Items tagged with new shepard
In his role as Captain James T. Kirk, William Shatner has fictionally traveled to the far reaches of outer space, boldly going to places where no Earthlings had been before, encountering strange, wondrous, and sometimes bizarre adventures along the way. That was all make believe, of course. However, the captain of the starship USS Enterprise is going to space for real today (just not outer space), and will boldly set a record that might never be broken. At 90 years old (and nearly seven months), Shatner will become the oldest person to ever travel to space. He will achieve the feat in Blue Origin's New Shepard tourist rocket. Incidentally, a former New Shepard passenger held the distinction as...
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Reusability is the name of game with rockets from Blue Origin and SpaceX. Back in early April, the Blue Origin New Shepard reusable rocket booster made its third suborbital flight (reaching a height of 339,138 feet) and successfully touched down on its landing pad at the end of the mission. At the time, we were presented with an external chase view of the New Shepard landing on its pad, which is impressive enough. However, Blue Origin decided this week to give space geeks another more impressive view of that same landing to peruse via YouTube: a view from the vent camera that is mounted just below the New Shepard’s ring fin. Needless to say, the view is breathtaking, as we can clearly see the...
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX hasn’t been able to find complete success when it comes to testing a completely reusable rocket for commercial space travel, but SpaceX’s failures were just greater incentive for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. You see, Bezos owns a private space firm called Blue Origin, and while it seems to fly under radar compared to the immense press that SpaceX receives, the company just celebrated an incredible milestone in the efforts to advance reusable rockets for future space travel. Blue Origin launched its New Shepard space launch system, which consists of a BE-3 rocket engine and a top-mounted crew capsule. New Shepard, which is named after famed Mercury and Apollo astronaut Alan Shepard,...
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It won’t be that long before space is a vacation destination. Space flight company Blue Origin announced that it has completed the rocket engine for its New Shepard spaceship and plans to begin tests before the end of the year. “The BE-3 has now been fired for more than 30,000 seconds over the course of 450 tests,” said Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin founder and Amazon CEO. “We test, learn, refine and then test again to push our engines. The Blue Origin team did an outstanding job exploring the corners of what the BD-3 can do and soon we’ll put it to the ultimate test of flight.” Tickets aren’t on sale just yet, but Blue Origin felt comfortable enough with its progress to start getting the word out....
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