Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket crashed during a flight last September due to the structural failure of the vehicle’s BE-3 engine nozzle caused by excessive operating temperatures, the company announced on Friday.

NASA has nixed the idea of suborbital training flights for its astronauts aboard vehicles launched by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.

Blue Origin is still investigating the in-flight failure of its New Shepard rocket last September that resulted in the abort of a capsule carrying a load of experiments, the system’s chief architect said on Tuesday.

WhiteKnightTwo took to the air again on Monday morning. Virgin Galactic’s Eve mothership, named after company founder Richard Branson’s mum, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in California. After flying in circles over the Mojave Desert, it headed east to New Mexico where it flew circle over Spaceport America before landing on the facility’s only runway after a flight of 5 hours 33 minutes.

Welcome to our newest feature, SpaceTech Briefs. Today we’ll look at some of the things NASA is doing these days.

NASA Looks to Open Suborbital Flights to Researchers

While NASA has been happy to provide funding for microgravity experiments and technology demonstrations on suborbital flights by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, it has drawn the line at funding its own personnel to fly along with their payloads. That could soon change, however.

KENT, Wash. (Blue Origin PR) — Today’s NS-23 launch is scrubbed due to weather. We’re continuing to track the weather in West Texas. Our next launch window for NS-23 opens tomorrow at 8:30 AM CDT / 13:30 UTC. Live webcast starts at T-20 minutes.

New Shepard’s 23^rd mission, a dedicated payloads flight, will fly 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe.

SEATTLE (Blue Origin PR) — On August 31, New Shepard’s 23^rd mission, a dedicated payloads flight, will fly 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe. The launch window opens at 8:30 AM CDT / 13:30 UTC from Launch Site One in West Texas. 

WASHINGTON (NREL PR) — Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will send an engineered bacteria into space as early as next year as part of ongoing research into solving the problem of plastic waste mitigation on Earth.

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (NASA PR) — Poised to launch on Artemis I from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida,  BioSentinel – a shoebox-sized CubeSat – will perform the first long-duration biology experiment in deep space. Artemis missions at the Moon will prepare humans to travel on increasingly farther and longer-duration missions to destinations like Mars, and BioSentinel will carry microorganisms, in the form of yeast, to fill critical gaps in knowledge about the health risks in deep space posed by space radiation.

Funded by exclusive partner Estée Lauder, the winning projects will have the opportunity to conduct research on the International Space Station

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2022 (CASIS PR) – On July 28, 2022, the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory announced two winning concepts from its Sustainability Challenge: Beyond Plastics. The winning concepts will receive funding for their research proposals from the exclusive challenge partner, global prestige beauty brand Estée Lauder, and will have the opportunity to launch their research to the orbiting laboratory.

The challenge, put forth by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc., manager of the ISS National Lab, in partnership with Estée Lauder, sought project concepts to advance sustainability research on the space station that address the worldwide plastic waste dilemma. The selected projects were announced at the 11^th annual ISS Research and Development Conference in Washington, D.C.