Blue Origin teams prepared for another launch of the company’s reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket, in order to loft many microgravity studies to the edge of the space. The rocket launched from the Blue Origin’s private spaceport, that’s north of Van Horn, in Texas, at 9:30 a.m. EDT. The company announced the launch on Tuesday.
This mission has been the 11th flight of the Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, and the second New Shepard launch from this year. Of course, they will webcast the launch.
Will humans be able to fly with the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket?
Jeff Bezos founded this entire thing, and the company is planning to fly passengers on the future New Shepard launches. In January, officials from the company said that humans could fly with New Shepard to the edge of space, and then back to Earth by the end of the year.
The New Shepard rocket is powered only by one hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine, and it will launch vertically from a pad, from Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas. A crew capsule that’s placed on the top of the rocket will carry all the passengers on the future missions. Thursday’s launch will loft 38 microgravity research payloads. NASA sponsors nine of those.
About Blue Origin and New Shepard Rocket
The New Shepard’s engine fired for 2 minutes and 30 seconds to get the New Shepard rocket into the sky. The crew capsule, which did not carry a human crew on Thursday, separated from the rocket some moments later when both of the parts reached a peak altitude which is above 100 km (that’s 62 miles). That mark is also known as the Kármán line, which is the recognized boundary of space.
Blue Origin is the main competitor to SpaceX in the private space race which also includes Virgin. The launch of Blue Origin New Shepard rocket was successful.
Daniel Kiss is the senior editor for News Lair. Daniel was working as a writer since he finished high-school, first for local papers then he started online, nowadays he likes to write about the latest games and tech innovations.
