The window for Tuesday’s launch of the New Shepard suborbital rocket with the NS-24 mission from the launch pad at the Corn Ranch Missile Range in Texas, better known as Launch Site One, opened at 17:37 CET. Not long after, the machine actually started.
After a while, the ground control center confirmed the successful separation of the capsule (module) from the rocket stage, the so-called booster. The cargo on board went through several minutes of microgravity. Shortly thereafter, the booster successfully landed back on Texas territory.
Capsule touchdown! Congrats to Team Blue on today’s successful mission. #NS24
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 19, 2023
Then followed – with the help of parachutes – the landing of the capsule on the earth’s surface. As Blue Origin later reported on the X social network, both the rocket and the mentioned capsule (i.e. the crew cabin, but now without people) reached a maximum height of 107 km above the Earth’s surface during the NS-24 mission.
Today’s #NS24 mission stats:
🚀 Crew capsule apogee: 347,601 ft. AGL / 351,248 ft. MSL (106 km AGL / 107 km MSL).
🚀 Booster apogee: 347,208 ft. AGL / 350,855 ft. MSL (106 km AGL / 107 km MSL). pic.twitter.com/WHwzRNIrZL— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 19, 2023
The entire mission lasted 10 minutes and 13 seconds, specifically from 17:42 to 17:52 CET.
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Originally, the rocket was supposed to launch on Monday this week after about a year and a quarter. Blue Origin first delayed the New Shepard rocket’s suborbital flight by an hour, citing cold weather at the launch site, and then canceled the launch entirely due to an unspecified ground system problem, the news station’s server wrote CNN.
Suborbital flight
This is a flight that did not reach orbit, but crossed or approached the imaginary boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. The internationally recognized imaginary “boundary of space”, the so-called Kármán boundary, is located at an altitude of 100 kilometers. However, from the perspective of the US military, space starts at 80.4 km high.
The rocket of Jeff Bezos (otherwise also the founder of Amazon) was supposed to have, among other things, “33 devices for science and research” on board as part of the current mission. As previously reported by the portal Space.comit is a cargo “supporting experiments in space”.
The company did not specify the nature of the individual devices, however, according to the website SpaceNews she mentioned that more than half “are developed with the support of the US space agency NASA”.
Blue Origin had to take ’21 corrective actions’
Regarding last year’s problems that prevented the New Shepard rocket from launching until now, the US Federal Aviation Administration concluded a review of Blue Origin’s investigation in September of this year and agreed with the findings of Bezos’ company. The company had to implement “21 corrective measures including engine redesign and organizational changes”.
That problem occurred last September with the unmanned flight of the New Shepard rocket. The space cabin prematurely separated from its launch vehicle, which malfunctioned, about a minute after launch.
Bezos rocket malfunction. The payload module separated, the rocket stage collapsed
The rocket veered off course over West Texas one minute and four seconds after launch. Live footage from Blue Origin showed the cabin’s escape system engine firing after the launch vehicle malfunctioned. The separation of the module from the rocket stage occurred at an altitude of 8.8 km. The cargo cabin then fell back to the earth’s surface with the parachutes open.
The company later confirmed that the rocket stage had crashed back to Earth. “No injuries are reported,” Blue Origin reassured at the time. The incident was labeled an “anomaly”.
A larger New Glenn rocket
As the agency recently reminded Reuterswhile New Shepard returns to flight, Blue Origin is also aiming for the first flight of its much larger New Glenn rocket, which it plans to do in late 2024.
New Shepard only reaches the edge of space, but the New Glenn launch vehicle is designed to place heavier payloads into orbit. The goal of Bezos’ company is to compete more with billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX company.
Blue Origin rockets are named after American astronauts Alan Shepard (the first American in space) and John Glenn (the first American astronaut to fly around our planet).
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2023-12-19 19:29:15
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