A little more than a month after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took a rocket ride, his Blue Origin space venture is sending another New Shepard suborbital spaceship to the final frontier — but this time the high-profile payloads are paintings, not people.
Blue Origin’s 17th New Shepard mission is set for liftoff from the company’s suborbital spaceport in West Texas at 8:35 a.m. CT (6:35 a.m. PT) on Thursday, although the flight could always be delayed due to weather or technical issues.
The reusable vehicle that Bezos and three crewmates rode last month was optimized to fly passengers, but the spaceship for Thursday’s flight is optimized to carry research payloads instead. No humans will be riding along during what’s expected to be this particular rocket ship’s eighth suborbital outing.
You can watch the countdown on Blue Origin’s website or on YouTube, with coverage beginning a half-hour before launch.
If all goes according to plan, the flight should follow the standard profile for New Shepard: The hydrogen-fueled booster will push the capsule to a height beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) mark, and then touch down autonomously on a landing pad not far from the launch site.
Meanwhile, the capsule will experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then float down to a parachute-aided landing in the West Texas desert. It should all be over a little more than 10 minutes after launch.
This mission’s primary research task is to test a precision landing system for NASA, following up on an initial test that was conducted last October. The guidance system is designed for use aboard crewed lunar landers for NASA’s Artemis program.
There are 18 other scientific payloads tucked inside the New Shepard capsule, 11 of which are receiving financial support from NASA. One payload will test a process for turning common spaceflight waste products into exhaust gases and useful resources such as water and propellant. Another payload will put a novel method for measuring propellant levels to the test in zero-G.
But the marquee payloads are actually riding on the exterior of the capsule: In cooperation with Utah-based Uplift Aerospace, Blue Origin is flying three portraits that Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo painted on the capsule’s main chute covers. “Suborbital Triptych” depicts Boafo’s mother; the mother of fellow artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, a childhood friend of Boafo’s; and Boafo himself.
“A self-portrait looking up to the skies best explains what this project means to me,” Boafo said in a pre-launch statement. “I grew up knowing the sky was the limit, and now I get to work on a project that goes beyond the sky as we know it.”
“Suborbital Triptych” is meant to be the first in a series of “Art x Space” philanthropic initiatives organized by Uplift.
Blue Origin is also flying thousands of postcards sent in by kids under the auspices of the Club for the Future, the company’s nonprofit educational foundation. Some of those cards have an extra connection to the contemporary art world: They’re decorated with space-themed graphics from a music video that was created for OK Go Sandbox’s #ArtTogetherNow initiative.
After Bezos returned from Blue Origin’s first-ever crewed spaceflight, the company announced that the next crewed flight would take place in the September-October time frame. The crew for that mission, presumably including customers who have paid a hefty but undisclosed ticket price, has not yet been announced.
By all appearances, Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space program has proceeded smoothly over the past six years — but the Kent, Wash.-based company’s more ambitious programs are facing more significant challenges.
The first launch of the orbital-class New Glenn rocket has been delayed until late 2022, and Blue Origin is late delivering its BE-4 rocket engines to United Launch Alliance, one of its closest partners in the space industry.
At this week’s Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said he expected the first flight-ready BE-4 engines to be delivered for ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket by the end of this year. Bruno acknowledged the delivery would be “later than we had planned for,” but he insisted that he was “very, very happy” with the BE-4’s performance during testing.
On yet another front, Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit in federal court protesting NASA’s decision not to fund a lunar lander development program that’s led by Bezos’ company. NASA and SpaceX have held up work on a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract pending the outcome of that lawsuit.
An expedited decision is expected around Nov. 1 — which just might come on the heels of Blue Origin’s next crewed spaceflight.