Blue Origin will launch its first mission in greater than 15 months this morning (Dec. 18), and you may watch the motion live.
Blue Origin’s Recent Shepard suborbital vehicle is scheduled to lift off from the corporate’s West Texas site today during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time).
You may watch the motion live via Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Space.com will carry the corporate’s feed if possible. Coverage will begin at 9:10 a.m. EST (1410 GMT).
Recent Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo that flies people and payloads to suborbital space. The vehicle hasn’t flown since Sept. 12, 2022, when it suffered an anomaly during an uncrewed research flight.
That failure resulted within the lack of Recent Shepard’s first-stage booster, though the capsule landed safely under parachutes and the 36 research payloads survived intact.
Blue Origin’s mishap investigation identified the reason behind the crash as a “thermo-structural failure” of the nozzle on the engine that powers Recent Shepard’s booster. The corporate has implemented corrective measures and is now able to fly again.
Just like the September 2022 flight, today’s mission — referred to as NS-24, because it can be the twenty fourth overall liftoff for Recent Shepard — is uncrewed. It is going to carry 33 research payloads, greater than half of them “developed and flown with support from NASA,” Blue Origin wrote in a mission description.
“Others come from K-12 schools, universities, and STEAM-focused organizations,” they added. (STEAM stands for “science, technology, engineering, art and arithmetic.”)
Today’s flight will even tote 38,000 postcards for Club for the Future, a nonprofit founded by Blue Origin that goals to get young people keen on space science and exploration.