In a dizzying new effort to provide a more permanent means of artificial gravity to test tools and equipment for use in future missions to the Moon and Mars, a joint venture between Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and NASA will reconfigure the spacecraft. New Shepard space with the ability to rotate the effects of lunar gravity.
Representing one-sixth of the Earth’s gravitational pull, the conditions facing the gravity of the lunar surface are just some of the problems in which machines and materials will have to operate efficiently.
As a larger testing ground for these emerging technologies, NASA will soon have more options to observe those innovations in monthly gravity thanks to a collaboration with Blue Origin to bring new capabilities to their reusable New Shepard suborbital missile system.
At this time, NASA can replicate the limited gravity of the Moon on parabolic flights in converted aircraft, such as the KC-135 “Vomit Comet”, which helped train astronauts from 1994 to 2004 and in special centrifuges aboard suborbital vehicles. NASA is currently using a Navy C-9 aircraft for their limited gravity program, using a test aircraft launched in 2005 as a two-jet variant of a McDonnell Douglas DC-9.
However, these outlets provide a few seconds of monthly gravity exposure at a time and are severely limited in terms of the size of the final payload, which led NASA to investigate future systems for longer duration and allowances. higher load.
According to a NASA press release, the new innovation of testing the monthly gravity of Blue Origin should be ready to run from the end of 2022. To achieve the desired results, the rocket and the New Shepard capsule will undergo a number of improvements that will allow the spacecraft to capitalize on the reaction control system and thus ensure effective 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 media for the payloads transported inside. Blue Origin’s initial flight experiments for the program will target 11 rotations per minute to provide over two minutes of consistent monthly gravity.
“NASA is excited to be among the first customers to take advantage of this new capability,” said Christopher Baker, director of the Flight Opportunities program at NASA’s Washington headquarters. “One of the constant challenges of living and working in space is low gravity. Many systems designed to be used on Earth simply do not work the same way elsewhere. A wide range of tools we need for the Moon and Mars could benefit from partial weight testing, including technologies for on-site resource use, rule extraction and environmental control, and life support systems. ”
Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft is one of the prominent commercial flight platforms offered for flight technology testing, contracted by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program.
This program has helped advance hundreds of exciting space technologies, not only from NASA, but also from private industry and academia, putting them to work aboard suborbital commercial flights before escalating them to risky orbital missions such as CubeSats. , The International Space Station, the Moon and potentially Mars.
“Mankind has been dreaming of artificial gravity since the early days of space flight,” said Erika Wagner, Ph.D., New Shepard, director of useful tasks at Blue Origin. “It is exciting to work with NASA to create this unique ability to explore the science and technology we will need to explore the future human space.”