Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today provided a brief dose of spaceflight to six people, including the first researcher to conduct his own experiment on a suborbital space trip with NASA support.
The team for Blue Origin’s eighth crewed New Shepard mission included Rob Ferl, a professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. Ferl studies on how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, including the zero-gravity conditions experienced in spaceflight.
During today’s flight at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas, Ferl activated an experiment that was meant to document how plants respond to the transitions to and from microgravity.
The mission, known as NS-26, proceeded smoothly. New Shepard’s hydrogen-fueled booster rose into cloudy skies at 8:07 a.m. CT (6:07 a.m. PT), sending the crew capsule past the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Crew members could be heard hooting and hollering on today’s webcast as the spaceship blasted through the cloud cover.
After stage separation, the reusable booster flew itself back to a landing pad near the launch tower. Meanwhile, the six crew members floated up from their seats and took in views of Earth beneath the black sky of space.
At the top of the ride, the capsule reached an altitude of 342,314 feet (104 kilometers, or 64.7 miles) above ground level. Then the spacefliers strapped themselves back into their seats for a parachute-assisted descent and touchdown amid the Texas rangeland. Once again, the crew screamed with delight.
The mission lasted 10 minutes from liftoff to landing. “That is just one of the cleanest flights I’ve seen from this rocket,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said.
During various phases of the flight, Ferl pushed plungers on small self-contained tubes that were attached to his flight suit. That action served to “freeze” the biochemical conditions of plants inside the tubes. Those plants will be compared with control samples on the ground to document the effect of gravity transitions on the plants’ gene expression. In a news release, NASA said such studies will support future missions to the moon and Mars.
Ferl’s flight test was funded by a grant awarded through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, with additional support from NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences. Blue Origin and other commercial ventures have flown dozens of payloads for NASA through the Flight Opportunities program, but this was the first time that a researcher accompanied a NASA-supported experiment on a suborbital spaceflight.
After the flight, Ferl said “the ride was incredibly smooth.”
“Being there, the darkness of space … there’s no way to talk about how impressive space is, and the Earth below,” he said. “The science went well. Everything worked the way it was supposed to. … There’s room and opportunity for scientists of all sizes, shapes and ages to do this.”
Joining Ferl on today’s flight were:
- Nicolina Elrick, a Singapore-based philanthropist and entrepreneur whose career includes roles as a fashion model, a property developer and an executive business coach.
- Eugene Grin, a Ukrainian-born real estate and investment manager who lives in upstate New York.
- Eiman Jahangir, an Iranian-American cardiologist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who has participated in analog astronaut missions. Jahangir’s seat is sponsored by MoonDAO, an online community focused on space exploration and settlement.
- Karsen Kitchen, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who’s majoring in communications and astronomy. She’s the founder of Orbitelle, an initiative to encourage women to pursue careers in the space industry. At the age of 21, Kitchen became the youngest woman to cross the Karman Line. (For what it’s worth, Anastatia Mayers flew above the 50-mile space boundary at the age of 18 in 2023 on a Virgin Galactic rocket ship.) Kitchen’s father, teacher-entrepreneur Jim Kitchen, took a suborbital space trip with Blue Origin in 2022.
- Ephraim Rabin, an American-Israeli businessman, philanthropist and entrepreneur. He’s the founder and CEO of Parchem Fine & Specialty Chemicals, a New York-based chemical wholesaler
Today’s flight brings the list of Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin’s spacefliers to 43. Previous fliers include Star Trek actor William Shatner, “Mercury 13” aviator Wally Funk, Black aerospace pioneer Ed Dwight and Jeff Bezos himself.
https://ift.tt/rmXl2ZP August 29, 2024 at 02:23PM GeekWire
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