Blue Origin Officially Now in the Commercial Space Game

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In a surprise announcement, commercial space company, Blue Origin launched a test flight of its suborbital New Shepard spaceship and successfully demonstrated the space capsule. They were not able to land and recover its reusable rocket booster however.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin has successfully tested its rocket, New Shepard in a sub-orbital flight in Texas.

"Our 110,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine worked flawlessly, powering New Shepard through Mach 3 to its planned test altitude of 307,000 feet."

"Our 110,000-lbf thrust liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen BE-3 engine worked flawlessly, powering New Shepard through Mach 3 to its planned test altitude of 307,000 feet," proclaimed Bezos in a press statement.

The highly secretive company, founded and run by the Amazon.com founder undertook the launch in a virtual media-blackout, and only announced that the launch occurred Wednesday, May 29th in West Texas, without giving any more details so far. The company did post videos and images of the launch on their website.

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Blue Origin with the impressive launch is now officially a commercial space race player. The company developed its own BE-3 rocket engine which uses at the cutting-edge of 21st century rocket engine technology.

The New Shepard launched with the capsule on top. The company also tried to retrieve the rocket, but that effort failed. "Unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent. Fortunately, we’ve already been in work for some time on an improved hydraulic system," they report.

Blue Origin has also have developed an astronaut capsule. The New Shepard spacecraft is designed to launch at least three people on round trips to suborbital space.

"We continue to be big fans of the vertical takeoff, vertical landing architecture," states Bezos. "We chose VTVL because it’s scalable to very large size. We’re already designing New Shepard’s sibling, her Very Big Brother – an orbital launch vehicle that is many times New Shepard’s size and is powered by our 550,000-lbf thrust liquefied natural gas, liquid oxygen BE-4 engine."

The VTVL has also been recently attempted on multiple occasions by SpaceX, with their


SOURCE  Blue Origin

By 33rd Square

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