In a dizzying new effort to provide a more permanent means of artificial gravity to test tools and equipment for future missions to the Moon and Mars, a joint venture between Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos and NASA will reconfigure the New Shepard spacecraft with the ability to generate the effects of lunar gravity.
Representing one-sixth of the Earth’s gravitational pull, the conditions experienced with the gravity of the lunar surface are just some of the issues that will require machines and materials to function efficiently.
As a larger testing ground for these emerging technologies, NASA will soon have more options for observing these innovations in lunar gravity thanks to a collaboration with Blue Origin to bring new capabilities to its reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket system.
Right now, NASA can replicate the limited gravity of the Moon in parabolic flights on converted aircraft such as the retired KC-135 “Vomit Comet” that helped train astronauts from 1994 to 2004 and in special centrifuges aboard suborbital vehicles. NASA currently uses a Navy C-9 aircraft for its limited gravity program, using a test aircraft launched in 2005 as a dual-jet variant of a McDonnell Douglas DC-9.
However, these outlets offer few seconds of exposure to lunar gravity at a time and have an extremely limited payload size, which led NASA to investigate future systems for longer duration and permissions. larger load.
According to a NASA press release, Blue Origin’s new innovation in lunar gravity testing should be ready by the end of 2022. To achieve the desired results, the New Shepard rocket and capsule will undergo several upgrades. which will allow the spacecraft to take advantage of its reaction control system and thus provide real rotation with the vessel.
This process will allow the entire capsule to act as a kind of giant centrifuge to produce long-term artificial gravity environments for the payloads transported inside. The first Blue Origin flight experiments for the program will aim at 11 rotations per minute to give more than two minutes of constant lunar gravity.
“NASA is pleased to be one of the first customers to take advantage of this new capability,” said Christopher Baker, executive of the Flight Opportunities program at NASA headquarters in Washington. “One of the constant challenges of living and working in space is the reduced gravity. Many systems designed for use on Earth simply do not work the same anywhere else. A wide range of tools we need for the Moon and Mars could benefit from partial gravity testing, including technologies for on-site resource utilization, regolith mining, and environmental and support control systems. in life “.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft is one of the leading commercial flight platforms offered for technology flight testing contracted by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.
This program has helped advance hundreds of encouraging space technologies, not only from NASA, but also from private industry and academia, by putting them to work aboard commercial suborbital flights before scaling them to orbital missions. such as CubeSats, the International Space Station. , the Moon and potentially Mars.
“Humanity has been dreaming of artificial gravity since the early days of space flight,” said Erika Wagner, PhD, New Shepard’s director of payloads at Blue Origin. “It’s exciting to work with NASA to create this unique ability to explore the science and technology we will need for future exploration of human space.”