Blue Origin carried out another suborbital mission this week with its reusable New Shepard rocket, which was the 29th New Shepard flight and its 14th payload mission.
The Jeff Bezos space venture announced this mission saw the payloads experience “roughly two minutes of lunar gravity forces.”
It added that “the New Shepard crew capsule used its reaction control system to spin up to approximately 11 revolutions per minute, simulating one-sixth Earth gravity at the midpoint of the crew capsule lockers.”
It comes after Blue Origin last month had successfully carried out the first test flight of its much larger rocket dubbed New Glenn, which is intended to be a heavy payload rival to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Lunar gravity
But this week, the smaller New Sheppard rocket, which has previously carried paying customers (including Jeff Bezos) to the edge of space from Texas, carried 30 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies.
This brings the number of payloads flown on New Shepard to more than 175.
But the fact that the New Sheppard crew capsule was able to stimulate lunar gravity is perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this mission, giving future space vehicles on missions to the Moon or Mars for example, the ability to stimulate some form of gravity for the astronauts.
Spinning a spacecraft to generate artificial gravity has of course been visualised in many SciFi movies over the years, and NASA even considered it for its Skylab station back in the 1970s.
At one point a centrifuge module was also planned for the International Space Station (ISS), but this was axed for budgetary reasons.
Successful mission
“New Shepard’s ability to provide a lunar gravity environment is an extremely unique and valuable capability as researchers set their sights on a return to the Moon,” said Phil Joyce, SVP, New Shepard.
“This enables researchers to test lunar technologies at a fraction of the cost, rapidly iterate, and test again in a significantly compressed timeframe,” said Joyce.
A video of the 10 minute New Sheppard Mission NS-29 can be found here (the rocket launch starts around the 15 minute mark).
Meanwhile the booster rocket successfully landed itself upright in west Texas (2 km or 1.2 miles from the launch site), while the crew capsule reached 105 km (65.2 miles) above sea level before returning to Earth.
The mission video shows that one of the capsule’s three parachutes did not fully deploy, as it failed to inflate correctly until the last minute. This issue did not affect the safe landing of the capsule.