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New Shepard Rocket to Take Off on May 2 in New Cargo Test Flight

The 11th test flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is scheduled to take place on May 2 at the company’s West Texas facility, moving Jeff Bezos’ entity closer to full-scale operations.
Blue Origin New Shepard 1 photo
Photo: Blue Origin
The previous launch of the New Shepard took place in January when the rocket carried to orbit eight NASA-backed experiments. This time the payload will be greater, with a total of 38 experiments making their way on board, ranging from medical tech to art projects.

In the cargo hold of the New Shepard sit, among others, two projects that use zero gravity as a medium for works of art developed by the MIT Media Lab, an experiment to test temperature fluctuations in microgravity devised by students from Huntsville, Alabama, and even an experimental technology designed to treat a collapsed lung in zero-G, the brainchild of Orbital Medicine.

Scientist and entities that have at times waited for years to get a chance to send their ideas to space are hitching a ride on the New Shepard, and Blue Origin uses these missions to further improve on their design.

A future iteration of this rocket will be used to carry humans to the Moon and Mars, and it will also form the basis for the next Blue Origin rocket, the New Glenn. Tests of the New Shepard started in 2006.

New Shepard is made of a capsule and booster rocket that launch vertically from a launchpad. 150 seconds from launch, the booster engine cuts off, and the capsule glides into space. Both the booster and the capsule are supposed to come back down to Earth, just like the ones used on SpaceX’s Falcon.

When it is ready to transport humans, the capsule of New Shepard will be able to accommodate six people in a space ten times larger than the one Alan Shepard had on his Mercury flight in 1961.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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