Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space flight company, is set to launch its New Shepard (NS) spacecraft from West Texas on Thursday. The spacecraft will carry commercial and NASA-supported payloads inside the crew capsule, as well as a NASA lunar landing technology demonstration on the booster’s exterior.
“This will be the 4th flight for the New Shepard program this year and the 8th flight for this particular vehicle, which is dedicated to flying scientific and research payloads to space and back,” Blue Origin said in a statement on August 23.
In July, Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, Wally Funk, and a fourth passenger were launched into space aboard the New Shepard spacecraft. Across 11 flights, the spacecraft has delivered more than 100 payloads to space. New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall rocket-and-capsule combination that cannot be piloted from within the spacecraft. The event will be live-streamed on the company’s website.
The NS-17 flight, which was flown for the first time in October, 2020, is all set to test further a suite of lunar landing technologies to reduce risk and increase confidence for successful missions to the Moon in its latest spaceflight, this is the second mission of its kind. “The technologies could allow future missions—both crewed and robotic—to target landing sites that weren’t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters,” said Blue Origins.
