Blue Origin announced on Monday that founder Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will join the winner of an auction on the first crewed suborbital flight of the company’s New Shepard vehicle from west Texas on July 20. The fully reusable rocket and capsule system has flown 15 suborbital flight tests without anyone aboard with a record of 14 successes and one partial failure. The latter came on the systems’ […]
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by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Checking up on Blue Origin’s auction of a seat on the first crewed New Shepard flight, we find that the top bid remains at $2.8 million. That’s exactly where it was a few days after online bidding became public on May 19.
Online bidding will end next Thursday, June 10 at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 UTC). Bidders need to raise their bid limits before that deadline. Two days later, the competition will conclude with a live online auction.
(more…)Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can’t take the sky from me….
— “The Ballad of Serenity,” Sonny Rhodes
“After so many years and so much hard work, New Mexico has finally reached the stars.”
— New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
By now, you’ve probably read the rhetoric flourishes in Virgin Galactic’s press release about the company’s first suborbital flight test in more than two years that was conducted on Saturday. Suffice to say, if the stars were located at the altitude that SpaceShipTwo actually reached (55.45 miles/89.2 km), they would take the sky away at the same time they burned the land and boiled the seas. Being suborbital, VSS Unity wouldn’t have helped anyone escape the inferno.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. So, let’s just put doomsday out of our minds. It’s time to break down what the flight test accomplished, what comes next, and why 27 months passed between powered flights. And what about Jeff Bezos?
Ready? Let’s go!
(more…)
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
After years of moving step by step, ferociously eventually, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is set to throw down the gauntlet to Richard Branson’s rival Virgin Galactic next week by announcing how people can buy tickets to space on Blue’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle.
The New York Times reports that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has challenged NASA’s decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop the Human Landing System designed to return astronauts to the moon as part of the space agency’s Artemis program. Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said NASA’s decision was based on flawed evaluations of the bids — misjudging advantages of Blue Origin’s proposal […]
Atlas V provides important reliability and schedule assurance in launch agreement
Centennial, Colo., April 19, 2021 (ULA PR) – United Launch Alliance (ULA) announced today that Amazon has secured Atlas V for nine launches supporting deployment of its ambitious Project Kuiper initiative. Project Kuiper is an initiative that will increase global broadband access through a constellation of 3,236 advanced satellites in low earth orbit.
(more…)Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has posted a temporary flight restriction (TFR) for a New Shepard suborbital flight from its test facility in west Texas for later this week. The TFR is in place starting Wednesday, April 14 at 1200 UTC (8 a.m. EDT/7a.m. CDT) until Saturday April 17 at 2000 UTC (4 p.m. EDT/3 p.m. CDT). It would be the 15th flight of a New Shepard spacecraft and the second […]
A former senior NASA official violated procurement regulations in his dealings with Boeing out of fear the company could delay the Trump Administration’s plan to land astronauts on the moon in 2024, The Washington Post reports.
The Post reports that NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration Doug Loverro reached out to Boeing Senior Vice President Jim Chilton in February to tell the company it would not win a study contract for the Human Landing System, a vehicle that will take astronauts to and from the lunar surface. The call came at a time when NASA was not to contact any of the bidders.
Loverro, who abruptly resigned in May, wanted to find out if Boeing planned to protest its loss. If so, NASA would need to issue stop work orders to the winning bidders until the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled on the protest. GAO reviews usually take months.
(more…)CNBC reports that Jeff Bezos, who has been selling Amazon stock to fund his Blue Origin space company, has liquidated more of his holdings. Bezos has accelerated his stock sales in the last year. In August, Bezos offloaded more than $3.1 billion of Amazon shares, after selling more than $4.1 billion worth of shares in February. The sales this week bring his total cash out in 2020 to more than $10.2 billion so […]