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WASHINGTON – Blue Origin plans to conduct the final test flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on May 2nd. The company and other industry players are looking for ways to allow NASA-funded researchers to fly with their payload during such missions.
The company announced on Twitter on May 1 that the 11th flight of the New Shepard vehicle was scheduled to take place on May 2nd at 9:30 am Eastern Time from the company's test site in West Texas. . The announcement was made a few hours after the publication of a Notice to Flight Attendants, or NOTAM, by the Federal Aviation Administration, limiting the airspace surrounding the test site for a period of four days to from May 2nd. These restrictions have already been associated with New Shepard Tests.
The flight, the first of the vehicle for more than three months, will feature 38 microgravity research payloads, Blue Origin said on Twitter. The company has not responded to an email request for information regarding the upcoming test.
NASA announced separately on May 1 that its flight would offer nine payloads via its Flight Opportunities program for suborbital experiments. The payloads include 3D printing experiments and biomedical research, as well as tests on a centrifuge capable of simulating lunar and Martian gravity conditions.
The vehicle will also include a "standardized framework" of flight equipment that will be tested in flight for future space experiments designed by the students. "This opens the door to additional experiments for more schools, which means more teachers and students will be exposed to the promises of spaceflight," said Elizabeth Kennick, president of Teachers. In Space, the organization that developed the computer hardware, in the NASA statement.
This New Shepard flight, like New Shepard's previous tests, should not carry people on board. However, future search flights may have the opportunity to carry payloads under human surveillance, as well as those of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo.
As part of the Flight Opportunities program, however, researchers can not fly with their payloads, which limits the payloads monitored by humans to those that can be managed by the launch provider's staff. However, these companies are looking to increase the number of people eligible to fly with their payload.
"We have potential customers who contact us with these needs," said Blue Origin's Audrey Powers at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Board's Regulatory and Policy Committee on May 1.
She added that Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun discussions with NASA to expand the scope of the current flight opportunities program to include payloads monitored by humans. At its meeting, the committee discussed a set of conclusions and recommendations on issues that could lead to payloads under human surveillance.
"The current flight opportunities program allows Blue Origin to fly its employees and fill payloads in Flight Opportunities," said Powers. "We want to expand or expand this potential so that someone else from Blue Origin or Virgin can take the plane and take care of these payloads. "
This is not the first time that NASA plans to support payloads for human surveillance for flight opportunities. In 2013, Lori Garver, then deputy administrator of NASA, had announced at a conference on suborbital research that the agency would allow researchers to fly with their payload, without however continuing with the development guidelines for this purpose.
In December 2017, Steve Jurczyk, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Technologies at the time, said the agency would once again review human-monitored payloads, proposing a similar process to the one used for the flights of commercial parabolic airplanes. NASA has not provided updates on these efforts since then.
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