Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches another New Shepherd into space
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Wednesday, have launched another suborbital launch of its New Shepherd rocket, designed to carry humans to the edge of space and back. It was launched to test reusable booster and capsule systems. Alike to 14 launches before this, even this rocket didn’t have any human aboard.
New Shepherd rocket took off from Blue Origin’s test launch facilities in Van Horn, Texas, at 12:49 pm on Wednesday. It ascended around 65 miles before getting rid of its crew capsule, sitting atop the rocket booster carrying the company’s test dummy.
Ariane Cornell, Director of the astronaut strategy at Blue Origin said, “A beautiful launch and landing for both the crew capsule and the booster.”
As per Blue Origin, this NS-15 mission was a “verification step for the vehicles and the operations before flying astronauts.” Numerous approaches were considered for the pre-launch procedures on the Launchpad by a team of four company executives before lit off.
The employees had left the launch site 15 minutes before setoff. The team of company executives included Clay Mowry, VP of legal and compliance Audrey Powers, “the architect of the New Shepherd” Gari Lai, and Blue Origin CFO Susan Knapp.
With each New Shepherd being launched, Blue Origin is testing new hardware tailored for flying-human. In NS-14, the latest mission in January had push-to-talk buttons and little screens for each passenger’s seats.
The company founded in 2000, had hoped to launch humans in space for the first time in 2020 but there have been delayed. They don’t appear to be in a rush as they haven’t exactly said when are they going to send humans into space.
