New Shephard

In News

Recently, Blue Origin has concluded the online auction for the first seat on the New Shephard rocket system.

• Blue Origin is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company founded by Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder of the multinational e-commerce giant Amazon.

About the Auction

• Over 7,600 people registered from 159 countries to bid for this seat, which ultimately went for a winning bid of USD 28 million, with the winner’s identity yet not disclosed.
• The winning bidder will get to fly aboard New Shephard, when it takes its first human flight on 20^th July 2021, which marks the 52^nd anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing.
  • On the same date in 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans ever to land on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

New Shephard

• It is a rocket system meant to take tourists to space over 100 km above the Earth and accommodation for payloads.
• It completed its seventh test launch successfully in October 2020 when it took off from Texas.
• It has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard, who was the first American to go to space.
• It will take astronauts and research payloads past the Karman line, which is the internationally recognized boundary of space.
  • According to most experts, space starts at the point where orbital dynamic forces become more important than aerodynamic forces, or where the atmosphere alone is not enough to support a flying vessel at suborbital speeds.
  • Historically, it’s been difficult to pin that point at a particular altitude.
  • In the 1900s, Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán determined the boundary to be around 50 miles up, or roughly 80 kilometers above sea level. 
  • Based on that, the Kármán line is set at an imaginary boundary that is 62 miles up, or roughly a hundred kilometers above sea level.
  • In 2004, test pilot Mike Melville became the first private astronaut to fly beyond the Karman Line.

(Image Courtesy: Twitter)

• Design and Functionality
  • The rocket system consists of two parts, the cabin/capsule and the rocket/booster.
  • The cabin can accommodate experiments from small Mini Payloads up to 100 kg, which provide easier and cheaper space access to students of educational institutions developing their own space programs.
  • The cabin is designed for six people and sits atop a 60 feet tall rocket. It is fully autonomous and does not require a pilot.
  • It separates from it before crossing the Karman line, after which both vehicles fall back to the Earth.
    • After separating from the booster, the capsule free falls in space, while the booster performs an autonomously controlled vertical landing back to Earth.
    • The capsule, on the other hand, lands back with the help of parachutes.
  • The system is a fully reusable, vertical takeoff and vertical landing space vehicle that accelerates for about 2.5 minutes before the engine cuts off.
• Significance
  • It will provide easier and more cost-effective access to space for purposes such as academic research, corporate technology development and entrepreneurial ventures among others.
  • It will also allow space tourists to experience microgravity by taking them 100 km above the Earth.
    • Microgravity is the condition in which people or objects appear to be weightless and the effects can be seen when astronauts and objects float in space.

(Image Courtesy: BBC)

Space Tourism

• The ‘fairly new’ concept seeks to give laypeople the ability to go to space for recreational, leisure or business purposes.
• It is another niche segment of the aviation industry that makes space more accessible to those individuals who are not astronauts and want to go to space for non-scientific purposes.
• Since space tourism is extremely expensive, it is a case of a very small segment of consumers that are able and willing to purchase a space experience.
• History
  • In 1997, a private company called Space Adventures was founded to offer bookable space-related adventures and send paying customers to orbital space so far.
  • In 2001, Dennis Tito, a US millionaire, became the first space tourist on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to visit the International Space Station (ISS).
  • In 2009, the Russian space agency stopped selling tickets to private citizens.
• Currently, apart from Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are the major players in the space tourism industry.
  • In 2018, Blue Origin was one of the companies selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to conduct studies and advance technologies to collect, process and use space-based resources for missions to the Moon and Mars.
  • In 2019, both signed an agreement that gives Blue Origin permission to use NASA’s historic test stand.
• The current approach to space tourism and the development of vehicles to access space are virtually all based on extensions of current rocket launch vehicle and rocket plane development.
• Also, there have been concerns regarding the health of the passengers and accumulation of black carbon in the stratosphere, further increasing the danger of climate change.
• In order to take a longer-term view of space travel and the development of safer ways to lift humans into Earth orbit and travel into space, new technologies will be needed. 

Source: IE