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Blue origin just took another big step towards manned space flight.
The company, led by the founder of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, launched its first update New Shepard spaceship for astronauts, the RSS First Step, during an unmanned suborbital test flight from West Texas today (January 14).
“The success of this flight really brings us closer to the flying astronauts,” Ariane Cornell of Blue Origin, Director of Astronaut and Orbital Sales, said in a live webcast. “There will be a lot of fun to come in 2021.”
New Shepard took off at 12:18 p.m. EST (1718 GMT), and its two components – a rocket and a capsule, both of which are reusable – made their landings shortly after. The booster descended for a motorized vertical landing in its designated landing zone near the launch pad, and the capsule then settled gently under parachutes a short distance away, lifting a plume of desert land about 10 minutes away. after take off.
The New Shepard capsule reached a maximum altitude of 106,932 meters (350,827 feet), according to Blue Origin. It’s about 107 kilometers high, above the traditionally recognized 62 mile (100 km) space border.
“Everything seems to have gone perfectly today,” said Cornell.
Related: Blue Origin’s incredible NS-11 New Shepard test flight in photos
This test flight, the 14th overall in the New Shepard program, was special, with a booster and capsule that were both new. (The previous mission, which flew in October 2020, involved a New Shepard vehicle that had flown six times before.) Blue Origin named the new RSS First Step capsule, with RSS standing for “reusable spaceship.”
The new capsule is “equipped with upgrades for the astronaut experience as the program nears human spaceflight,” Blue Origin representatives wrote yesterday (Jan. 13) in a description of the mission.
“The enhancements include improvements to environmental features such as acoustics and temperature regulation inside the capsule, crew display panels, and speakers with microphone and push button to every seat, ”they wrote. “The mission will also test a number of astronaut communications and safety warning systems.”
The capsule has six seats, they added, one of which was occupied today by “Skywalker mannequin, “an instrument-laden dummy that flew on previous New Shepard test missions.
Today’s mission also carried over 50,000 postcards, some in the pockets of Mannequin Skywalker. The postcards were submitted by students around the world through the non-profit organization Blue Origin, Club for the future, who organized these efforts on two previous New Shepard test flights.
Blue Origin is developing New Shepard to transport people and payloads to the suborbital space and back. A lot of science experiments have so far been carried out during the vehicle’s test missions, but New Shepard has yet to launch anyone into space.
Blue Origin is not the only high profile company in the suborbital sector space tourism company. Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is developing a pilot space plane called SpaceShipTwo to take paying customers to the last frontier.
The latest SpaceShipTwo vehicle, known as the VSS Unity, reached space on two test flights, in December 2018 and February 2019. Unity attempted its third space flight last month but was foiled by a computer connection problem. The space plane and its two pilots landed safely.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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