Blue Origin ready to return to the launch pad with New Shepard
Jeff Bezos' aerospace company, Blue Origin, is planning to return its New Shepard suborbital rocket to flight around December 18, as it seeks to restart its space tourism business.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket warms up its engines on the launch pad.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' aerospace company is expected to carry out its first launch in 15 months next week, after the failure of the last mission in September 2022 due to an anomaly on the New Shepard rocket. Blue Origin itself made this known in a post on X , the former Twitter social platform.
“For our next New Shepard mission we are aiming for a launch window that will open on December 18th,” the post reads. According to Bloomberg , the window is expected to close three days later, on December 21. There will be no humans on board, but 33 payloads for science and research, the company added, referring to the payload that will support experiments in space.
A successful launch could reinvigorate Bezos' company's ambitions and comes at the same time as a new chapter for Blue Origin: in early December, current CEO Bob Smith made way for Dave Limp, a veteran executive at Amazon. So Bezos turned to Dave Limp, head of Amazon's devices division, the man behind Alexa and Kindle, to address competition from SpaceX and Virgin Galactic in space tourism. ( To learn more about the Space episode, the Startmag podcast, on Space Tourism, is a challenge between SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin ).
All the details.
NEW SHEPARD READY TO RETURN TO SPACE AFTER LAST YEAR'S FAILURE
The New Shepard rocket launches from Blue Origin's private facility in West Texas, carrying people and payloads to an altitude above 100 kilometers, for a couple of minutes in zero gravity. The capsule flies autonomously, without a human pilot, and descends with the assistance of a series of parachutes to land in the Texas desert. The New Shepard rocket is a fully reusable vehicle, and the booster is designed to land upright after a successful launch into space.
What was supposed to be the 23rd flight of the New Shepard rocket, carrying an uncrewed space capsule in September 2022, ended in failure. The mission, financed by NASA, had to transport the capsule and other material to the outer limits of Earth's gravity, studying the effects of microgravity for a few minutes. However, the capsule correctly activated the emergency release system and touched the ground without damage thanks to parachutes.
It was the fourth flight of the New Shepard program that year and the first dedicated payload-only flight since August 2021. As the Guardian recalls, in six crewed "tourist" flights lasting between 10 and 15 minutes each, to date Blue Origin carried 31 humans into space with New Shepard launches. Previous passengers included founder Bezos in July 2021 .
WHAT HAD HAPPENED
As Reuters recalls, in March the company had established that a "structural failure" in the rocket's engine nozzle had caused the September 2022 failure. Last September the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the United States aviation authority United, closed its review of Blue Origin's New Shepard investigation, agreeing with the company's findings. It required Blue Origin to make 21 corrective actions, including an engine redesign and “organizational changes.”
THE RETURN IN FLIGHT
So now New Shepard is flying again as Blue Origin races to get its heavy launcher, New Glenn, scheduled to debut in late 2024 for the first time. In addition to developing the New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, the company has also worked on the BE-4 engine that powers both the New Glenn rocket and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket.
Unlike the New Shepard suborbital rocket, New Glenn is designed to deliver heavier payloads into orbit.
THE COMPETITION WITH SPACEX AND VIRGIN GALACTIC
Meanwhile, Blue Origin, which aims to become a major player in the space, chases its rivals.
Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson's company, got a head start with the launch of its second commercial flight in June . SpaceX also continues its conquest of space. Elon Musk's aerospace company dominates the commercial space launch market and recently reached a valuation of $180 billion.
Finally, it should also be remembered that last May Blue Origin was awarded the contract for a second NASA crewed lunar lander for the Artemis V mission in 2029.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/blue-origin-pronta-a-tornare-sulla-rampa-di-lancio-con-new-shepard/ on Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:21:13 +0000.