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Blue Origin, a private aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos, announced that it will sell private space travel tickets from next year. This was announced by Rob Meyerson, senior vice president of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, in Washington, DC, June 20-21. He said Blue Origin will be in space for a regular passenger on a rocket New Shepard under development. However, we did not disclose specific price or schedule. It is also unclear what kind of flight will take place if you actually do space travel.
New Shepherd has been repeating flight tests since 2015. Booster can land on the ground again, like a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s Space X. It is also possible to recycle it several times. In order to ensure safety, the Blue Origin side is designed to ignite the rocket motor mounted on the bottom of the capsule and escape at a high speed to go to a safe place if a booster problem occurs during the launch.
The capsule, which the passengers will ride on the rocket, is designed to match the pressure that humans can work on and place a large window so that it can be observed in the space.
The New Shepard is a small rocket that weighs only 20 meters (? But with a liquid fuel engine of over a million horsepower, the capsule and booster can be launched at once. As mentioned above, when recovering the booster, the booster uses the air resistance brake located at the upper part of the body to control the body posture with the upper and lower pins while lowering the falling speed to the ground. When it gets closer to the ground, it reverses the rocket engine and reduces its rapid descent speed. Landing legs are located at the bottom of the aircraft.
New Shepherd, with a rocket engine BE-3 with a maximum thrust of 490 kN at the time of the test launch in April 2015, has reached Mach 3 at an altitude of 93,500 m, separated from the air and successfully returned to the ground. There is a bar.
Of course, according to this announcement, even if Blue Origin sells tickets from next year, it does not know the specific price or flight plan, but Blue Space, Space X and Virgin Galactic are competing for the same goal. If Blue Origin succeeds in the first flight next year, it is expected to attract considerable attention.
There is also the following figure as well as the blue origin. The company’s motto is called Gradatim ferociter. In Latin, it means “one step at a time”. Blue Origin has announced that it will develop New Glenn, a rocket that can be reused in 2016, as well as a small rocket, New Shepherd.
New Glen is between 80 and 95 meters long, 7 meters in diameter, and weighs 45 tons. It is almost the same size as the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo project. Of course, it is bigger than the Falcon Heavy in Space X. 7 BE-4 engines.
The BE-4 engine is a fourth-generation rocket engine under development by Blue Origin, which can burn liquefied natural gas LNG and liquid oxygen to produce 250 tonnes of propulsion. The total height of the engine is about 4.5m. BE-3 engine used in existing New Shepard burned liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, but BE-4 used LNG. Of course, this can be less in terms of performance than burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, but it is also more advantageous in space and fuel itself. Blue Origin has developed the BE-4 rocket engine and aims to complete reliance on Russian rocket engines such as the RD-180, which is also used in US rockets.
Blue Origin has released the concept image of New Glen in 2017. New Glenn can carry 13 tonnes of cargo to a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) at an altitude of 36,000 km. According to Jeff Bezos last year, the first launch of New Glen is expected to be in 2020.
However, it is clear that the age of space tourism is becoming more real. Of course, even if it is a space travel, like most of the international space station, it will be a pattern of returning to a certain altitude rather than flying around the earth and returning to the universe after experiencing gravity. Nevertheless, the fact that civilian space travel competition is leading humanity into a new space does not change.
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