people instead of flying these women to the edge of space for a few minutes. The world is broken.

  10. joepierson123 Avatar

    It’s all the rocket is capable of doing

  11. yummyjackalmeat Avatar

    as expensive as it is to go as high as they did, going into orbit is way way way way more expensive.

  12. SidewaysGoose57 Avatar

    The thing that gets me is how they called them “crew”. Did they fly it? No. Did they do scientific experiments?. No. They were passengers. When I fly in a airliner I’m not crew, I’m a passenger. So were they.

  13. wesweb Avatar

    It’s not that they only stayed up there for 10 minutes. It’s that the entire trip was just over 10 minutes.

  14. ac54 Avatar

    Because that’s the proven safe capability of Blue Origin. They have yet to orbit an unmanned test flight.

  15. parallelmeme Avatar

    Staying up that long would have required more speed and fuel.

  16. thattogoguy Avatar

    Suborbital spaceflights don’t have the velocity or energy to reach orbit. Any flight going up that did have the ability to be suborbital and last for hours would not need to be suborbital since its apogee would require enough energy to reach orbit anyway.

  17. Puzzleheaded_Run2590 Avatar

    it was a publicity stunt – not any kind of official mission researching anything at all.

    many think they didn’t go anywhere at all and stayed on the ground.

    it’s all a distraction from the absurdity happening daily in the US.

  18. Internal-Syrup-5064 Avatar

    They were passengers on an automated trip. And they were screaming the whole time

  19. j_grouchy Avatar

    They did not stay there for 10 minutes. Like 90 percent of the 11 minute trip was going up and coming down. I think they were only up there for like a minute.

  20. Rich-Wrap-9333 Avatar

    Because we didn’t collectively wish hard enough for her stay there.

  21. Wild-Spare4672 Avatar

    Blue Origins spaceship is not advanced enough to do that.

  22. qalpi Avatar

    Gravity and not enough speed 

  23. nizzernammer Avatar

    They just went on a very expensive and not particularly meaningful luxury ride. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing was written off as a promotional expense.

  24. matschbirne03 Avatar

    To stay up there for multiple hourse ypu need to have enough energy to get into orbit which is WAY more than just shooting into space with a trajectory where the earth gravity will pull you back again.

    Basically what they did is the cheapest way, with which you can say you were in space. It’s like technically correct, but maybe not what most people think about when they think about being in space.

  25. John_EightThirtyTwo Avatar

    When you jump up in the air, why do you stay only briefly?

  26. thespeeeed Avatar

    Analogies are far from perfect and over-simplified.

    Katy’s rocket was like throwing a ball straight UP. It eventually comes back down again. For gravity to not eventually bring it down again it would have to go much much faster.

    Orbit is more like throwing a ball so fast SIDEWAYS that it goes over the horizon. It’s always falling but the earth’s curvature means that it’s going fast enough that it misses. The ball eventually gets all the way around the world and keeps going.

    The reason orbital rockets go straight up at first before starting to get all that sideways speed is to clear the thickest part of the atmosphere and all that pesky drag.

    You have to orbit pretty high up for tiny bits of atmosphere to not eventually slow you down to the point you fall back to earth. But functionally once in orbit you just stay there unless you boost to lose or gain speed.

    TLDR:

    Katy’s rocket – thrown straight up but not fast enough for gravity to not eventually win.

    Orbiting – goes up then goes really fast sideways. Much much faster than Katy’s rocket.

    No longer being dominated earths gravity – got to go very very fast.

  27. geleisen Avatar

    They were not there for 10 minutes. The whole flight from beginning to end was 11 minutes. They were only in ‘space’ for about a minute.

  28. Individual-Care-4570 Avatar

    I kind of think it was a way to introduce the public to these kind of trips. Show us it’s safe and fun. Then market and sell similar trips.

  29. 27803 Avatar

    They took a giant expensive slingshot ride into space that’s all

  30. imaguitarhero24 Avatar

    Some accurate explanations, but a key thing to think about is the majority of an orbital rocket’s fuel is used to gain speed sideways, not vertically. The movies portray space travel very poorly most of the time. They make it look like you shoot straight up, then you’re in space and you just hang out up there with no gravity. In real life, yes you need to get vertical, but if that’s all you do you fall right back down like the blue origin suborbital flights do. To enter orbit, you have to fling yourself so fast sideways that you continue to miss the ground and keep going around and around. The majority of a rockets energy goes into gaining speed, not altitude. That’s why it’s so difficult to get to orbit.

  31. Special_Store_847 Avatar

    The question makes sense. But the answer is simple. This was a marketing stunt for a new kinda amusement park ride, where the rich can say they “went to space”.

    No matter how cringe it was for us, you will soon see a celebrity/rich people’s space race. Some are already jealous I’m sure. They will pay hand over fist to be part of this club.

    It needs to be quick between their busy schedule.

