30/04/2018

One step closer for mankind

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, has seen the company's eighth rocket test flight launched at the weekend. Featuring 'Mannequin Skywalker' – a dummy astronaut who has now undertaken his second mission.

The launch in West Texas marked the seventh successful booster flight in a row for the company.

The New Shepherd spacecraft launched from Van Horn, Texas just after 1.00pm Eastern and included the company's second round of commercial payloads to be delivered into outerspace, from a range of customers.

The New Shepherd capsule has room to carry six 'space tourists' but remains unmanned for now. During the 11 minute journey, the New Shepard capsule successfully detached from its booster, at an altitude of about 47 miles, and went on to reach a height of 351,000 feet, or about 66.5 miles.

That height is about 20,000 feet higher than the normally targeted altitude, in order that Blue Origin can gather additional flight data.

In the booster's second flight, it returned to earth tail first, reignited the BE-3 engine and successfully deployed its four landing legs.

It then came to a landing on a concrete platform near the launch site.

Three large parachutes aided the New Shephard capsule back down to Earth

No target dates have been announced for when the capsule will be able to transport passengers but that is ultimately the goal for the project.

The spacecraft carried items into space on this trip;

'These payloads represent a range of users, from NASA's Johnson Space Center to a small commercial communications firm, as well as our first European customers, funded by the German national space agency, DLR,' Blue Origin said.

DLR sent up the necessities for its Daphnia experiment, which included water fleas, and Blue Origin explained as follow:

'The Daphnia experiment investigates the effects of microgravity on gene expression and the cytoskeleton of daphnia water fleas. This small invertebrate species is popular in design of future bioregenerative life support systems for human space exploration.'

In addition to the fleas, items on board and headed for space included NASA's Suborbital Flight Experiment Monitor-2 (SFEM-2) and the Schmitt Space Communicator (SC-1x).