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Blue Origin will launch its first mission in over 15 months this morning (December 18), and you can watch the event live.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle is scheduled to lift off from the company’s site in West Texas today during a window that opens at 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time).
You can watch the action live Via Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Space.com will carry the company’s feed if possible. Coverage will begin at 9:10 a.m. EST (1410 GMT).
Related: The failure of Blue Origin’s New Shepard is a reminder that spaceflight is still difficult
New Shepard is a reusable rocket capsule assembly that transports people and payloads into suborbital space. The vehicle has not flown since September 12, 2022, when it suffered a malfunction during an unmanned research flight.
This failure resulted in the loss of New Shepard’s first stage booster, although the capsule landed safely under parachutes and the 36 research payloads remained intact.
Blue Origin’s unfortunate investigation determined the cause of the accident to be a “structural thermal failure” of the nozzle on the engine that powers the New Shepard booster. The company has implemented corrective measures and is now ready to fly again.
Like the September 2022 flight, today’s mission — known as NS-24, because it will be New Shepard’s 24th liftoff — is unmanned. It will carry 33 research payloads, more than half of which were “developed and flown with support from NASA,” Blue Origin wrote in a statement. Task description.
“Others come from K-12 schools, universities, and STEAM-focused organizations,” they added. (STEAM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.”)
Today’s flight will also carry 38,000 postcards for Club for the Future, a non-profit organization founded by Blue Origin that aims to attract young people interested in space science and exploration.
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