Thu, Aug 25, 2022
Blue Origin’s Workhorse Back in Bit
Blue Origin is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Washington State-based aerospace and sub-orbital spaceflight concern. Since its September 2000 founding, the company has built and launched a succession of spacecraft ranging from test platforms such as Charon and Goddard to its workhorse New Shepard spaceflight system—which, to date, has safely delivered no fewer than 31 souls to space over six successful crewed missions.
On 31 August 2022, New Shepard will undertake its 23rd mission, the cargo manifest of which includes 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe. The mission—intuitively dubbed NS-23—brings the total number of commercial payloads flown on New Shepard to more than one-hundred-fifty. Two NS-23 payloads will fly on the exterior of the launch vehicle’s booster for ambient exposure to the space environment; another eighteen payloads are funded by NASA—primarily by the organization’s Flight Opportunities program.
Among NS-23’s cargo are tens-of-thousands of postcards from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, a nonprofit organization that seeks to give people across the world access to space via its Postcards to Space program. The club’s broader purpose is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields for the mutual benefit of humankind and the Earth.
NS-23 will also carry experiments germane to the operation of hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity; the properties of planetary soils in microgravity; biological responses to suborbital missions: the fiber optic sensing of strain on spacecraft assemblies; the production of a painting in microgravity; the nature of ultrasonic sound-waves in microgravity; the space environment; the fabrication of propellants; artificial intelligence; and liquid measurement in microgravity.
The upcoming launch will be New Shepard program’s fourth 2022 flight, the first dedicated payload flight since August 2021’s NS-17, and the ninth flight for the vehicle itself.
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