Fly like millionaires: Blue Origin debuts rocket simulator in Central Florida
MERRITT ISLAND
Those taking a virtual ride to space on the new Blue Origin New Shepard simulator at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex face the same conundrum as the folks who can afford the real thing — don’t forget to look out the window.
“The common thing that we’ve heard from basically every astronaut is that they had wished they had spent more time looking out the window, and less time getting out of the seat and floating around,” said Blue Origin’s Barret Schlegelmilch, whose title is Crew Member 7. He is the person who trains the six customers who take the roughly 10-minute trip up to space and back aboard Jeff Bezos-owned rocket company’s space tourism rocket.
He was on hand Friday to explain how the life-size simulator of the crew capsule works. It is free to visitors with paid admissionto within KSC’s Gateway attraction.
“The way it works is you go inside, you sit in the seats which are identical to our actual flight seats,” he said. “Everything you can see and touch in there is basically identical to the real thing.”
Unlike the real thing that takes up to six people past the Karman line, about 82 miles altitude, to experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth, visitors to KSC won’t be getting out of their seats.
But they will be distracted during what is a sped-up, four-minute experience wearing VR headsets.
On the simulator, riders get to choose from among a mini Saturn V rocket, a space shuttle, a crew capsule or a tennis ball, and when the time comes, the simulator makes them appear as if they are floating. Riders’ virtual hands can flick them across the cabin, and even into one another. That’s why it’s easy to forget to look out the window.
The VR headsets are loaded with images taken with 360-degree cameras from previous flights of New Shepard, which launches from Blue Origin’s West Texas facility.
For more infornation about the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, call 855-433-4210 or go to kennedyspacecenter.com