WASHINGTON — Blue Origin delayed the return to flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle by one day as the company’s founder says he will push the company to move more quickly on its various projects.
Blue Origin had scheduled a launch of its New Shepard vehicle from its West Texas test site for Dec. 18. However, the company first delayed the launch by an hour, citing cold conditions at the launch site, then scrubbed the launch because of an unspecified ground system issue.
The company announced on social media late Dec. 18 that it rescheduled the mission, designated NS-24, for Dec. 19, with liftoff planned for 11:37 a.m. Eastern.
The mission is the first for New Shepard since a mishap during a payload-only flight of the vehicle in September 2022. An investigation traced the NS-23 accident to structural failure in the nozzle of the vehicle’s BE-3PM engine caused by excessive heating.
Blue Origin said NS-24 will carry 33 research payloads as well as 38,000 postcards from Club for the Future, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the company. No people will be on board. The company did not list the payloads but said that more than half “are developed and flown with support from NASA.”
Danielle McCulloch, manager of NASA’s Flight Opportunities program at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, provided SpaceNews with a list of payloads NASA is supporting on NS-24. Many of them also flew on NS-23 last year:
- An in-space manufacturing innovation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that leverages paraffin and beeswax to produce alternative options for propelling small spacecraft (on NS-23)
- A project from small business Ecoatoms Inc. in Reno, Nevada, designed to advance the production of biosensors in low Earth orbit
- An autonomous sampling system from Montana State University and University of Colorado Boulder that will use yeast as a model for understanding how microgravity affects living things
- An…
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