![]() ![]() Most water areas are small, private farm ponds less than an acre in size. It is used for flood control, municipal and industrial water supplies, irrigation, and recreation. It is one of 24 public reservoirs built by the U.S. The largest reservoir, Milford Lake near Junction City, covers 15,709 acres. It covers about 160 acres and is on private property. The largest natural lake is McPherson County’s Lake Inman in central Kansas. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Lake Inman, Kansas, courtesy of Wikipedia. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. ![]() NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. So I think it's important to remember this isn't a proven technology yet and we probably have a ways to go before this is going to happen. ![]() And their rocket stages have crashed and actually exploded. SpaceX, which is a rival company, has tried this several times. So, you know, this was a big success for Blue Origin, but earlier this year, they did have a failure where the rocket stage actually crashed. So does this now mean problem solved, everybody's got it figured out?īRUMFIEL: Well, right, I think that's a really good point. Before this, there were a lot of pretty spectacular failures. SHAPIRO: Geoff, this launch and landing was a success. And further down the road maybe it could get cheap enough that you could actually go into orbit. If that works, then potentially, yeah, people could at least get a taste of space. It'll open some parachutes and land gently so it doesn't rely on this rocket landing system. It'll float in space for about four minutes, give people a great view and then it's going to come back down. And when they get up to the edge of space, the capsule's going to pop off the top of the rocket. So on top of this rocket that they can reuse they're going to put a capsule. SHAPIRO: Does this mean that in our lifetimes people will be able to take tourist trips to space affordably?īRUMFIEL: So that's exactly what this company Blue Origin's hoping to do. We're going to - over the next couple of years, we're going to fly this vehicle many, many times.īRUMFIEL: And if they can fly the same rocket many, many times, they could potentially dramatically cut the cost of space travel. JEFF BEZOS: This is the first of what will be many test flights. And that's exactly what billionaire Jeff Bezos told CNN he wants to do. But if you could land that first stage, you could potentially use it again. SHAPIRO: That's Geoff making the sound of a rocket hitting the ground.īRUMFIEL: Yeah, exactly. So right now, when you have one of these giant rockets taking off from Cape Canaveral, or, you know, from Kazakhstan if it's Russian, basically the rocket goes firing off into space and then the vast majority of it, the first stage, just breaks off and goes clump back down onto the ground or into the ocean. Why is the landing so important?īRUMFIEL: The point here is reusability. And it sounds like the big news is not the takeoff but the landing. SHAPIRO: This was so secret people didn't even know the launch was happening. But instead of just crashing into the ground, it fired its rockets.īRUMFIEL: So the rocket fires its engines and sort of hovers like a UFO and then gently sets down on Earth. And then - this is the really cool part - this giant rocket stage fell back to Earth. The rocket traveled more than three times the speed of sound, got up to 62 miles above the Earth, which is technically the boundary to outer space. SHAPIRO: What exactly happened this week?īRUMFIEL: So yesterday afternoon, a rocket built by this company Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, took off from a field in Texas. And to tell us all about it, NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel is here. Big news this week in commercial space travel. ![]()
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