New Delhi: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace business, will launch its eighth tourist journey to suborbital space on Thursday, August 29.
The flight promises a unique experience, taking six individuals on an awe-inspiring 11-minute journey above the Karman line, the internationally accepted border of space.
The reliable New Shepard rocket, making its eighth human trip, will launch at 8:00 AM CDT (6.30 pm IST) from Launch Site One in West Texas.
According to the business, the New Shepard programme has “flown 37 humans” thus far.
Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin make up the team of six.
While Karsen will be the youngest woman to cross the Karman line, the business stated that Ferl will be the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew.
Ferl’s project aims to assist scientists in understanding how plant genes react to and from microgravity.
He will use a Kennedy Space Centre Fixation Tube, or KFT, to “fix” or capture a snapshot of the gene activity of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant within the tube, allowing researchers to investigate it later in the lab.
On the ground, co-investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will monitor Ferl’s movements and trigger identical control KFTs four times throughout the flight.
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Meanwhile, Blue Origin has collaborated with NASA on the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) project. This project aims to examine the interaction of the solar wind with Mars’s magnetosphere, which is crucial for understanding the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere and its potential for supporting life.
The data collected from the ESCAPADE mission will be crucial for planning future Mars missions and understanding the challenges of interplanetary travel.
It is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American astronaut to circle Earth, who completed three orbits in 1962. At 98 meters tall, it is one of the tallest and most powerful rockets ever built and launched.
The heavy-lift rocket also uses cleaner fuel and is designed to transport huge payloads to low-Earth orbit.
“New Glenn’s first stage is designed for a minimum of 25 flights,” the company said. It added that the rocket will operate like a commercial airliner and “will lead to significantly less waste and cost.”
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–IANS
