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Blue Origin finds cause of launch failure and vows to fix it

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says a launch anomaly that forced the suspension of its suborbital spaceflights last September was caused by a structural failure of the rocket engine’s nozzle.

Corrective actions are being taken, and flights are expected to resume “soon,” Blue Origin said today. The redesigned New Shepard spaceship will re-fly the payloads that were part of the uncrewed mission that went awry.

No people were aboard New Shepard during last year’s launch from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. No one was injured on the ground, and there was no damage to ground-based systems. All of the debris was recovered in the designated hazard area.

Flights have been suspended during Blue Origin’s investigation, which was conducted by a team including representatives from NASA and the National Transportation Safety Board with oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration. In an emailed statement, the FAA said the investigation “remains open.”

“The agency is currently reviewing the company’s submission of its mishap report,” it said. “FAA approval is required to close the investigation and for the New Shepard System to return to flight.”

Before the failure of the uncrewed research mission, known as NS-23, Blue Origin had flown 31 customers and special guests (including Bezos and his brother Mark, and Star Trek actor William Shatner) on six crewed suborbital trips. There were also more than a dozen uncrewed flights, many of which carried research payloads.

Blue Origin’s only other New Shepard failure occurred during the first test flight of the suborbital launch system in 2015. As was the case for that earlier failure, last September’s mishap led to the loss of the rocket booster, but the capsule that would have held crew was recovered safely. Blue Origin said if there had been crew members aboard, they would have had a safe but rocky ride.

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How Washington rates on NASA’s economic report card

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture leads the list of NASA’s Washington state contractors in a newly released analysis of the agency’s economic impact.

The analysis came out today when NASA released data showing how many jobs and how many procurement dollars were generated during fiscal year 2021 in each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. NASA said this is the first time it has drafted state-specific fact sheets to complement its Economic Impact Report.

“With the president’s fiscal year 2024 budget announcement this week, NASA will remain an economic engine that supports good-paying American jobs, sustains American innovation and strengthens American competitiveness in the 21st century,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a news release. “Our impressive economic impact just scratches the surface of the agency’s influence around the world, and it makes clear that what is good for NASA is good for communities across the country.”

Nationwide, NASA supported more than 339,600 jobs in fiscal year 2021 (which ran from October 2020 to the end of September 2021), based on a multiplier that accounts for direct and indirect economic effects. The space agency said its activities generated more than $71.2 billion in economic output during the fiscal year. Washington state accounted for 4,622 of the jobs resulting from NASA’s economic impact, $1.06 billion in economic output and $426.6 million in NASA procurements.

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Blue Origin aims to turn moon dirt into solar cells

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture isn’t just working on rockets and space stations: The Kent, Wash.-based company is also developing a technology that could someday transform the moon’s soil into materials for electricity-producing solar cells and transmission wire.

That branch of Blue Origin’s advanced development programs takes the spotlight in a blog item posted to the company’s website. The underlying approach — called molten regolith electrolysis, or MRE — has been the subject of research for decades, but Blue Origin says it’s refined the technique over the past two years.

“We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth,” the company says. “We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the moon.”

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Blue Origin wins a launch order for NASA Mars mission

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won its first NASA order for a New Glenn rocket launch, with Mars as the mission’s ultimate destination.

The task order calls on Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin to provide launch service for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, as part of the space agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare program, also known as VADR.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is currently still under development, would be tasked with sending two robotic probes spaceward from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in late 2024.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft would study how Mars’ weak magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind, and how energy and plasma enter and leave the magnetosphere. The cruise to Mars would take about 11 months, followed by several months of orbital adjustments in preparation for the science mission.

Learning about Mars’ magnetosphere would provide a new perspective on space weather, on strategies for protecting astronauts from space storms — and potentially on the evolution of the Red Planet’s climate. Scientists say Mars lost much of its atmosphere and became less hospitable for life because it didn’t have a strong magnetosphere to protect it from the stripping-away effect of the solar wind.

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Lauren Sanchez plans to ride her beau’s spaceship

Lauren Sanchez is planning to follow in the footsteps of her billionaire boyfriend, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, by taking a trip aboard the suborbital rocket ship built by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. And she plans to bring an all-female crew with her on the mission, which she hopes will take place by early 2024.

Sanchez discussed the space mission, her experience as a helicopter pilot and a media producer — and her relationship with Bezos — in a wide-ranging interview published today by WSJ. Magazine.

The relationship between Sanchez and Bezos — and Bezos’ divorce from his wife MacKenzie Scott — fueled a wave of tabloid stories in 2019. Two years later, Bezos took a ride on Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight with Sanchez watching from the wings. Sanchez said Bezos will be “cheering us all on from the sidelines” when she takes her turn aboard the New Shepard spaceship.

“As much as he wants to go on this flight, I’m going to have to hold him back,” she told the magazine.

