Blue Origin said the launch window for the first flight of its new suborbital rocket, New Shepard, will open on Monday (October 7). This is the company’s second such vehicle, which will help it send more tourists into space. Monday’s NS-27 mission will be unmanned but with 12 payloads, one of which will be a replica of the iconic artifact, the Monolith from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Image Source: Blue Origin
The launch window will open at 08:00 local time (16:00 Moscow time). The new crew capsule was named RSS Kármán Line. The ship is decorated with a new livery and has a number of improvements for the convenience of passengers. The accelerator also underwent some changes, receiving adaptations to accommodate the payload. Almost 99% of the rocket’s dry mass is reused, including the capsule, parachute and more.
The NS-27 mission will deliver 12 payloads to an altitude of about 100 km – 5 on the launch vehicle and 7 inside the passenger capsule. The payload includes new navigation systems developed for the New Shepard and New Glenn missiles; two different lidar sensors for the Lunar Permanence program; ultra-wideband proximity sensors developed by the company under a NASA TechFlights grant; and a commercial payload that is a replica of the Monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith will be sent by order of Spacemanic and the Croatian publishing house Amaranthine Books.
The rocket will also send tens of thousands of digital postcards created by student members of the nonprofit Blue Origin Club for the Future beyond the Karman line. Postcards for sending into space can be downloaded remotely on the company’s website.
This year, Blue Origin resumed sending tourists into space on a suborbital rocket after a two-year hiatus. The first flight took place in May, the second in August.