Blue Origin puts a lunar spin on its suborbital rocket ship

For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of moon-level gravity.

The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the moon.

The point of the exercise was to test how the payloads performed during the conditions they would face during future lunar missions — for example, how well they could process moon dirt to extract oxygen and other resources, or how well they could work to manufacture solar cells for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project.

Blue Origin had to call off an initial launch attempt last week due to a glitch in the avionics system, but the balky equipment was replaced and checked out in advance of today’s launch. Liftoff came at 10 a.m. CT (8 a.m. PT). New Shepard’s hydrogen-powered booster sent the capsule up to a height of 64.6 miles (104 kilometers), just above the 100-kilometer Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

After stage separation, launch commentator Alice Watts reported that the capsule achieved “full lunar-G roll.” Then the booster landed itself on a pad not far from where it was launched, while the capsule descended to a parachute-aided landing in the Texas scrublands. One of the three parachutes didn’t open as quickly as planned, but Blue Origin said that had no effect on the landing sequence.

The payloads will be taken from the capsule and checked to see how they performed under lunar conditions.

Previously, suborbital payloads could get only a few seconds’ worth of moon gravity during parabolic airplane flights. “Between that and actually going to the moon sits New Shepard,” launch commentator Joel Eby explained during today’s webcast. “It’s kind of filling that sweet spot in the middle, showing that these technologies can be tested at a lower cost, with immediate results and over minutes of data collected, not just a few seconds.”

More than half of the payloads were supported through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. Four payloads were built by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, and tested technologies focusing on excavating and processing lunar soil. Another payload, created by Kennedy Space Center and its research partners, was designed to study how moon dust gets electrically charged and lifted up when exposed to ultraviolet light.

The results from the experiments will be factored into future lunar missions, including NASA’s Artemis campaign to send astronauts to the lunar surface by as early as 2027.

Today’s mission also carried thousands of postcards to space and back on behalf of the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational foundation. The cards will be returned to the students who sent them in for a suborbital ride.

Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard boosters and capsules are built at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. In addition to the Kent HQ and the Texas spaceport, Blue Origin has a rocket factory and launch pad in Florida (where its orbital-class New Glenn rocket was launched for the first time last month) and a rocket engine factory in Alabama.

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