{"id":13829,"date":"2018-04-29T18:30:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-29T10:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/suborbital-test-flight-moves-blue-origin-closer-to-launching-people\/"},"modified":"2018-04-29T18:30:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-29T10:30:58","slug":"suborbital-test-flight-moves-blue-origin-closer-to-launching-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/suborbital-test-flight-moves-blue-origin-closer-to-launching-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Suborbital test flight moves Blue Origin closer to launching people"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Updated at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) with new apogee number.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"
The New Shepard booster took off from West Texas at 12:06 p.m. CDT (1:07 p.m. EDT; 1707 GMT). Credit: Blue Origin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The privately-developed New Shepard booster, designed and built by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company Blue Origin, took off from a launch pad in West Texas, briefly flew into space with an instrumented capsule, and returned to a rocket-assisted landing Sunday in another test before humans climb aboard the suborbital spaceship.<\/p>\n

The hydrogen-fueled rocket lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s test site near Van Horn, Texas, at 12:06 p.m. CDT (1:06 p.m. EDT; 1706 GMT), a few seconds after igniting its BE-3 main engine for a pre-launch health check.<\/p>\n

The single-stage rocket, named for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, climbed through the stratosphere, then cut off its engine around 2 minutes, 16 seconds, after liftoff.<\/p>\n

About 20 seconds later, an unpiloted crew capsule released from the top of the booster, and the vehicles soared to the edge of space.<\/p>\n

A live webcast of the test flight provided by Blue Origin showed the vehicles coasting to an apogee of roughly 351,000 feet, or about 107 kilometers, around four minutes into the mission. The rocket achieved a top speed of around 2,200 mph (3,540 kilometers per hour), according to data released by Blue Origin.<\/p>\n

Ariane Cornell, who hosted Blue Origin\u2019s launch webcast, said engineers intended to \u201cpush the envelope\u201d of the New Shepard\u2019s capabilities, aiming to reach an altitude of 350,000 feet, around 20,000 feet higher than the rocket\u2019s typical target.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the altitude we\u2019ve been targeting for operations,\u201d Bezos tweeted after Sunday\u2019s flight.<\/p>\n

The two vehicles then made their descents, and the New Shepard booster fell back through the atmosphere, deployed an airbrake and reignited its throttleable BE-3 engine to slow its velocity for touchdown. Four landing legs extended from the base of the New Shepard booster just before it settled gently on a landing pad around 2 miles (3 kilometers) from the rocket\u2019s launch site.<\/p>\n

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Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket makes its final descent on Sunday\u2019s flight. Credit: Blue Origin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The rocket landed about seven minutes after liftoff, while the crew capsule deployed three parachutes and fired retro-rockets to cushion the craft\u2019s landing on the desert floor approximately 10 minutes after launch. A live view from a flying drone captured spectacular views of the capsule\u2019s final descent.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s flight was delayed several hours to due to thunderstorms near Blue Origin\u2019s sprawling West Texas launch base.<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s test flight reused the same New Shepard booster and space capsule that made their first launch in December, and it was the eighth test flight overall for Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital space tourism vehicle.<\/p>\n

The rocket flown Dec. 13 and on Sunday is Blue Origin\u2019s third New Shepard vehicle, featuring changes to make the rocket easier to refurbish and reuse between missions. The first New Shepard model was lost on a landing attempt in April 2015, and Blue Origin retired the second unit after it made five successful suborbital hops.<\/p>\n

The December test flight also debuted Blue Origin\u2019s upgraded crew capsule, which features large windows to offer passengers spectacular views on their trips to space and back. The \u201cCrew Capsule 2.0\u201d vehicle was re-flown Sunday.<\/p>\n

Like the December test flight, a dummy dubbed \u201cMannequin Skywalker\u201d was strapped into the crew capsule to simulate the conditions passengers riding the rocket will one day experience.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin did not provide a live video stream of the Dec. 13 test flight, after conducting live webcasts of the previous two New Shepard demo missions in 2016.<\/p>\n

The company hopes to be ready to fly people on New Shepard test flights by the end of the year, followed by the start of commercial space tourism service in 2019. Officials have not said how many more uncrewed test flights are planned before people ride the New Shepard rocket.<\/p>\n

But Blue Origin is already offering rides for government and commercial research payloads, and more experiments were aboard the unpiloted crew capsule Sunday. It was the second time customer payloads were launched by Blue Origin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese payloads represent a range of users, from NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center to a small commercial communications firm, as well as our first European customers, funded by the German national space agency, DLR,\u201d Blue Origin said. \u201cEach of the payloads has been outfitted with a custom Blue Origin Payload Locker to provide structural, power, and data interfaces throughout the flight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NASA payload included sensors to measure the environment \u2014 carbon dioxide levels, pressure, acceleration and acoustics \u2014 inside the crew capsule\u2019s cabin, and test components for the space agency\u2019s Orion spacecraft. A commercial New Mexico-based communications company named Solstar flew a tech demo to test the concept of providing Wi-Fi access to in-space users, according to Blue Origin.<\/p>\n

Three experiments in biology and physics from German universities and research institutes also flew Sunday, Blue Origin said.<\/p>\n

The New Shepard suborbital vehicle is a stepping stone to Blue Origin\u2019s larger orbital-class New Glenn rocket, which the company says could make its first test flight from Cape Canaveral by the end of 2020.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin engineers are testing a more powerful rocket engine, the BE-4 fed by liquified natural gas, for the New Glenn launcher. The company also hopes to sell BE-4 engines to United Launch Alliance for the next-generation Vulcan rocket.<\/p>\n

Cornell said Sunday that passengers who fly on the New Shepard rocket will get \u201cfirst dibs\u201d on riding the New Glenn rocket, which will eventually carry people into Earth orbit.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: Updated at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) with new apogee number. The New Shepard booster took off from West Texas at 12:06 p.m. CDT (1:07 p.m. EDT; 1707 GMT). Credit: Blue Origin The privately-developed New Shepard booster, designed and built by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company Blue Origin, took off from a launch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1678,509,291,1046,25,1250,311,493],"class_list":["post-13829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-be-3","tag-blue-origin","tag-commercial-space","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-launch","tag-new-shepard","tag-reusability","tag-space-tourism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13829"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}