{"id":14144,"date":"2017-12-10T21:28:57","date_gmt":"2017-12-10T13:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/blue-origin-could-fly-new-suborbital-vehicle-this-week\/"},"modified":"2017-12-10T21:28:57","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T13:28:57","slug":"blue-origin-could-fly-new-suborbital-vehicle-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/blue-origin-could-fly-new-suborbital-vehicle-this-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Origin could fly new suborbital vehicle this week"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
File photo of a New Shepard launch from Blue Origin\u2019s West Texas test site. Credit: Blue Origin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An airspace restriction over West Texas posted on the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s website and filed by Blue Origin suggests the company founded by Amazon.com\u2019s Jeff Bezos could launch its upgraded reusable New Shepard suborbital booster for the first time this week.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin officials said in recent months that ground crews were readying the next model of the New Shepard single-stage rocket for its first test flight from the company\u2019s sprawling test facility near Van Horn, Texas, east of El Paso, targeting a suborbital launch by the end of this year.<\/p>\n

A Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, released Saturday covering Blue Origin\u2019s test site suggested the New Shepard flights may resume this week. The airspace over the commercial company\u2019s remote desert launch base will be restricted due to \u201cspaceflight operations\u201d from Monday through Thursday, between 1430 and 2100 GMT (9:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. EST; 8:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m. CST).<\/p>\n

A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the NOTAM was filed by the Bezos-backed company.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue Origin has filed a NOTAM for spaceflight operations this week,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cIt will be taken down when our activity is complete.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Kent, Washington-based company did not provide further details on the test flight plans.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard booster, named for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard and topped with a pressurized crew capsule, is under development to carry researchers and space tourists on short suborbital hops above an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers), the internationally-recognized boundary of space, also known as the Karman line. The capsule has already accommodated automated research experiments, without a crew on-board, on earlier suborbital test flights.<\/p>\n

The upcoming flight will debut the third New Shepard vehicle built by Blue Origin. The first rocket was lost on descent after a successful blastoff in April 2015, and the second booster launched and landed successfully five times.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin retired the second vehicle after testing the spacecraft\u2019s launch abort capability in October 2016, demonstrating the maneuvers needed to whisk the capsule and its occupants safely away from failing rocket. The company sent the rocket and a mock-up crew capsule to display at several aerospace conferences and conventions, including the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April and the Experimental Aircraft Association\u2019s AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July.<\/p>\n

The third New Shepard vehicle will move Blue Origin closer to launching people into space, perhaps as soon as late next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithin the next 18 months, we\u2019re going to be launching humans into space,\u201d said Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, in a presentation to the National Space Council on Oct. 5. \u201cThese won\u2019t be astronauts \u2014 people that would have been trained and specialized within an area \u2014 but these will be everyday citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crew capsule will eventually be able to carry six passengers beyond the Karman line.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Jeff Bezos sits inside a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital crew capsule, with the five-times-flown reusable New Shepard booster in the background at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Credit: Stephen Clark\/Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis is our third tail for New Shepard, following on the lessons we learned from tail two,\u201d said Clay Mowry, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of sales and marketing. \u201cThe capsule, for instance, didn\u2019t have windows on it. Those were painted on for the test flights. Now, we have the largest windows, on this capsule, that will have ever flown in space.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new capsule also has seats as Blue Origin experiments with the passenger accommodations inside the spacecraft.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the booster itself, we\u2019ve incorporated a lot of things that will allow us to enable operational reuse,\u201d Mowry said at Euroconsult\u2019s World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris in September. \u201cThere are a lot of features to that vehicle, where for instance we have panels, and you want to be able to get in and access through these panels to be able to service the vehicle in between flights.<\/p>\n

With the third vehicle, Blue Origin engineers are also \u201ctrying to improve on thermal protection and other elements of it to make it so the system is operationally reusable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe third propulsion module we\u2019re going to test hopefully by the end of this year,\u201d Mowry said in September. \u201cWe\u2019ll fly it again, and we\u2019ll be testing it into next year, and then there\u2019s a fourth propulsion module that will be coming, which is the one that we\u2019re actually going to fly people on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Shepard is powered by a BE-3 main engine consuming a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, generating about 110,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle. The engine burned for nearly two-and-a-half minutes on New Shepard test flights last year, powering the booster on a trajectory nearly straight up from the West Texas launch pad.<\/p>\n

The crew capsule detached from the booster a few moments later, and both vehicles coasted to maximum altitude in the rarefied upper atmosphere, above most of the effects of aerodynamic forces. The descending rocket deployed a drag brake to slow its fall, then reignited the BE-3 engine \u2014 which can be throttled down to a fraction of its full power level \u2014 and extended landing legs for touchdown on a concrete pad.<\/p>\n

The capsule descended to the desert surface under parachutes, and technicians refurbished the vehicles for reuse.<\/p>\n

A similar launch and landing profile is expected to be followed by the third New Shepard vehicle, but engineers aim to reduce the time needed to ready the rocket and capsule for a re-flight.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin provided an online live video stream of the last two New Shepard flights in June and October last year, but the company has not indicated it will offer a live webcast of this week\u2019s test launch.<\/p>\n

A bigger multi-stage rocket named the New Glenn is planned for launch by 2020 from Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin is designing the larger launcher to carry satellites into orbit, and eventually people.<\/p>\n

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

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

File photo of a New Shepard launch from Blue Origin\u2019s West Texas test site. Credit: Blue Origin An airspace restriction over West Texas posted on the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s website and filed by Blue Origin suggests the company founded by Amazon.com\u2019s Jeff Bezos could launch its upgraded reusable New Shepard suborbital booster for the first […]<\/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":[1678,509,291,1250,311,1898],"class_list":["post-14144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-be-3","tag-blue-origin","tag-commercial-space","tag-new-shepard","tag-reusability","tag-texas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14144"}],"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=14144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}