  32. Forsaken-Soil-667 Avatar

    Going to space isn’t just a matter of shooting straight up. If you watch a rocket launch, it moves in a curve. From my limited understanding of how rockets work, the point of a rocket is not just to go straight up, it also needs to reach a speed where gravity’s pull and forward momentum cancels each other out which is when you achieve orbit. Thus objects in orbit, like the ISS are always constantly “falling” towards earth. What they did was go shoot straight up to reach the Karman, hang for a minute or two before gravity pulled them back to earth.

  33. GreenFaceTitan Avatar

    The longer, the more complicated the preparations needed, the more expensive the trip.

  34. CryptographerOwn2777 Avatar

    I don’t think they went anywhere. It was all Hollywood magic

  35. Kracus Avatar

    As others have said about the orbit thing is true. What a lot haven’t mentioned is that when you come back down, if you go too high up, there’s a lot more engineering required to avoid burning up in the atmosphere as you’ll be going faster and things will get hotter.

  36. JoeDoeHowell Avatar

    Because that’s the service that Blue Origin provides for tourists. A trip to sub-orbit elevation for 11 minutes.

  37. 8AJHT3M Avatar

    They went on a very expensive carnival ride

  38. Deere-John Avatar

    THey didn’t go to space, they basically rode that drop zone carnival ride really high up. Much like those rides though, kissing the ground is not a bad idea since you’re not guaranteed not to hit the ground again at terminal velocity.

  39. BrewerBuilder Avatar

    Because Blue Origin is just Space Tourism. That’s why Katy Perry et al. aren’t really the impressive female space crew that they want you to think they are. They sat in a pod and got launched into space. They didn’t touch anything. They didn’t land the craft. They went on a more dangerous version of a carnival ride.

  40. gnakgnak Avatar

    My guess would be gravity.

  41. rilloroc Avatar

    One of them forgot their purse

  42. mysticmeeble Avatar

    Some PR stunts only require a limited amount of time.

  43. CharlieSixFive Avatar

    Space rejected them.

  44. just-a-regular-alien Avatar

    Because rich people can do whatever nonsense that they want to do without thinking of the consequences

  45. Snail-Alien Avatar

    Because she’s wide awake.

  46. AftyOfTheUK Avatar

    The choices available were:

    0 minutes

    10 minutes

    They chose 10 minutes. 

    That is the reason why

  47. MongooseProXC Avatar

    Gayle King was weighing it down.

  48. redsandsfort Avatar

    Better question: Bezos knew Katy Perry was on the flight, why didn’t he aim it towards the sun?

  49. Activeenemy Avatar

    That’s a pretty above average time in space 😂

  50. dondegroovily Avatar

    It’s easy to get to space. It’s only 100 km. If you’re in Seattle, space is closer than the Pacific Ocean

    The hard thing is staying in space. You need to move fast enough to achieve orbit. Exact speeds vary depending on how high, but it’s way faster than airplanes

    If you don’t achieve that speed, you’ll simply fall right back down

    Randall Monroe explains it really well: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

  51. GodV Avatar

    they went into high atmosphere, they didn’t go into outer space.

  52. Jrippan Avatar

    Going straight up to ”space” is easy, orbit is hard.

    The Blue Origin capsule peaked at like 2200 mph prior to separation going straight up. To actually stay in space you need to travel at ~17500 mph (depending on altitude) ”sideways”. Orbit is all about moving fast enough that you keep missing the dense part of the atmosphere.

  53. Serialkisser187 Avatar

    So what was the carbon footprint of this trip?

  54. Greghole Avatar

    Because Bezos’s rocket can’t do that.

  55. Fluffy-Assignment782 Avatar

    They went suborbital trajectory. Not into orbit.

  56. peter9477 Avatar

    Would you have been able to stand being around these people for more than 10 minutes?

    Neither could God…

  57. thackeroid Avatar

    The question is why were they brought back down. Once they were off, who was missing them?

  58. The-Jolly-Llama Avatar

    Because Jeff Bezos is too poor to take them into stable orbit. 

  59. MotherofFred Avatar

    Because space didn’t want them either.

  60. Connect-Resolve-3480 Avatar

    Because she shot across the sky-y-y and then came back down like a firework.

  61. skyfishgoo Avatar

    gravity mostly.

    there weren’t going fast enough to stay any longer, let alone reach orbit.

    super expensive, one-off, vomit comet.

  62. Consistent_Ad5551 Avatar

    So I hope everyone knows that the main purpose of the trip was to do basic science research on the effects of zero gravity on breast implants, fillers, and Botox. All very important things to most of the OP’s on Reddit.

  63. Nvenom8 Avatar

    That’s not how Blue Origin’s vehicle works. It just goes up and falls right back down. It’s only going to space in the most technical sense, that you’re briefly just above the altitude classified as space.

  64. Sad_Leg1091 Avatar

    Because it was a sub-orbital flight – it never reached orbit only reached space by going above the Kármán line.

  65. TJ700 Avatar

    As I understand it, one of them had to pee.

  66. Colinbeenjammin Avatar

    Why do you only get two minutes each time you ride Space Mountain

  67. ikrisoft Avatar

    Going to space in the sense they went to space is not that hard. It is just 60 miles up and then 60 miles down. Some people drive further just to
    get to grandma.