Sanchez said her five crewmates will be “women who are making a difference in the world and who are impactful and have a message to send.” Their identities haven’t yet been revealed.

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NASA and DARPA team up on nuclear rocket program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has taken on NASA as a partner for a project aimed at demonstrating a nuclear-powered rocket that could someday send astronauts to Mars.

DARPA had already been working with commercial partners — including Blue Origin, the space venture created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies, or USNC-Tech — on the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations program, also known as DRACO. USNC-Tech supported Blue Origin plus another team led by Lockheed Martin during an initial round of DRACO design work.

Now DARPA and NASA will be working together on the next two rounds of the DRACO program, which call for a commercial contractor to design and then build a rocket capable of carrying a General Atomics fission reactor safely into space for testing. The current plan envisions an in-space demonstration in fiscal year 2027.

“With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever – a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said today in a news release.

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Blue Origin delivers the engines for first Vulcan rocket

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it has completed delivery of the two BE-4 rocket engines that will be used next year for the first launch of United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket.

The delivery to ULA’s factory in Alabama comes two years later than the schedule called for when ULA chose Blue Origin as the engine supplier for the Vulcan first-stage booster in 2018.

In a tweet, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said one of the engines has already been placed on the booster, and the other one “will join it momentarily.”

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said he’s “excited to see ULA’s Vulcan fly.”

“The BE-4 is a great engine, and we’re proud of Team Blue for achieving this milestone as part of ULA’s team,” Smith said in a news release. “It’s been a wonderful partnership, and this shipset is the first of many more to come.”

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Memo points to Blue Origin expansion around its HQ

The workforce at Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space venture, has been growing by leaps and bounds — and so has the need for office and lab space.

A memo laying out a real-estate sales offering suggests that Renton, Wash., the Seattle suburb right next door to Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, is a prime destination for many of the company’s 3,000-plus employees in the area. The memo was issued last month by Jones Lang LaSalle, the sales adviser for the sellers, and was brought to light this week by the Puget Sound Business Journal.

The focus of the offering is The Landmark, a Renton office complex that’s up for sale at a price that hasn’t been publicly disclosed. The property, with 274,931 square feet of rentable space, had been purchased by California-based Redwood-Kairos Real Estate Partners in 2015 for $45 million.

Blue Origin’s stable presence at The Landmark is one of the big selling points. “The Landmark is strategically located just 10 minutes from Blue Origin’s headquarters,” JLL’s memo says.

According to the memo, Blue Origin occupies 83% of the space in two Landmark buildings, at 1600 Lind Ave. SW and 1600 E. Valley Road. Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based company specializing in public-sector software, takes up another 13%. “Since Blue Origin signed their initial lease in July 2021 for 92,834 square feet, they have taken every available space and negotiated tenant relocations (Wizards of the Coast) to allow for a 227,033 square-foot footprint today (more than doubling in size in less than a year),” JLL said.

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Orbital Reef space station wins role in sci-fi movie

The commercial space station that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has a hand in building, known as Orbital Reef. will be getting some Hollywood-level product placement years before it’s due to go into operation.

Blue Origin and the other partners in the Orbital Reef project today announced a cross-promotional deal with Centerboro Productions to portray the space outpost in an upcoming sci-fi movie titled “Helios.” The announcement was timed to coincide with this week’s International Astronautical Congress in Paris.

The movie is set in 2030, which is around the time Orbital Reef could become a reality — assuming that the funding from NASA and from commercial partners continues to flow.

“The film will tell the story of a spaceship, the Helios, and its crew during their urgent mission to the International Space Station,” a plot synopsis reads. “When a massive solar flare hits the station, it is up to astronomer and former NASA astronaut Jess Denver and Air Force Colonel Sam Adler to team up and save humanity.”

Orbital Reef is to be featured as a next-generation space station that serves as a critical resource for the Helios crew.

“We teamed up with Blue Origin to give moviegoers a thrilling but realistic depiction of the future of living and working in space and a coordinated response to a space weather emergency,” Patricia A. Beninati, who’s one of the film’s producers and writers as well as the president of Centerboro Productions, said in a news release.

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Uncrewed Blue Origin flight cut short by anomaly

A booster misfire caused an early end today for an uncrewed suborbital space mission launched by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

It was the first Blue Origin mission to fall short of its goal since the first flight of the company’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship in 2015. Blue Origin didn’t immediately say what caused today’s anomaly. The Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the mishap and would eventually have to sign off on Blue Origin’s return to flight.

No people were aboard the spacecraft. Instead, this mission was dedicated to scientific payloads and STEM education. The New Shepard spaceship carried 36 payloads, half of which were funded by NASA, plus tens of thousands of postcards that were sent in by students and flown courtesy of Blue Origin’s educational foundation. the Club for the Future.

This was the first dedicated payload launch since August 2021, coming amid a string of six crewed suborbital flights that saw 31 customers and special guests (including Bezos himself) go to space and back.