Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos served as launch commentator today for a risky but successful third flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship to space and back. He even worked in a reference to his lucky cowboy boots.

The minutes-long suborbital mission not only featured the first ride for university research payloads, but also a quick restart of the propulsion module’s hydrogen-fueled BE-3 rocket engine, just seconds before what would have been a crash.

That maneuver was aimed at “pushing the envelope” for the uncrewed New Shepard’s performance, Bezos said on the eve of today’s flight at his company’s West Texas launch site.

The running commentary on Twitter marked yet another role for Bezos, who founded Blue Origin back in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of spaceflight. He traced the preparation of the crew capsule for launch as well as the status of the propulsion booster after the two parts of the spacecraft separated as planned:

The flight marked the third time that this New Shepard rocket ship went beyond 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude to reach outer space, and then made a safe vertical landing. The test followed similarly successful outings in November and January.

This time around, the craft’s crew capsule contained an experiment from the University of Central Florida, aimed at studying impacts between objects in zero-G; and from the Southwest Research Institute, designed to simulate the dynamics of rocky soil on small near-Earth asteroids.

If all goes according to plan, Blue Origin will continue to fly research payloads, and then advance to flying test passengers. Such tests would clear the way for the company to begin flying paying passengers as early as 2018. Blue Origin has not yet determined how much the tickets will cost, but Bezos said last month that many thousands of people have signed up online for updates.

Check back for updates on this breaking story.

 

GeekWire

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