Space capsule for tourists on show
‘‘We’ll take anything below that; 8.75 is such a huge relief,’’ Williams said.
‘‘They’re telling us for the next 24 hours the river will stay at that height and should start to rapidly recede over the weekend.’’
Despite the lower-than-expected peak, Williams said about 3000 homes and business would be affected by the floods, and an estimated 220 homes would have water over their floorboards.
About 375 homes and businesses remain without power after Ergon shut off power earlier in the week.
The flood barriers at North Rockhampton had been criticised for protecting some homes and not others, but Williams said they had worked well. – AAP UNITED STATES: The seats are comfortable, laid back with headrests like in a dentist’s office. The walls are padded and white, and there are handles all over the place so that the floating astronauts can hang on like people riding the subway.
But it’s the windows that are the defining feature of the spacecraft that Jeffrey Bezos showed off yesterday at the Space Symposium, a conference in Colorado Springs.
In a year or more – Bezos said the timing hasn’t yet been decided – his space company Blue Origin plans to begin flying tourists past the edge of space, 100km high, where for about four minutes they’ll experience the thrill of weightlessness and view the curvature of the Earth.
‘‘Everybody says that when you go to space, it changes you,’’ said Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post. ‘‘All the astronauts come back with stories like that. It’s very emotional to see this Earth, to see the thin layer of the atmosphere.’’
Blue Origin is one of several entrepreneurial companies seeking to lower the cost of access to space, and touch off what Bezos said could become a ‘‘golden age of space’’.
In addition to Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has accomplished a series of feats, such as becoming the first commercial venture to fly a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Last week, SpaceX became the first company to re-fly the first stage of a rocket that had delivered a payload to orbit.
Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, also plans to fly tourists to space, and is in the middle of testing its new space plane, SpaceShipTwo, which would be tethered to the bellow of a mothership and then launched in flight. Virgin charges US$250,000 a flight; Blue Origin hasn’t yet decided what its tickets would cost.
Flanked by the Blue Origin spacecraft and the New Shepard booster, which has flown past the edge of space five times, Bezos said the company could begin flying paying customers by as soon as 2018, but that the schedule is fluid.
While his ‘‘singular focus is people in space’’, the flight-testing programme will be deliberate and painstaking, he said.
– Washington Post