[Via Satellite 04-30-2015] On April 29, Blue Origin <\/b>conducted the first developmental test flight of its New Shepard Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing (VTVL) space vehicle. New Shepard reached a planned test altitude of 307,000 feet, reaching a speed of Mach 3 using the liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen BE-3 engine, capable of 110,000-lbf. Blue Origin reported that guidance, navigation and control were nominal throughout max Q and all of ascent, and that the in-space separation of the crew capsule from the propulsion module occurred flawlessly.<\/p>\n
New Shepard is a reusable launch vehicle designed to carry astronauts and payloads to space. Work within Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital vehicle program feeds directly into the company\u2019s orbital program. During the test flight, Blue Origin was unable to recover the propulsion module due to a loss of pressure in New Shepard\u2019s hydraulic system while descending. The company is developing an improved hydraulic system, and the assembly of propulsion module serial numbers two and three is already underway.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe continue to be big fans of the vertical takeoff, vertical landing architecture. We chose VTVL because it\u2019s scalable to very large size. We\u2019re already designing New Shepard\u2019s sibling, her very big brother \u2014 an orbital launch vehicle that is many times New Shepard\u2019s size and is powered by our 550,000-lbf thrust liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen BE-4 engine,\u201d said Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Via Satellite 04-30-2015] On April 29, Blue Origin conducted the first developmental test flight of its New Shepard Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing (VTVL) space vehicle. New Shepard reached a planned test altitude of 307,000 feet, reaching a speed of Mach 3 using the liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen BE-3 engine, capable of 110,000-lbf. Blue Origin reported […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74303,"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":[],"class_list":["post-74301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74301"}],"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=74301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}