In a dizzying new effort to provide a more permanent tool for artificial gravity to test tools and equipment for upcoming missions to the Moon and Mars, a joint venture between Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and NASA will launch the New Shepard spacecraft reconfigured with the ability to increase the effects of lunar gravity.
The conditions experienced with the gravity of the lunar surface are one-sixth of the gravity of the earth, but only a few of the problems that machines and materials require to work efficiently.
As a larger testing ground for these emerging technologies, NASA will soon have more options to observe the innovations in lunar gravity, thanks to a partnership with Blue Origin to harness their new Shepard-reusable suborbital rocket system.
At present, NASA can replicate the limited gravity of the moon on parabolic flights in converted aircraft such as the retired KC-135 “Vomit Comet” which helped train astronauts from 1994 to 2004, and in special centrifuges on board vehicles. NASA is currently using a Navy C-9 aircraft for their Limited Gravity program, using a test aircraft that was commissioned in 2005 as a two-jet variant of a McDonnell Douglas DC-9.
However, these outlets provide a few seconds of exposure to lunar gravity at a time and are very limited to the ultimate payload size, which has driven NASA to explore future systems for longer duration and larger payloads.
According to a NASA press release, Blue Origin’s new innovation for lunar gravity testing should be ready to start from late 2022. To achieve the desired results, the New Shepard rocket and capsule will be subjected to a number of upgrades that the spacecraft enables use of the reaction control system and thus provides actual rotation at the spacecraft.
With this process, the entire capsule can serve as a kind of giant centrifuge to produce long-term artificial gravity environments for the payloads that are transported inward. Blue Origin’s initial flight experiments for the program will target 11 rotations per minute to give more than two minutes of steady lunar pulling.
“NASA is pleased to be one of the first customers to take advantage of this new capability,” said Christopher Baker, program manager of the Flight Opportunities program at NASA headquarters in Washington. ‘One of the constant challenges of living and working in space is reducing gravity. Many systems designed for use on earth simply do not work the same. A wide range of tools we need for the Moon and Mars can benefit from testing in partial gravity, including technologies for using in situ resources, regolith mining, and environmental control and life support systems. ‘
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft is one of the leading commercial flight platforms offered for technological flight tests contracted by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.
This program has helped advance hundreds of encouraging space-based technologies from not only NASA, but also private industry and academia, by making them work aboard commercial levels of suburban flights before embarking on risky orbital missions such as CubeSats, the International Space station, to be raised. , the Moon and possibly Mars.
“Mankind has been dreaming of artificial gravity since the earliest days of space travel,” said Erika Wagner, PhD, New Shepard director of payloads at Blue Origin. “It’s exciting to work with NASA to create this unique capability to explore the science and technology we need for future human space exploration.”