RCS Will Spin Capsule To Achieve 1/6th G

Blue Origin’s New Shepard flight, NS-29, is scheduled to launch on Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 1600 UTC / 10:00 a.m. CST from Launch Site One in West Texas, carrying 30 payloads for NASA and others. It will also simulate lunar gravity to accelerate learning and technology readiness for customers at a much lower cost than actually going to the Moon.

The crew capsule will utilize its Reaction Control System (RCS) to spin up to about 11 revolutions per minute where it will simulate one-sixth Earth gravity in the midpoint of the crew capsule lockers and will last for about two full minutes. Lunar gravity was previously only available for a few seconds with a centrifuge drop tower or about 20 seconds onboard parabolic flight profiles.

This flight will bring the total number of commercial payloads flown by New Shepard to 175. Of the ones onboard NS-29, more than half are for NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program and four of the payloads are for Honeybee Robotics, a division within Blue Origin’s In-Space Systems business unit. The Honeybee experiments are to test technologies for penetrating, excavating, and processing lunar regolith.

NS-29 will also be carrying thousands of postcards for Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s STEAM-focused nonprofit to inspire and mobilize future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

Payload highlights include:

• Electrostatic Dust Lofting, NASA Kennedy Space Center
• Fluidic Operations in Reduced Gravity Experiment, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Honey Bubble Excitation Experiment, Honeybee Robotics
• Soil Properties Assessment Resistance and Thermal Analysis, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Lunar-g Combustion Investigation, NASA Glenn Research Center
• Film Evaporation MEMS Tunable Array Micropropulsion System, Purdue University

FMI:  www.blueorigin.com/