Blue Origin auctions New Shepard ride with Jeff Bezos for $28 million

Blue Origin auctions New Shepard ride with Jeff Bezos for $28 million

Subject : Science & tech

Context : The flight aboard New Shepard, slated for July 20th, will mark the company’s first mission flying humans, in which the winning bidder will bask in a few minutes of microgravity with Bezos, his brother Mark, and one other passenger before returning back to land.

Concept :

New Shephard

• New Shephard has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard, the first American to go to space, and offers flights to space over 100 km above the Earth and accommodation for payloads.
• Essentially, it is a rocket system that has been designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Karman line – the internationally recognised boundary of space.
• The idea is to provide easier and more cost-effective access to space meant for purposes such as academic research, corporate technology development and entrepreneurial ventures among others.
• It is built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Space Company called Blue Origin.
• In 2018, Blue Origin was one of the ten companies selected by NASA to conduct studies and advance technologies to collect process and use space-based resources for missions to the Moon and Mars.

How does it work?

• The rocket system consists of two parts, the cabin or capsule and the rocket or the booster.
• The cabin can accommodate experiments from small mini payloads up to 100 kg.
• The cabin is designed for six people and sits atop a 60-feet tall rocket and separates from it before crossing the Karman line, after which both vehicles fall back to the Earth.
• 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.
• 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.

Karman Lines

• The Karman line is an attempt to define a boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
• The line is named after Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), a Hungarian American engineer and physicist, who was active primarily in aeronautics and astronautics.
• He was the first person to calculate the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes too thin to support aeronautical flight and arrived at 83.6 km (51.9 miles) himself.