The hush-hush commercial spaceflight firm Blue Origin,
backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had a bit of news this week.
The firm, based in Kent, Wash., selected three experiments to fly during the first phase of test flights of its suborbital rocketship, New Shepard (a homage to the first American in space, Alan Shepard.)
Bezos intends to offer commercial suborbital flights for paying passengers beginning around 2012. Unmanned flights are expected to begin about 2011.
The three experiments selected this week to fly during New Shepard’s demonstration missions are:
*Three-Dimensional Critical Wetting Experiment in Microgravity, principal investigator Stephen Collicott, Purdue University.
* Microgravity Experiment on Dust Environments in Astrophysics (MEDEA), principal investigator Joshua Colwell, University of Central Florida.
* Effective lnterfacial Tension lnduced Convection (EITIC), John Pojman, Louisiana State University.
“These flights are planned to begin in the coming years to demonstrate the integration and operation of scientific experiments into the New Shepard system,” the company said in a press release.
Blue Origin launched a prototype ship in 2006 -- here’s a link to a video. The company’s homepage is devoted to job recruitment.
(New Shepard before its test flight in 2006. Credit: Blue Origin)
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