Blue Origin ran another suborbital mission this week with a new reusable Shepherd Rocket.
Jeff Bezos Space Venture announced that in this mission, the payload experience saw “about two minutes of the force of gravity on the moon.”
“The new Shepherd Crew Capsule used its response control system to spin up about 11 spins per minute, simulating the sixth Earth gravity at the midpoint of the crew capsule locker.”
It came last month after Blue Origin successfully ran the first test flight of a much larger rocket called the New Glenn.
Moon gravity
But this week, the tiny new Shepherd Rocket, which previously carried paid customers (including Jeff Bezos) from Texas to the edge of space, carried 30 payloads from NASA, research institutions and commercial companies.
This will result in over 175 payloads flying with the new Shepherd.
However, the fact that the new Shepherd Crew capsule was able to stimulate the gravity of the moon is perhaps the most notable aspect of this mission, which, for example, has the ability to stimulate some form of gravity for astronauts. Give it to the moon or Mars to future space vehicles.
Rotating a spacecraft to generate artificial gravity has, of course, been visualized in many SCIFI films over the years, and NASA considered it at Skylab station in the 1970s.
At one point, the International Space Station (ISS) centrifugal module was also planned, but this was x for budgetary reasons.
A successful mission
“The ability of the new Shepherd to provide the lunar gravity environment is a very unique and valuable ability as researchers look to return to the moon,” says Phil Joyce, SVP of New Shepherd. .
“This allows researchers to test the moon’s technology at a fraction of the cost, quickly iterate and test it again in a significantly more compacted time frame,” Joyce said.
The 10-minute new Sheppard Mission NS-29 video is here (the rocket launch starts around the 15-minute mark).
Meanwhile, the booster rocket landed normally in West Texas (2 km or 1.2 miles from the launch location), but the crew’s capsule reached 105 km (65.2 miles) above sea level before returning to Earth.
Mission video shows that one of the three parachutes in the capsule did not fully unfold as they were unable to properly expand until the very end. This issue did not affect the safe landing of the capsule.
