On October 13, 2020, Blue Origin, a space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has launched a rocket, namely, New Shepard for the seventh time, which carried science experiments and drawings made by children. The company is assisting the NASA in its Moon mission, Artemis program, to put astronauts back on the lunar surface. Besides Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Alabama-based Dynetics have been working under the programme.
The flight of New Shepard attained a peak altitude of 106 km and lasted just 10 minutes. The booster landed vertically back at the launch complex after lift-off, and the capsule, consisting of science experiments, including 1.2 million tomato seeds (to be distributed to school children around the US and Canada), and tens of thousands of children’s postcards, a magnetic asteroid-sampling experiment by Texas-based Southwest Research Institute, and a mini rocket-fuelling test.
The booster was loaded with NASA’s navigation equipment for future Moon landings. The Artemis program aims to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, a deadline imposed by the White House.
Blue Origin is leading a team of companies to develop a lunar lander for astronauts. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also working on a lander, as is Alabama-based Dynetics. NASA chose these three companies in this early phase of the Artemis program to increase the chances of getting astronauts to the lunar surface by the imposed deadline. This was the 13th New Shepard flight for Blue Origin, the first being in 2015. The rocket is named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. Blue Origin needs a couple more flights before launching people, tourists, scientists, and professional astronauts on short hops.
Artemis program is the new era of lunar exploration, named after the twin sister of Apollo, the Goddess of the Moon. NASA has built a coalition of partnerships with industry, nations, and academia to get to the Moon quickly and sustainably. Today, NASA is delivering more missions, more science, and more innovation at a better value for the American taxpayer than at any point in the history of the agency. Under this programme, humanity will explore regions of the Moon never visited before, uniting people around the unknown, the never seen, and the once impossible.
More information: SpaceX is a private spaceflight company that puts satellites into orbit and delivers cargo to the ISS. The first private company to send a cargo ship to the ISS in 2012, the company is working on developing powerful rockets and spacecraft capable of carrying people into space. It was founded by Elon Musk. Dynetics provides responsive, cost-effective engineering, scientific, IT solutions to the national security, cybersecurity, space, and critical infrastructure sectors, including highly specialised technical services and a range of software and hardware products, like components, subsystems, and complex end-to-end systems.
Courtesy: India Today, nasa.org, space.com, dynetics.coma