    What is hard is to stay in space. Contrary to popular belief gravity does not “end” in space. Everything put up into space around the Earth is constantly falling back towards Earth. So then how come that satelites, and space stations, and the astronauts stay up seemingly floating? What is going on is that while they are falling back towards Earth they are going so fast sideways that the curvature of Earth rolls away from them. In some sense they are constantly falling, while at the same time going so fast sideways that they are also constantly missing the planet.

    This state of affairs is called “being on an orbit” because this free-falling-but-missing makes you go in circles around the planet. And to achieve that you have to go sideways really really fast (about 17000mph). And most of the energy from a proper rocket is spent to accelerate your craft to this very high speed. In other words the hard part is not going up, but to speed up enough so you don’t fall back. (And then the other hard part is to safely slow down when you eventually want to come back.)

    The designers of the rocket they went up with decided to spend all the rockets energy to go up, and none of it to accelerate them sideways. This means they could keep the rocket relatively simple, relatively small, and relatively safe. At least compared to a “proper” rocket which would need to have enough energy to accelate you to orbital speed. The drawback is that same as a stone you throw up in the air once it runs out of speed it immediately starts falling back. This is why they couldn’t stay up longer. Because the rocket they were riding were not designed such that they could stay up longer.

  68. Benwhurss Avatar

    That’s all they could afford.

  69. SeanInMyTree Avatar

    Saying they went into space is like saying you navigated the pacific because you went to the beach and got splashed by a wave

  70. OldGroan Avatar

    Blue Origin needed a payload for a rocket test. That payload was those women. Lifting them was bot the point. Lifting anything was the point.

    Their presence was inconsequential.

  71. green_meklar Avatar

    Because physics. They were on a suborbital trajectory; their vehicle just fell back down because (by design) it wasn’t going fast enough to stay up. It takes a much bigger, more expensive vehicle to reach an orbital trajectory.

  72. ProfessorEtc Avatar

    They couldn’t hold their breath any longer.

  73. OinkMcOink Avatar

    The idea of where “Earth” ends and where space begins is a highly debated topic in the scientific community. Some astronomers will agree they went to space, and some will tell you they weren’t even close.

  74. NC_Ion Avatar

    Because of all the Botox and fillers.

  75. RobotDinosaur1986 Avatar

    Because they didn’t go into orbit the blue origin rocket just goes up and comes straight down.

  76. FranksWateeBowl Avatar

    Because that’s all the time they needed to be connected to love.

    Jesus that bitch is stupid.

  77. Pisstoe Avatar

    They went in a roller coaster not space.

  78. Unicron1982 Avatar

    People who are not into space stuff often do not get how stuff stays up there.
    The ISS is at a hight, where it would theoretically experience 90% gravity and fall down like a stone. BUT it is in orbit. So it moves faster around the planet than it moves towards the planet. It basically falls endlessly arround the planet, and that is why their zero G experience is called “free fall”. They are NOT weightless, they are endlessly falling.

    Blue Origin never goes into orbit it goes straight upwards, and falls down again. If you would want to “stay longer”, you would have to continuously fire the engines, and through that, you would not experience weightlessness, it just would be like being on a very hight tower. For actually staying longer in weightlessness, you would have to accelerate to about 110’000km/h with the curvature of the earth, which would cost a lot more in fuel.

    TLDR: Blue Origin is basically just a fancy rollercosters which lifts you up, afnd then drops you down. Every weightlessness you experience,. Is the “falling down” of the capsule.

  79. shinryu6 Avatar

    Because Blue Origin is a scam meant to lure in high paying tourists with the promise of being an “astronaut” based on old definitions while just barely maybe touching the edge of space. 

  80. quitelikeu Avatar

    Any longer and the brown ones lose citizenship

  81. Gallager_mmt Avatar

    Because they didn’t go into full orbit—just a quick suborbital flight, kinda like touching the edge of space and falling back down. It’s more like a space rollercoaster than a full stay at the space hotel. Ten minutes gives you the view, the weightlessness, the bragging rights, and then boom—you’re back in time for lunch.

  82. Evening-Beyond-344 Avatar

    Their egos sucked up all the air and they had to land to not suffocate.

  83. GhostRiders Avatar

    The better question is why did they bring them back.

  84. bkfountain Avatar

    It’s just a space rollercoaster for rich people.

  85. GrimmPerfected Avatar

    publicity nonsense

  86. ThiccBlastoise Avatar

    Rich people doing publicity stunts, unfortunately it’s an improvement from rich people openly interfering in politics (yes I know bezos and other billionaires supported Trump, just more quietly)

  87. filkerdave Avatar

    That’s how long they could hold their breath

  88. UltraShadowArbiter Avatar

    Because they didn’t actually go to space. They didn’t even leave the atmosphere.

  89. SpaceToaster Avatar

    It was more like a high plane ride than an orbital space flight (about 1/6 the altitude the shuttle would orbit at)

  90. bobroberts1954 Avatar

    IDK how accurate it is but a news caster mentioned they would hit a max seed of 2000mph. IIRC, you need to travel around 18000mph to stay in orbit. So they would need to go 9 times faster. This was just an expensive amusement park ride.