Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, successfully launched its 14th Shepard spacecraft, a mission dedicated to the implementation of commercial space travel, which reached the highest speed and highest altitude to date in addition to being equipped with a more comprehensive security system, making it the biggest leap to date to achieve commercial spaceflight.
Jeff Bezos's space flight company has completed the launch of the fourteenth New Shepard spacecraft, which has many enhancements over previous manned space vehicles.
launch! Blue Origin successfully completed the launch of the fourteenth New Shepard spacecraft, sending its manned space capsule into space, a process that has given the company its biggest step to date in the face of the ideal of manned spaceflight.
The mission, launched from Blue Origin's West Texas site, unveiled the design of the company's latest manned space capsule, equipped with a series of upgrades to make flying more comfortable.
Its only passenger was a dummy known as the "Mannequin Skywalker," which sat in one of the six seats in the capsule.
This recent success has brought the company closer to the goal of commercial human aviation flight than ever before. The company was founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with plans to use a new Shepard rocket to send up to 6 people into space. The capsule will fly over the Kármán line, a 100-kilometer-high boundary that separates Earth's atmosphere from outer space. When passengers go into space and drift back to West Texas, they feel a force three times stronger than Earth's gravity.
These brief space trips are designed for pure enjoyment, not to send astronauts to the International Space Station, or even to Mars, nor to SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The capsule is 530 cubic feet in size, and the windows can penetrate 92% of the visible light. Astronauts will be invited to take off their seat belts, float around the cockpit, and practice some maneuvers before returning to Earth.
Thursday's flight was the first use of the New Shepard's booster iteration and, overall, the fourth new Shepard booster. The first two booster designs have been decommissioned, while the third has successfully completed its mission seven times in a row between December 2017 and October 2020. The company said the first three boosters will carry the effective load of unmanned driving into space, but the fourth booster will be used for manned missions.
In preliminary statistics after launch, the team announced that the capsule reached an apogee of 350827 feet. During the flight, the maximum ascent speed was as high as 2242 miles per hour, which lasted 10 minutes and 15 seconds.
The attempt was aimed at perfecting the system and making the flight experience smooth. The capsule is equipped with new acoustic and temperature-regulating equipment, microphones and speakers, and push-to-talk buttons for all six seats so that passengers can talk to the Mission Control Center and crew display panels.
The capsule is also equipped with a new safety and alert system. This includes lights and sounds set up in each passenger's seat to deliver safety messages. The walls are padded so passengers don't hurt themselves while floating around.
Blue Origin Flight Plan Diagram (Image Source: Blue Origin)
The flying features are moving in a new direction, which is to make the flying experience more impressive for passengers. About 16 seconds after launch, the booster starts spinning at a speed of 2 to 3 degrees per second. The aim is to give passengers a better view of the scenery below during the journey.
The booster spun sharply during landing as the BE-3 engine struggled to reposition the booster to the center of the launch pad.
"It's the kind of material that makes the live rocket launch and landing so exciting." Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin's head of aerospace and orbit sales, said so during the live broadcast of the launch mission.
As part of the Future Club initiative, the launch also sent more than 50,000 postcards submitted by students around the world. It was the third mission of the flight, and some of it was placed in the pockets of the Mannequin Skywalker.
THE INVERSE ANALYSIS – Blue Origin's goal is to transport people who are passionate about space tourism with the New Shepard spacecraft. This is similar to Virgin Galactic's goal of providing similar suborbital flights just past the Kármán line. The latter detailed its cockpit and interior in a July 2020 disclosure.
It's unclear when people will be able to fly into space aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, putting aside pandemic factors. Bezos told us in February 2019 that people would be able to start flying that year. But company officials say perhaps they need to make three or four more unmanned spaceflights before sending real humans into space.
The completion of this mission has brought the realization of the goal one step closer than ever before.
BY: Mike Brown
FY: Infinity
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