Blue Origin New Shepard preparation
Workers prepare Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship for its next test flight. (Credit: Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin rocket venture will put its New Shepard suborbital spaceship to its sternest test to date: a flight that involves a quick restart of the craft’s rocket engine just six seconds before projected impact.

If the restart doesn’t work on Saturday, the third flight of the reusable New Shepard will end with a fiery splat.

The mere fact of Bezos’ announcement is almost as remarkable as the flight plan.

Previously, he might have said in advance that a flight would happen “very soon,” or the timing could have been figured out by checking the required notice from the Federal Aviation Administration. But today’s tweets represent the first time Bezos has publicly specified the date of a Blue Origin test flight in advance.

Bezos is promising that there’ll be drone footage of the test. And two research experiments will be packed aboard for the trip to outer space. That marks another first for Blue Origin’s suborbital space effort.

An FAA notice issued today suggests that the flight test could take place anytime between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. CT (6 a.m. and 2 p.m. PT), on any day from Saturday to Tuesday. The exact timing of a flight test typically depends on weather conditions and technical readiness.

New Shepard’s flight profile calls for the craft’s propulsion module, powered by Blue Origin’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine, to send an uncrewed passenger capsule beyond 100 kilometers (62 miles), the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

The two experimental packages inside the capsule will study impacts between objects in zero-G (Collisions into Dust Experiment, or COLLIDE, from the University of Central Florida) and simulate the dynamics of rocky soil on small near-Earth asteroids (Box of Rocks Experiment, or BORE, from Southwest Research Institute).

Toward the top of the ride, the passenger capsule would separate and float back down to Earth at the end of a parachute. The propulsion module, meanwhile, would take a supersonic fall through the atmosphere and switch on its BE-3 engine at a height of just 3,600 feet, aiming for a vertical landing. That’s lower than usual, but Blue Origin wants to “push the envelope” and test the performance of the engine under high-stress conditions.

This particular propulsion module has been to space and back twice, in November 2015 and in January of this year, but Bezos has said he won’t be surprised if the module was lost in a high-stress test. Two earlier test vehicles have been destroyed already, in August 2011 and April 2015. To keep the development effort on track, Blue Origin is building several more spaceships as potential replacements.

Blue Origin assembles New Shepard’s hardware at its headquarters in Kent, Wash., about 17 miles south of Seattle. However, the flight tests take place at Bezos’ launch facility in West Texas.

Bezos founded the company in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of spaceflight. After the flight test program is completed, Blue Origin plans to take up to six passengers at a time on tourist and research missions that will feature several minutes of weightlessness and big-window views of the planet below.

If Blue Origin’s test schedule holds, the New Shepard could start carrying paying passengers as early as 2018. The company’s rivals in suborbital spaceflight include Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace.

Blue Origin also is working on a more powerful BE-4 engine, which is fueled by natural gas and is due to be used on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin also plans to use the BE-4 for its own orbital vehicles, which are still early in the design and development phase. Orbital operations would be headquartered at a Florida launch and manufacturing facility near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

When it comes to orbital launch services and rocket reusability, Blue Origin’s chief rival is SpaceX, the California-based company founded by billionaire Elon Musk.

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