Blue Origin Flies — and Lands — New Shepard Suborbital Spacecraft
▻http://spacenews.com/blue-origin-successfully-flies-new-shepard-suborbital-vehicle
#Blue_Origin announced Nov. 24 that it launched its #New_Shepard suborbital vehicle on a second test flight, flying to the edge of space and successfully landing both sections of the vehicle.
New Shepard launched from the company’s West Texas test site at 12:21 p.m. Eastern time Nov. 23, reaching a peak altitude of 100.5 kilometers and top speed of Mach 3.72. The vehicle’s unoccupied crew capsule separated and parachuted to a landing, while its propulsion module made a powered vertical landing.
“As far as we can tell from our quick-look inspections and a quick look at the data, this mission was completely nominal, and this vehicle is ready to fly again,” Blue Origin founder #Jeff_Bezos said in a brief conference call with reporters Nov. 24.
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The company did not announce the test flight in advance, and did not issue a statement about it until 18 hours after it took place. However, in recent weeks company officials have stated that they planned to conduct a test flight of New Shepard before the end of the year.
The successful flight keeps Blue Origin on track to begin commercial flights of uncrewed research payloads by the middle of 2016, a goal recently stated by company officials. Bezos told reporters he hoped to to start flying people on New Shepard in a couple of years, depending on the progress made during test flights.