Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin carried out his fifteenth successful test flight under the territory of the airline’s New Shepard rocket.
New Shepard is a reusable rocket designed to transport tourists, travelers and payloads to the edge of space and back, with panoramic views and the short experience of sitting in microgravity.
Wednesday’s mission, which fired from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Van Horn, Texas, served as a “verification step” as the company worked to send its first human passengers into space.
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Like previous New Shepard flight tests, NS-15 did not include any passengers. Instead, it features the company’s test dummy “Mannequin Skywalker”, along with 25,000 postcards from Club for the Future, a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring younger generations to pursue careers in STEM.
For the first time, however, Blue Origin had a team of four drivers serving as stand-in astronauts to perform a series of pre-launch checks in the crew capsule, which could hold up to six passengers.
The exercise included stepping up the New Shepard launch tower, climbing into the capsule, doing a system check of the CAPCOM communicator from New Shepard, enabling the crew to stay in touch with personnel on the ground and leaving the capsule.
The team consisted of Blue Origin’s vice president of sales, Clay Mowry, vice president of Audrey Powers, chief financial officer Susan Knapp, and New Shepard architect Gary Lai.
In this photo provided by Blue Origin, Audrey Powers gives a thumbs up in the New Shepard rocket capsule during a crew exercise in West Texas on Wednesday, April 14, 2021. Two employees were trapped in the rocket rack for exercise, but they did launched shortly before the capsule was launched to the edge of the space with only a test dummy. (Blue origin via AP)
After pre-launch practice, the team of executives left the cap about 15 minutes before New Shepard kicked off.
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At about 12:49 p.m., New Shepard hovered about 65 miles into the air and climbed to a maximum altitude of 347,193 feet above ground level, about 2,234 miles per hour.
The crew capsule of the rocket was then separated from the rocket and hit a height of 347,574 feet above the ground before being carried out with sixteenth consecutive landing with the help of three parachutes.
Meanwhile, New Shepard revamped its BE-4 engine as it turned its downward direction to the ground and deployed short four-legged legs before being touched on a concrete slab, about two kilometers from the initial launch pad. In total, the flight lasted about 10 minutes.
After the successful landing of the capsule and NS-15, the astronauts practiced after flight procedures, including opening the hatch of the capsule and leaving the capsule.
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While Blue Origin has not announced an exact date for when it will fly its first human passengers into space, the company revealed during Wednesday’s test that the first flight with a crew would happen ‘soon’.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and partly financed the business by selling its personal Amazon shares over the past few years. The firm is considered a direct competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
In addition to its work on New Shepard, Blue Origin entered into a service contract with NASA earlier this year for its “New Glenn” lance vehicle that will enable the firm to compete for future NASA missions, including planetary expeditions, Earth observation missions and satellite launches. .
Under the terms of the contract, Blue Origin’s New Glenn system is eligible for orders until June 2025 and orders until the end of 2027. The New Glenn partnership is in support of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to combat astronauts against 2024 to bring back to the moon.