A little more than a month after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took a rocket ride, his Blue Origin space venture sent another New Shepard suborbital spaceship to the final frontier — but this time the high-profile payloads were paintings, not people.
Blue Origin’s 17th New Shepard mission lifted off from the company’s suborbital spaceport in West Texas at 9:31 a.m. CT (7:31 a.m. PT) today, after a couple of countdown holds that provided opportunities for last-minute checks of the rocket and its payloads.
The reusable vehicle that Bezos and three crewmates rode last month was optimized to fly passengers, but the spaceship for today’s flight was optimized to carry research payloads instead. No humans were riding along for this particular rocket ship’s eighth suborbital outing.
The flight followed the standard profile for New Shepard: The hydrogen-fueled booster pushed the capsule to an altitude of 347,434 feet (105.9 kilometers), which is above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) “Karman Line” that marks a widely accepted outer-space boundary.
Minutes later, the booster touched down autonomously on a landing pad not far from the launch site. “Just like she was landing on the moon,” launch commentator Jacki Cortese said.
Meanwhile, the capsule experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, and then floated down to a parachute-aided landing in the West Texas desert.
The flight took 10 minutes from launch to the capsule’s touchdown.
This mission’s primary research task was to test a precision landing system for NASA, following up on an initial test conducted last October. The guidance system is designed for use aboard crewed lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program.
There were 18 other scientific payloads tucked inside the New Shepard capsule, 11 of which received financial support from NASA. One payload tested a process for turning common spaceflight waste products into exhaust gases and useful resources such as water and propellant. Another payload put a novel method for measuring propellant levels to the test in zero-G.
But the marquee payloads actually rode on the exterior of the capsule: In cooperation with Utah-based Uplift Aerospace, Blue Origin flew three portraits that Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo painted on the capsule’s main chute covers.
“Suborbital Triptych” depicts Boafo’s mother; the mother of fellow artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, a childhood friend of Boafo’s; and Boafo himself.
Bezos shared images of Boafo and the artwork on Instagram after the landing:
“A self-portrait looking up to the skies best explains what this project means to me,” Boafo said in a pre-launch statement. “I grew up knowing the sky was the limit, and now I get to work on a project that goes beyond the sky as we know it.”
“Suborbital Triptych” is meant to be the first in a series of “Art x Space” philanthropic initiatives organized by Uplift.
Blue Origin also flew thousands of postcards sent in by kids under the auspices of the Club for the Future, the company’s nonprofit educational foundation. Some of those cards had an extra connection to the contemporary art world: They’re decorated with space-themed graphics from a music video that was created for OK Go Sandbox’s #ArtTogetherNow initiative.
After Bezos returned from Blue Origin’s first-ever crewed spaceflight, the company announced that the next crewed flight would take place in the September-October time frame. The crew for that mission, presumably including customers who have paid a hefty but undisclosed ticket price, has not yet been announced.
A month ago, Bezos said that nearly $100 million in private ticket sales had been brought in for future spaceflights. The same figure was cited during today’s webcast.
By all appearances, Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space program has proceeded smoothly over the past six years — but the Kent, Wash.-based company’s more ambitious programs are facing more significant challenges.
The first launch of the orbital-class New Glenn rocket has been delayed until late 2022, and Blue Origin is late delivering its BE-4 rocket engines to United Launch Alliance, one of its closest partners in the space industry.
At this week’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said he expected the first flight-ready BE-4 engines to be delivered for ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket by the end of this year. Bruno acknowledged the delivery would be “later than we had planned for,” but he insisted that he was “very, very happy” with the BE-4’s performance during testing.
Lots of lunar activity at Launch Site One, including building a lunar hazard field to test LIDAR systems and other technologies. This enables us to improve systems that will help us land on the Moon. pic.twitter.com/NEBFffJpGj
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) August 26, 2021
On yet another front, Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit in federal court protesting NASA’s decision not to fund a lunar lander development program that’s led by Bezos’ company. During today’s webcast, Blue Origin repeatedly emphasized its efforts to lay the groundwork for missions to the moon, including the construction of an outdoor testbed with artificial craters and other hazards.
NASA and SpaceX have held up work on a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract pending the outcome of Blue Origin’s lawsuit. An expedited decision is expected around Nov. 1 — which just might come on the heels of Blue Origin’s next crewed spaceflight.
Geek Life: New Shepard joins model-rocket pantheon
This is an updated version of a report first published at 8:26 p.m. PT Aug. 25.
