Blue Origin will launch the 29th mission of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle next week, on an uncrewed research flight that will simulate lunar gravity conditions.
The mission, known as NS-29, is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site on Tuesday (Jan. 28) at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT; 10 a.m. local Texas time).
The company, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, will webcast the action live, beginning 15 minutes before liftoff.
New Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space.
The vehicle is best known for carrying paying customers on brief trips to suborbital space. But NS-29 is not a space tourist flight; the capsule is packed with 30 research payloads, “all but one of which is focused on testing lunar-related technologies,” Blue Origin wrote in a mission description.
“The payloads will experience at least two minutes of lunar gravity forces, a first for New Shepard and made possible in part through support from NASA,” the company added. “The flight will test six broad lunar technology areas: in-situ resource utilization, dust mitigation, advanced habitation systems, sensors and instrumentation, small spacecraft technologies, and entry, descent and landing.”
New Shepard will create those “lunar gravity forces” by firing its reaction-control thrusters so that it rotates about 11 times per minute.
Related: New Shepard: Rocket for space tourism
NASA is a big part of NS-29: More than half of the 30 payloads going up on the mission are supported by the agency’s Flight Opportunities Program, according to Blue Origin. This should come as no surprise; NASA is working to return astronauts to the moon via its Artemis program and is keen to gather data about the lunar environment to facilitate this effort.
Four of the 30 payloads belong to Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary focused on off-Earth exploration. You can learn more about the NS-29 research gear here and here.
Nine of New Shepard’s 28 flights to date have been crewed. The vehicle’s most recent mission sent “The Space Gal” Emily Calandrelli and five other people to suborbital space on Nov. 22.
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