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8 hours ago, ICanSleepWhenI'mDead said:

Gotta run - - I need more tin foil, and the dock workers may go on strike again in November.  What sort of ship cargo are they afraid of unloading, anyway?

 

Or, it was a ruse, because the government needed to offload some stuff and did not want anyone to see it.  So, they got the dock workers to strike, thereby making a human shield around the port.  The news crews would be more interested in getting video of them, than of the strange object being unload onto a trailer behind them.  

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Posted

Jeff Bezos Blue Origins company successfully launched its New Glenn rocket last night, a huge step up in size and delivery power for rockets that will eventully be reusable. Travel by air liner would not be cost effective if they used up the plane completely every flight, so rockets have to be reusable, though that failed on this first flight 

 

https://www.wsj.com/business/bezos-blue-origin-rocket-launch-0621c82f

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket blasted off from a launchpad Thursday, with flames pouring out from its booster. Liftoff marked a years-in-the-making milestone for Bezos and a step toward catching up to rival space entrepreneur Elon Musk.

“All of the things we want to do in the future rely on New Glenn,” Bezos said in a recent interview. 

New Glenn measures more than 320 feet tall. It is designed to conduct regular flights using reusable boosters, lofting commercial and national-security satellites into orbit. The rocket is eventually meant to launch astronaut crews.

It is also years behind schedule. Blue Origin had intended to have New Glenn ready years ago but struggled with technical and production setbacks. Bezos said he believes Blue Origin can move faster in the future, as the company pushes to improve the vehicle and steps up manufacturing.

 

Since its founding, Blue Origin has created a smaller rocket for short tourism and research trips to space. The company has worked on building a space station and developed other technologies, such as using moon dust to create solar cells. It employs around 11,000 people with operations in Washington, Texas and Alabama.

What Blue Origin hadn’t done before Thursday is send up its own rocket on an orbital mission, which is critical to competing for more business. It would also support Bezos’ long-term space goals, which include seeing humanity spread out across the solar system.

Brent Sherwood, a former Blue Origin senior vice president, said the success of the New Glenn program is fundamental to pursuing those big objectives. “Until you can launch a lot of stuff into orbit and until, in today’s world, you’re reusing the boosters, you haven’t met the price of admission,” he said.

 

“There’s room for lots of winners,” Bezos said. “SpaceX is going to be successful, Blue Origin is going to be successful and there’s some company out there right now that hasn’t even been founded yet that is also going to be successful.”

SpaceX has embraced failing quickly during rocket development to gain data and experience to help the company gradually improve. Early Wednesday, SpaceX launched a lunar lander created by Texas-based Firefly Aerospace and a lander from ispace, a Japanese space company, to the moon.

Musk’s space company is targeting Thursday for the seventh test launch of its massive Starship rocket, seeking to deploy devices that mimic its Starlink satellites and test other changes to the rocket during the mission.

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