Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin launched its fourth manned New Shepard flight on Thursday, a 10-minute thrill ride to the edge of space that will take the spacecraft’s chief designer and five entrepreneurs/adventurers, including a husband and wife, who have an emotional Kiss shared, high limit pushed to the edge of space.
Due to high winds at the company’s launch site in west Texas, the Stummel New Shepard rocket’s hydrogen-powered main engine was delayed two days and came to life at 9:58 a.m. EDT, throttled to full thrust, and boosted the spacecraft to one Jet of flaming exhaust.
Blue Origin will begin its fourth crewed flight on March 31, 2022 in a New Shepard spacecraft. BlueOrigin/CBS News
Gary Lai, one of Blue Origin’s early employees and the architect of the New Shepard program, was brought into the crew in place of comedian Pete Davidson after a launch delay and schedule conflict forced the Saturday Night Live star to retire.
Accompanying Lai for the suborbital flight were philanthropists and space enthusiasts Marc and Sharon Hagle; University of North Carolina professor and world traveler Jim Kitchen; George Nield, President of Commercial Space Technologies and former manager at NASA and the FAA; and “angel investor” Marty Allen.
An in-cabin video released after the flight showed the crew frolicking in zero gravity and marveling at the view, while the Hagles took a moment to share a warm hug and kiss.
“Oh my god, it was amazing,” she said of the flight. “I can’t wait to get home and share it with all the kids.”
“When the engine started, my energy levels exploded,” her husband said. “And then when you get into space and you start seeing the blue marble that everyone describes, in the black of space, there’s no way to describe it. Our grandkids asked us about it… and it’s just hard to describe.” ,
“And it was great to have a partner with me!” Said Sharon Hagle.
Sharon and Marc Hagle embrace after reaching the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule. Blue Origin
Despite some inexplicable delays in the countdown that delayed launch by more than 45 minutes, things appeared to be going smoothly on Thursday as the reusable rocket and crew capsule hurtled straight into a clear blue sky.
The computer-controlled New Shepard separated from its launch vehicle at an altitude of about 45 miles and continued to roll upward until it reached an altitude of nearly 66 miles, four miles higher than the internationally recognized “line” between the perceptible atmosphere and space.
After the boosters separated, passengers were weightless and could unbuckle and float in the cabin for three to four minutes while bending over the top of the flight path.
The New Shepard capsule is equipped with the largest windows of any operational spacecraft in the world, giving the crew a spectacular hemispherical view of Earth below and the deep black of space above as they reached the peak of their trajectory and began the long jump back of the starting place.
The New Shepard crew pose in zero gravity (left to right): Marc Hagle, Gary Lai, George Nield, Jim Kitchen, Marty Allen and Sharon Hagle. Blue Origin
“Let me tell you, that was an out-of-body experience,” Kitchen said after landing. “You’re going 2,300 miles an hour and you feel every bit of it. And then (you get to the top) and time stops. … You see this beautiful earth and the blackness of the universe and it’s the blackest black I’ve ever seen, it’s just breathtaking. And wow, that was a moment. That was a moment.”
The booster followed a similar trajectory to the capsule and maintained its tail-down orientation as it landed on its landing pad two miles from its launch site. Close to the ground, the rocket’s BE-3 main engine reignited, four landing legs were deployed and the booster landed in a cloud of dust.
The crew capsule followed two minutes later, descending under three large parachutes for a crawl landing, cushioned by powerful air jets, just before touchdown at 10:08 am EDT. Mission duration: 10 minutes and four seconds.
The crew pod descends for a landing in west Texas after reaching a maximum altitude of 65.9 miles, about four miles higher than the internationally recognized “limit” of space. Blue Origin
The launch marked Blue Origin’s 20th New Shepard flight, its fourth with passengers on board, and 24th nongovernmental commercial spaceflight overall.
Before the first manned launch of a New Shepard, Lai described the spacecraft as “the safest manned spacecraft ever designed, built or operated”.
“We’re going to ramp up operations,” Lai told CBS News at the time. “We will have tens and eventually hundreds and thousands of astronauts we hope to fly on New Shepard.”
New Shepard’s reusable crew capsule is designed to take passengers to an altitude of approximately 65 miles, three miles or so above the internationally recognized “frontier” of space and give passengers three to four minutes of weightlessness before parachuting in for a landing . Blue Origin
How did reality match his expectations?
“It was more intense than I thought it would be,” he said. “I naturally thought about what that experience would be like for our astronauts and it was a pleasure to experience it myself. It was ten times more intense than I thought, or anything I have ever experienced in my life. physically, mentally, emotionally.”
Thursday’s flight was Blue Origin’s first without a celebrity or celebrities on board.
Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark and aviation pioneer Wally Funk were on board New Shepard’s first manned mission on July 20; Star Trek’s William Shatner was on board the second launch on October 13; and TV personality Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, were onboard for the third on December 11.
Davidson, like Strahan, Churchley and Shatner before him, was invited to fly in some savvy marketing that warrants widespread media coverage in a high-stakes competition between Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, owned by billionaire and master marketer Richard Branson will generate.
Virgin has launched four manned flights of its VSS Unity winged spaceplane, most recently on July 11 Branson, two pilots and three crew members from the company. Commercial operation is scheduled to begin later this year.
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