Jeff Bezos’ rocket resembles a penis to maximize cabin space and stability

• Billionaire Jeff Bezos flew to the edge of space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on Tuesday.
• The suborbital rocket has a large domed capsule on top for passengers, giving it a phallic profile.
• The signature design of the new Shepard makes it more stable and optimizes cabin space, experts say.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos flew to the edge of space on Tuesday in a corporate rocket that had a bulbous passenger capsule sitting atop a tall, narrow recall tree.

The tumescent shape of the New Shepard rocket was a handy fruit for social media users who quickly pointed out the phallic design of the craft and wondered if that design meant its billionaire passenger was making up for something.

But experts say this suborbital sausage feast was anything but accidental. New Shepard’s signature shape was designed to optimize cabin space for up to six passengers and maximize the rocket’s stability upon its return to Earth, according to Pedros Llanos, engineer and professor of space flight operations. at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

“The main reason the design looks like this is that Jeff’s primary goal is to get people into space, so it’s all about having four to six people in the cabin and thus maximizing the volume of the room. cabin, ”Llanos told Insider. His group at Embry-Riddle sent freight on previous New Shepard launches in 2017 and 2019.

“Jeff also wanted to have the biggest windows in the space so people could have an amazing experience,” Llanos said, which further increased the size of the capsule.

While most spaceships look, in part, like male genitals, New Shepard’s large mushroom-shaped capsule – and the booster’s slender girth below – is the driving source for the recent innuendos.

Blue Origin declined Insider’s request for comment.

The shape of the capsule helps reduce drag on the rocket and keep passengers safe

Blue origin

According to Llanos, Blue Origin engineers tested more than 100 configurations for the shape of the capsule before settling on one that starts wide at the base and tapers – much like a muffin top.

Since the capsule is the first thing to pass through the air when New Shepard soars skyward (scientists call this front-most part the nose cone), it is rounded to reduce drag, Llanos said.

Drag is the force that slows down an object as it moves through air. The shape of a rocket affects the drag it experiences, NASA said: “Most round surfaces have less drag than flat surfaces. Narrow surfaces generally have less drag than wide ones.”

The capsule also had to remain stable during the descent – it detached from the New Shepard booster in the atmosphere and fell for four minutes before deploying parachutes and safely depositing Bezos and three others on the ground. That’s why the engineers had to make the bottom so wide.

“The more base it has, the better it will land,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A capsule shape with a narrower base would have been less stable on re-entry.

Thinner design helps the rocket reach suborbit

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Like most rockets, New Shepard has a thruster-filled thruster that helps detonate its capsule into space.

The higher a rocket’s objective is in space, the more propellant it must contain to propel its journey. So a thruster carrying a spacecraft bound for the orbiting International Space Station, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, will be bigger and bigger than a thruster for a rocket like New Shepard which is designed to go only up to at the edge of space.

“You don’t need that much fuel to become suborbital; everything on Jeff’s rocket is optimized to become suborbital,” Llanos said. “If it had gone orbital, the design would have been very different.”

Since Bezos’ rocket only aimed at the Kármán Line – an imaginary border 62 miles above sea level, where many experts say space begins – his engineers reduced the height and circumference of the New Shepard thruster. (Narrower surfaces usually have less drag too.)

The movement reinforced the phallic profile of the rocket.

NASA / Sandy Joseph and Tim Terry

McDowell said there are other rockets that have capsules larger than their thrusters – known as “hammerhead” rockets.

Notably, he said, the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, which will carry NASA and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft to the space station on July 30, has a similar profile.

Future rockets might not have this phallic design

Kyodo via Reuters; Nasa; Blue origin; Galactic Virgo; NASA / Bill Ingalls

It is difficult to predict whether future commercial space missions will sport a similar design, Llanos said.

Granted, Blue Origin’s next rocket – named New Glenn – looks more like a bullet than a penis.

“It’s more elongated and longer to accommodate a much larger payload,” Llanos said.

But New Glenn is designed to go into orbit and come back. And unlike its suborbital predecessor, the rocket will not have a round nose cone, which means New Shepard will likely be the only such craft manufactured by Blue Origin.

“It’s probably the most phallic spacecraft you’re going to see, if I had to guess,” Daniel Ramspacher, propulsion engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Center, told Slate.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen contributed reporting.