Blue Origin Reveals its First Commercial Payloads on Board New Shepard

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Blue Origin Reveals its First Commercial Payloads on Board New Shepard
Inverse
Danny Paez •December 22, 2017



One step closer for affordable commercial spaceflight.



The New Shepard rocket made its seventh suborbital flight last week from Blue Origin’s launch site in western Texas. While the launch is primarily meant to set the stage for planned crewed launches in 2018, the company revealed this Thursday that it had also taken its first 12 commercial payloads along for the ride.

Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s commercial spaceflight company, is known for being pretty secretive about the aerospace projects it undertakes, but M7 managed multiple milestones, not only testing both the booster and crew capsule for next year’s planned launches but also offering its customers their first opportunity to take advantage of the unique conditions of travel 60 miles straight up.

This a lot like the experiments that are sent to the International Space Station, just on a much shorter timescale. The flight lasted just 11 minutes, as New Shepard is not designed for longer orbital flights like the company’s larger New Glenn rocket.

During those 11 minutes, the payloads experienced microgravity. That short-lived weightlessness can be crucial for understanding everything from deep biological questions to how cutting-edge technology would work in space.

One experiment from Purdue University asked the all-important question: “Can fireflies light up in space?” That payload carried the same chemicals inside fireflies to see how microgravity affected them. Another Purdue-led research project tested a device that would let astronauts treat a collapsed lung suffered during the gravitational stress of launch.

Johns Hopkins researchers sent up a monitoring device to collect data on the environmental stresses that suborbital flights like New Shepard encounter. This could prove especially pivotal for Blue Origin, as it’s possible New Shepard’s suborbital flights will represent the first wave of the company’s commercial space missions before switching focus to the longer-range New Glenn.

Blue Origin’s website has the full list of payloads.

Photos via Blue Origin


https://www.yahoo.com/news/blue-origin-reveals-first-commercial-195400257.html