In an enormous success for the future of commercial spaceflight, Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed its reusable rocket, New Shepard, for not its first, or its second, but third time since November.
The spacecraft—consisting of a booster and an unmanned capsule—completed this successful test flight on Saturday. After separating from the booster, the capsule soared high, hitting a maximum altitude of 339,138 feet (about 103,400 meters), which is about two miles above the cutoff point for atmospheric flight. After what would be about four minutes of weightlessness for humans onboard, a parachute deployed, and it landed safely back at the West Texas launch site.
Parachutes deploy to bring the capsule back to Earth. Credit: Blue Origin
The booster, meanwhile, began falling much sooner, reigniting at an altitude of 3,635 feet (1,108 meters), or six seconds before it would have impacted the Earth—a maneuver attempting to push the envelope of the engine’s performance, according to Blue Origin’s founder and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. With its four landing legs deployed, it settled gently back on the ground. Bezos, who live-Tweeted the occasion, described the engine restart as “flawless” and “perfect”:
Flawless BE-3 restart and perfect booster landing. CC chutes
deployed. @BlueOrigin— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 2, 2016
The capsule also contained two science experiments, according to Space.com. One was a box of rocks logically titled the “Box of Rocks Experiment,” which aimed to investigate how rocks move in weightlessness—which will hopefully help clarify how rocky soil on small asteroids moves.
The second experiment involved a marble being dropped into a bed of dust (also logically titled, the “Collisions in Dust Experiment”), which attempted to get information that will help scientists understand how collisions between particles in the early solar system worked.
Luxury in 0G?
Before this test flight, two others were successfully completed: one on November 23, 2015 and another on January 22. According to Bezos, crewed flights of New Shepard—which can hold six people—will begin next year. And, should all go right, flights for paying passengers would begin in 2018. As of yet, there is no word about how much such a flight might cost. Although it seems the capsule is fairly “luxurious” when compared to its predecessors. Not only does it have “the largest windows in spaceflight history,” but it’s, well, roomy.
“The New Shepard capsule’s interior is an ample 530 cubic feet — offering over 10 times the room Alan Shepard had on his Mercury flight,” says the Blue Origin web page. “It seats six astronauts and is large enough for you to float freely and turn weightless somersaults.”
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Image credit: Blue Origin
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