![]() ![]() “You’ve got to imagine there was a meeting where someone went, ‘Do you really want to fly looking like this?’ But I’m guessing an engineer got up and said, ‘This is what the math says. Still, “they can’t not have noticed,” McDowell said. Was there any subtle aesthetic messaging involved? “I don’t know if I would have made the design this way, but I’m sure it was driven entirely by physics” as well as cost savings, said Forczyk. That’s there to accommodate a “ring-shaped fin” that is fundamental to the re-entry process, counteracting the effects of the fin at the bottom as the booster travels in reverse.Īll this adds up to some particularly memorable optics. He pointed to other examples of rockets with slightly flared tops, including the Atlas V Starliner, expected to launch next week.Īdding to those “anthropomorphic” qualities is a ridge near the top that is “very, very obvious”, Manley said. “It comes down to optimizing two different things and not being able to make them quite match,” McDowell said. These competing concerns can lead to a capsule that is wider than might originally have been envisioned. “It is easier to balance a long and skinny cylinder than it is to balance a thicker, fatter cylinder,” Forczyk said. “And this is the shape they came up with, this dome shape.”Īs for the booster, engineers work to minimize its mass, making it as small as possible. “They went through a lot of iterations coming up with the perfect shape to give them the most volume, the best windows, and wouldn’t kill anyone onboard,” said the astrophysicist Scott Manley in a private video shared with the Guardian. It also needs a “big, flat bottom” for stable re-entry, McDowell said. New Shepard’s interior is designed to “maximize the interior volume” to hold six passengers, said Laura Forczyk, the owner of Astralytical, a space analytics company. Just like the tips of passenger and military jets, capsules come in all different shapes. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.” “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, said McDowell. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. 28, 2008, when its Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit Earth. New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. Rocketry Image Gallery Present Day - SpaceX Falcon 1 SpaceX is developing a family of launch vehicles for missions to Earth orbit and beyond.
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