Space company Blue Origin plans to launch its New Shepard rocket for the first time in more than a year, in just under two hours – at 16:30 p.m. local time. The launch will be broadcast live on the company's website. We used Forefront to tell us a little about the background to the incident.
The current mission, NS-24, will be launched from Blue Origin's launch pad in West Texas, with no humans on board, but 33 items designed to conduct science experiments for NASA, schools and Project SETI looking for aliens. In addition, the rocket will have 38,000 postcards from students from the company's Future Club, which aims to encourage youth to take an interest in space exploration. All this will happen in suborbital flight (i.e., one that will not reach the altitude that allows orbiting the Earth, but will take off and land like a ballistic missile).
The planned launch window opens at 16:30 p.m., and the broadcast will begin 20 minutes earlier – that is, at <>:<> a.m. according to our watch, another two and a half hours.
The New Shepherd rocket, named after the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, is a rather small rocket – 18 meters high, similar to Rocket Lab's Electron rocket that made a successful launch over the weekend, and 3.7 meters wide, three times as wide as an electron, allowing it to carry more fuel and develop twice the power of the two electron phases combined. The company takes particular pride in the fact that it is virtually non-polluting – all its parts, including the landing parachute, are reusable, and its fuel is hydrogen, which produces only smoke-free water vapor.
This will be the 24th mission for the New Shepard rocket program, whose first launch was in 2015. For the past year, the rocket was shut down after a failed launch in September 2022, when the rocket crashed back to Earth shortly after takeoff. As is customary in such cases, an investigation was opened by the Federal Aviation Administration, which until its conclusions were completed and its conclusions were implemented (i.e., overhaul of the missile according to new guidelines) the launches were grounded.
In the summer of 2021, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos himself took off on the first manned flight of the rocket, to which a rather luxurious spacecraft for space tourists is attached. Since then, he has sent two more human missions into space, some of which paid tens of millions of dollars for airline tickets, while others, invited as guests, flew for free. A total of 31 people have flown with the company so far. Employees told Reuters that when flights become more regular, ticket prices should range from $200,000 to $300,000. Today's unmanned launch is a step on the way there.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us