New Shepard flight to demonstrate lunar gravity

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin’s next suborbital spaceflight will be a long-awaited demonstration of New Shepard’s ability to generate lunar gravity rather than microgravity.

Blue Origin announced Jan. 24 that it has scheduled its new New Shepard flight for no eaelier than Jan. 28 at 11 a.m. Eastern from the company’s test site in West Texas. The NS-29 mission will carry 30 payloads but no people.

Unlike previous flights of New Shepard, where the vehicle experiences several minutes of microgravity at the apex of its suborbital trajectory, the New Shepard crew capsule will be spun after separation from its booster using reaction control thrusters. The thrusters will spin the capsule at about 11 revolutions per minute, enough to simulate lunar gravity at the midpoint of payload lockers inside the capsule.

Blue Origin expects to provide at least two minutes of lunar gravity for the payloads on board during the flight. That is far more than the roughly 20 seconds of simulated lunar gravity available on parabolic aircraft flights.

The mission will carry 29 payloads inside the capsule, 17 of which were provided by NASA through its Flight Opportunities program. A 30^th payload will fly on the outside of the New Shepard booster to be exposed to the space environment.

The payloads fall into six broad categories: in-situ resource utilization, dust mitigation, advanced habitation systems, sensors and instrumentation, small spacecraft technologies, and entry, descent and landing. Most are from NASA centers but several are from Honeybee Robotics, a space technology division of Blue Origin.

“This is an entirely new way to bring lunar gravity to NASA and other lunar technology providers, accelerating their research and tech readiness at a much lower cost,” Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, in a social media post.

The capability has been in development for several years. NASA announced an agreement with Blue Origin in March 2021 to help develop a lunar gravity capability for New Shepard, with NASA providing unspecified development funding and early purchases of payload space on New Shepard.

Company officials had been talking about doing partial-gravity flights even before that announcement. At an August 2020 webinar, Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner said the company was studying the ability to spin the capsule to create lunar gravity conditions. At the time, she said the first such flight was planned for some time in 2022.

The capability could be used for other partial gravity levels beyond lunar gravity, Limp said in his post. “Plus, we can adapt this New Shepard capability to closely mirror Mars and other solar system gravity environments in the future.”

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