StemCell Therapy

This was the company's first launch since May

Jeff Bezos company Blue Origin has successfully launched its New Shepard vehicle for a 12th time, as it continues its efforts to begin launching humans on short jaunts into space.

Today at 12.46 P.M. Eastern Time, the U.S. companys 18-meter tall rocket launched from the companys test site in West Texas on the NS-12 mission. On board was a capsule, designed to one day carry up to six people, but on this occasion outfitted with a variety of experiments and sensors.

After reaching a maximum altitude of 104.5 kilometers, the rocket booster separated from the capsule and the two descended back towards Earth. The booster fired up its engines again and performed a controlled landing back on the ground, while the capsule descended safely and slowly to Earth via parachute. The whole flight lasted about ten minutes.

Congratulations to our New Shepard team, said Ariane Cornell, Director of Astronaut and Orbital Sales for Blue Origin, in a live stream for the launch. Look at that capsule. Man I wish I'd been on board today!

This was the sixth flight for this particular New Shepard vehicle, eclipsing the record of five flights made by its predecessor. This particular rocket has been an operational payload vehicle for several flights, meaning there are no more updates to the system, Blue Origin said in a pre-launch statement.

The booster touched down about seven minutes after launching,

New Shepard is designed to be a space tourism vehicle, taking paying customers on short trips into space lasting several minutes and giving them a brief stint of weightlessness before returning to Earth. Tickets are estimated to cost in the region of $200,000.

Blue Origin, which is also developing an orbital rocket called New Glenn, had hoped to start launching its first humans to space in 2019. However, delays have meant that is now almost certain to be pushed back to at least 2020. The company's last launch came in May 2019, while it has kept most of its plans for these inaugural human flights under wraps for now.

Were never going to fly until were absolutely ready, Blue Origins CEO Bob Smith told CNBC last month. [We] have to go look at all the analysis, and then convince ourselves that were ready to go So it probably will be next year.

On todays flight, however, were a number of commercial payloads, with Blue Origin noting it had now launched payloads for 100 customers. These included a NASA recycling experiment, a space plant experiment, and two art experiments in partnership with the band OK Go.

One of our educational payloads from Columbia University, designed and built by undergraduate students and advised by [astronaut] Dr. Michael Massimino, will study the acute impacts of microgravity environments on cell biology, Blue Origin noted in a pre-launch update. This is crucial for humans living and working in space.

Blue Origin also noted that thousands of postcards written by children were on board the flight, from their non-profit organisation Club for the Future. The Club's mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and help visualize the future of life in space, the company said.

Now Blue Origin will be hoping it can move ever closer to human flights. While no updated timescale for that has yet been released for when those might occur, todays launch and landing is at least another step in that direction.

We've got a couple more flights before we're going to get there, said Cornell.

Read this article:
Blue Origin Launches Its First Space Tourism Rocket In Seven Months - And Hopes To Take Humans To Space In 2020 - Forbes

This entry was posted on December 15, 2019 at 7:46 am and is filed under Stem Cell Tourism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |