Entertainment
Watch Bezos’ new super rocket blast its engines. Its about to launch.
In the continuing saga of billionaires and big rockets comes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with his latest space vehicle, New Glenn.
The rocket, which stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first person to orbit Earth in 1962. Though much shorter than SpaceX‘s towering Starship, it is about the size of NASA’s mega moon rocket, the Space Launch System.
Years in the making, the commercial rocket is on the verge of its maiden flight.
On Friday, while strapped firmly to its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, New Glenn nailed its final dress rehearsal, firing all seven of its engines for 24 seconds. It was the first time Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, had operated the entire stacked rocket as an integrated system. Flashes from the engines pierced through billows of steam, like cracks of lightning amid storm clouds.
“Next stop launch,” said Bezos in a post on X, the social media platform owned by his space launch competitor, Elon Musk. Despite their rivalry, Musk replied with a wish for godspeed.
A video of the test, called a hot fire, can be watched in the above post. The demonstration involved a complete fueling and practice countdown. New Glenn’s booster runs on methane and liquid oxygen, while the second stage of the rocket, which propels a spacecraft further into space, runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
When all seven booster engines are firing in concert, they produce enough horsepower for two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt, said David Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO. For 13 seconds of the hot fire test, New Glenn was operating at 100 percent of its thrust capacity.
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Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000, but its first small rocket, New Shepard, has primarily focused on space tourism, providing short flights for wealthy passengers to the cusp of space and back.
Star Trek actor William Shatner, one of the most familiar space figures in pop culture, became a real space traveler in October 2021.
Credit: PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP via Getty Images
But the company has aspirations to do much more. It’s building a lunar lander for NASA, to be named Blue Moon, that will perform several uncrewed test flights with the New Glenn rocket, before ferrying Artemis V astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.
It’s also building a commercial space station, dubbed Orbital Reef. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $130 million contract to build it as the U.S. space agency tries to transition to a new model of space research, wherein businesses own and operate space labs in low-Earth orbit and NASA becomes one of their many customers.
Just prior to Friday’s test, the Federal Aviation Administration issued Blue Origin a launch license for New Glenn, its final administrative approval. Though the company hasn’t yet announced when it will attempt a liftoff, an FAA operational advisory indicates a tentative plan of a launch window opening at 11:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 31, with a backup window at the same time on New Year’s Day.
“Well, all we have left to do is mate our encapsulated payload…and then LAUNCH!” Limp said on X. “Congrats to the many Blue folks on today’s test.”
Blue Origin will attempt to use a sea-based landing platform, named Jacklyn, to save New Glenn boosters.
Credit: Blue Origin
The license allows Blue Origin to launch New Glenn from the Space Force station at Cape Canaveral, as well as land its reusable booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. That sea-based landing platform, named Jacklyn, is one of the largest remotely operated vessels in the world. The company hopes to be able to reuse a single booster at least 25 times. Reusability is an important facet of the burgeoning commercial space industry, significantly lowering the cost per launch.
Blue Origin wanted to get to this point months ago. The inaugural flight was slated for October, which would have included two Mars orbiters built by Rocket Lab for NASA. Had New Glenn launched then, the twin spacecraft would have taken advantage of the planetary alignment that shortens the travel time to the Red Planet, an average of 140 million miles away from Earth.
NASA and Blue Origin are now in talks for a potential launch for that mission, known as Escapade, no earlier than spring 2025.
Entertainment
This $43 bundle quietly upgrades your entire PC experience
TL;DR: This rare Microsoft bundle deal gives you a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and Windows 11 Pro for only $42.97 (reg. $418.99) through May 17.
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Don’t count out your dusty old PC. This Microsoft bundle is here to give it a total facelift for less than $50. It kicks off with a lifetime license to some of the brand’s most popular tools — Microsoft Office, which you’ll pay for once and enjoy without any subscription fees.
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You’ll get permanent access to a suite of eight helpful apps with Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows. It includes staples that have been around for decades, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. You’ll also get newer favorites like Teams, OneNote, Access, and Publisher.
Once you’ve loaded the apps onto your device, you can upgrade your OS to Windows 11 Pro. It’s an operating system made for modern professionals, with tools that support your workflow. Enjoy a more powerful search experience, improved voice typing, a seamless interface, snap layouts, and much more.
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Mashable Deals
Show your PC some love with the Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and Windows 11 Pro bundle for only $42.97 (reg. $418.99) now until May 17.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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