Leaving the Kennedy Space Center today, got a nice view of a New Glenn first stage heading to the pad…
William Harwood
@rocketksc.bsky.social
Full-time space reporter, based at the Kennedy Space Center, since 1984; first with UPI, now with CBS News, covering human space flight, planetary exploration, commercial space operations and general astronomy
New Shepard-36: Blue Origin says the previously unidentified passenger is Will Lewis, an entrepreneur and adventurer
New Shepard-36: New Shepard main parachute deploy confirmed
New Shepard-36: Booster and capsule descending normally; passengers are back in their seats
New Shepard-36: Main engine shutdown, capsule separation confirmed; the passengers are now weightless
New Shepard-36: Management poll complete; all systems 'go' for launch
New Shepard-36: 15 minutes to launch of the RSS First Step capsule
New Shepard-36: Blue Origin's launch webcast is underway: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4TG...
New Shepard Mission NS-36 Webcast
YouTube video by Blue Origin
youtube.com
New Shepard-36: As with all New Shepard flights, the capsule will be boosted to an altitude just above 62 miles, the internationally recognized "boundary" of space; as the capsule coasts through the top of its ballistic trajectory, the crew will experience about 3 minutes of weightlessness
New Shepard-36: The 6 passengers include businessman Jeff Elgin; Danna Karagussova of Kazakhstan; entrepreneur Aaron Newman; Vitalii Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian businessman and adventurer; Clint Kelly III, an electrical engineer making his 2nd New Shepard flight; and an unidentified passenger
New Shepard-36: Blue Origin is preparing to launch 6 passengers aboard a New Shepard spacecraft on a sub-orbital flight to the edge of space and back; liftoff from the company's West Texas launch site is targeted for 9:40am EDT (1340 UTC); this will be Blue's 15th passenger flight to space
F9/IMAP: 1st stage landing on the droneship Just Read The Instructions; this was the 414th booster landing at seat and the 510th successful recovery overall
F9/IMAP: 2nd stage engine shutdown; the vehicle will now coast for a little more than 1 hour before a second firing to put the vehicle onto the payload deploy trajectory
F9/IMAP: 1st stage engine shutdown, stage separation, 2nd stage ignition confirmed
F9/IMAP: Here's a pre-launch view of the three payloads launching today, shortly before their encapsulation in a Falcon 9 nose fairing
F9/IMAP: NASA's Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will study ultraviolet light generated in Earth's extreme outer atmosphere while NOAA's SWFO-L1 will look for indicators of developing solar storms that could impact Earth's space environment
F9/IMAP: NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, will monitor the boundary of the heliosphere, where charged particles in the solar wind run into the surrounding interstellar medium; it will operate from Lagrange point 1, a gravitationally stable region between Earth and sun
F9/IMAP: SpaceX is fueling a Falcon 9 rocket for a dawn launch to carry three science probes into space to monitor the solar wind, solar storm development and Earth's extreme outer atmosphere; liftoff from KSC pad 39A is targeted for 7:30am EDT (1130 UTC)
New Shepard/NS-35: The New Shepard capsule, meanwhile, has deployed its main parachutes
New Shepard/NS-35: The New Shepard reached a maximum altitude of 345,000 feet before arcing over and beginning its descent to Earth, preceded by the booster
New Shepard/NS-35: After an on-time liftoff, the New Shepard capsule has separated from its booster and is now coasting up on a ballistic trajectory; the microgravity experiments on board are now experiencing about 3 minutes of weightlessness
New Shepard/NS-35: This will be Blue Origin's 4th attempt to launch the NS-35 mission since an initial scrub on Aug. 23; the company blamed the delays on unspecified issues with the the booster's avionics, but no other details were provided
New Shepard/NS-35: Blue Origin is counting down to launch of its 35th sub-orbital New Shepard flight from the company's west Texas facility; liftoff is targeted for 9am EDT (1300 UTC); on board: more than 40 microgravity experiments
F9/Cygnus NG-23: Jonny Kim, operating the space station's robot arm, locked onto a grapple fixture at the base of the Cygnus XL cargo ship at 7:24am EDT (1124 UTC) as the two spacecraft were sailing 258 miles above central Africa, closing out an extended 4-day rendezvous
