Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good�

Why does Jeff Bezos’s rocket look like that? An inquiry

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2021-07-21 07:00:05

Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had such a distinctive shape.

As social media erupted with innuendo, we contacted a few experts to find out why it looked, in the words of one astrophysicist, so “anthropomorphic”. At one major research institution, the press officer referred us to the gender studies department, but Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was able to shed some light on the topic.

New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, said McDowell. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.”

Just like the tips of passenger and military jets, capsules come in all different shapes, 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. It also needs a “big, flat bottom” for stable re-entry, McDowell said.