It was Blue Origin’s fourth crewed spaceflight, and its first that didn’t feature a celebrity passenger.
A New Shepard rocket-capsule combo lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas on Thursday morning (March 31), carrying six people to suborbital space.
Last September, the company launched its inaugural rocket but it was intentionally exploded minutes after lifting off.
Firefly Aerospace has a new majority owner as the Central Texas-based aerospace company prepares for its second rocket launch.
AE Industrial Partners, a private equity firm, has acquired a majority stake in Firefly Aerospace, the company announced.
The Cedar-Park-based company also raised $75 million in a funding round led by AE Industrial Partners. Firefly said it now estimates its valuation at more than $1 billion.
Pete Davidson was initially slated to be the next headline-grabbing name to take flight aboard the suborbital space tourism rocket developed by Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, after the commercial space company launched several other famous faces on its previous flights.
But the comedian abruptly dropped out of the mission after a schedule change pushed the flight back by a week. His seat was given to longtime company employee Gary Lai, the chief architect of the very rocket he’ll fly on. Lai will be joined by five paying customers who had the means to dish out an undisclosed sum for one of the coveted crew capsule seats.
Liftoff of the New Shepard launch vehicle had been scheduled for Tuesday morning, but the company said that it’s expecting rough winds at its facilities near Van Horn, Texas at that time. Blue Origin is now targeting Thursday at 8:30 am CT. Those interested in catching the action — which is expected to look much like Blue Origin’s three earlier suborbital jaunts — can tune into Blue Origin’s webcast Thursday morning.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk drops some key new information about the first Starship orbital flight test timeline and dropping SN20 prototype from this test.
SpaceX has been preparing for the first Starship orbital flight test since the last year. But this experiment is getting delayed due to one reason or another as time elapsed.
Initially, SpaceX wanted to perform the first Starship orbital flight experiment with the more stable and tested SN20 prototype (aka Ship 20).
Sharon and Mark Hagle, 73, are launching to the edge of space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket and want to go to space at least three times after.
Each year, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program awards grants to researchers to develop the next generation of technology that will help us explore cosmic unknowns.
From the oceans of Europa to the atmosphere of Venus, these inventions funded by NASA could propel space exploration even further.
Your space questions, answered.
Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: time dilation during space travel.
