Fuck these guys
God damn Katy Perry is so fine
She hits that level of being so polished, she resembles a clown, to me. I dunno, man. Too glammy. Not enough dirt under her fingernails.
Would that only if all clowns looked like her, truly we’d be in a much better timeline
Is she? She was cute when she was younger but now she just looks like a store clerk.
Looks, when she kisses a girl, I like it.
I guess its good to have standards even if they are a lower one.
They just don’t blow up like they used to…
Myself, I’m not so skeptical.
Yes, it’s a very expensive passtime. They burned H2 and O2, but used a lot of energy.
They had no practical purpose for going - only demonstrating that it’s safe. No experiments besides the flight itself, and it’s been demonstrated already that Blue Origin can fly and land. The added data point was just telemetry and small improvements, and the message that Blue Origin dares to fly VIPs.
I’m content to mostly ignore it, and note “there’s one more private space launch company out there”.
For greater traffic between Earth and space, things must change. The rocket stage that ascends out of the atmosphere would be better released from an extremely high-flying plane or airship. Chances of surviving accidents would increase. Required engine power levels would drop. This has been tried by Scaled Composites. Sadly their space programme was set back by deadly accidents unrelated to their architecture, losing 3 ground crew to an explosion and one pilot to a pilot error. :(
At a later time, instead of ascending out of atmosphere by burning carried fuel, one should seriously consider delivery of energy from Earth by laser (rocket as a solar concentrator, no looking out of windows) and maneuvering in orbit with the assistance of permanent space tugs utilizing highly efficient magnetic thrusters (orientation) and ion engines (propulsion). Probably ion engines that permanently sit in space and only get reaction mass and energy delivered to them regularly.
In the far end, if lots of cargo and lots of people must visit space, then a space elevator must be constructed. Materials that allow making one still don’t exist.
Spaceflight has been responsible for 1% of global warming (radiative forcing) in 2009-2019, mainly through dumping black carbon straight into the upper atmosphere. source The number of launches have increased massively since then, and in 2025 they’re several percent.
Each space tourism flight has as much effect on global radiative forcing as 40,000 passenger jet flights. Taylor Swift’s absurd reliance on private jets is a rounding error compared to space tourists. For the median American, their lifetime effect on global warming is less than that of one second of a space tourist being in space.
Interesting article, thank you.
A note about black carbon, however - it requires a carbon based fuel. This launch vehicle (and some others too) used H2 as its fuel. As a result, we can note emissions of zero for black carbon, alumina and chlorine.
The article has one more estimation error relative to this flight. They seem to have estimated 17.5% of the landing pod’s mass to burn up on re-entry. This is a reasonable estimate when re-entering from orbital flight (initial speed at least 7.8 km/s), but the flight in the news article was suborbital: a steep ascent to the Karman line (initial speed of re-entry: very low), followed by a ballistic fall.
As evidenced by photos of the capsule (also available in the news article), nearly none of its mass burnt away. It features no thermal protection tiles on the sides (there could be some under the bottom) and exhibits no visible signs of overheating or mass loss (even the painted text has remained readable).
So, while the article could be accurate in its analysis of solid-fueled and carbon-based launches and orbital re-entries, this flight differs considerably from the analyzed pattern. The capsule didn’t enter orbit, didn’t carry retrograde engines to initiate re-entry, as a result was lighter, and launchable using a relatively small rocket (19 m is really small for a passenger carrying rocket).
As a result, I think they caused very little irreversible atmospheric emissions. I would even speculate (based on intuition) that they caused less pollution than an airliner over 500 km.
It was just their energy bill that was huge.
Thanks for fact checking me!
🎶 ground control to Katy Perry… 🎶
This article has many great points. It cannot be overstated how demoralizing it is watching all these people with influence and power just burning this place up without a care. They could avoid taking that jet to a different state and back in one day, but they have the ability to do it and choose to do so anyway. My plastic straws seem to amount to tardigrade dicks next to these individuals dumping tonnes of pollutants each day.
amount to tardigrade dicks
Thank you for your contribution to our culture today. I will make very good use of this.
I agree with your message, but the plastic straw issue has always been contemptible and a worthless form of virtue signaling in the context of each person’s climate impact.
‘Oh, no plastic straws for me, please! I want to save the planet,’ spoken before reaching out the window of an air-conditioning-blasting, gas-guzzling SUV to grab a fistful of single-use plastic everything else and factory-farmed beef patties.
All you gotta do to know the plastic bans were bullshit is to look at the sheer volume of disposable plastic that goes into your shopping cart.
Shopping bags and straws were targeted because they impact consumers, not corporate supply chains.
It’s the classic move of individualising a systemic problem to distract people from focusing on the actual source. It was pioneered with littering, then recycling, carbon footprint, and others. The research shows it works to take the heat off of corporations, and the “solutions” that get sold to us don’t work. None of them do.
Yeah thats actually exactly why I said it. The solution to a lot of our problems exist and some even simple. Our entire lives have just been arranged to service the oligarchy.
Why do think they pushed recycling so hard instead of reduce and reuse. Recycling did not damage their bottom line and they lied about it.
