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Teams from Blue Origin in West Texas are gearing up for another Thursday launch of the Company's reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket, which will place dozens of microgravity research loads at the edge of space.
The one-storey rocket is expected to take off from Blue Origin's private spaceport north of Van Horn, Texas at 9:30 am EDT (8:30 am CET, 1:30 pm GMT), the company said on Tuesday.
This mission will be the eleventh flight of a New Shepard rocket since 2015 and the second New Shepard launch this year.
Blue Origin will broadcast the launch on the web and the company's video feed is integrated on this page.
Founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin plans to charge paying passengers for future launches in New Shepard. At the last New Shepard launch in January, company officials said that humans could ride on New Shepard until the end of space and return to Earth by the end of the year. # 39; year.
Powered by a single BE-3 hydrogen engine, the New Shepard rocket is launched vertically from a platform located at the Blue Origin remote test site in West Texas. A pressurized crew capsule above the rocket will carry passengers on future missions, but Thursday's launch will see 38 microgravity research payloads, nine of them sponsored by NASA.
The BE-3 engine will fire for nearly two and a half minutes to propel the New Shepard rocket into the air. The crew capsule – without human occupants during Thursday's flight – will separate from the summit of the New Shepard recall a few moments later, with both vehicles reaching a peak or maximum altitude greater than 100 km.
The 100 kilometer mark is known as the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized border of space.
The experiments conducted by the crew capsule will encounter a few minutes of weightlessness as the vehicles hinge and begin to fall back to Earth. The conditions of weightlessness are similar to the environment that will be experienced by future passengers.
The New Shepard booster will deploy braking brakes while diving into the atmosphere, then re-ignite its BE-3 main engine to slow it down for a vertical landing about 10 minutes after take-off. Four landing legs will extend from the base of the rocket just before it lands on a landing site about 3 km from the New Shepard launch site.
Meanwhile, the crew capsule will join a landing near the desert floor.
Blue Origin has piloted three versions of its New Shepard reusable rocket. The first rocket was lost in an accident at the landing in 2015 and the second unit flew five times before retiring. A third New Shepard vehicle has completed four successful missions.
Blue Origin delivered a fourth New Shepard propulsion module to the West Texas test site late last year from the company's plant in Kent, Washington. Officials said the fourth iteration of New Shepard is the rocket that will carry people.
Blue Origin has not publicly disclosed when the latest New Shepard vehicle will debut, nor which flight will be the first flight involving human passengers. In its announcement on Wednesday, Blue Origin did not specify which New Shepard rocket will be used during Thursday's flight, designated as New Shepard-11.
New Shepard is a springboard to Blue Origin's broader ambitions, including the development of the New Glenn heavy-port orbital rocket. The inaugural launch of the New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral is scheduled for 2021.
E-mail l & # 39; author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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