Mission 8 Flight
Blue Origin is an American spaceflight services company backed by Amazon’s very own Jeff Bezos. They make rocket ships, and their goal is to put everyday people in space. They’re based in Kent, Washington, but they run flights out of their space center in West Texas for paying customers.
Recently, their air craft New Shepard made it’s eighth voyage into the sky on April 29, 2018— flying out of Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site. Officially termed “Mission 8,” the crew reached an apogee of 351,000 feet (66 miles, 107 kilometers). This is the altitude that they’ve been targeting for operations.
Apogee is the farthest distance from Earth during the rocket’s orbit.
The payload customers of this trip featured users from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, employees from a small commercial communications firm, and the first European customers from the German national space agency, the DLR. “Mannequin Skywalker,” Blue Origin’s beloved test dummy, made his second trip flying to conduct astronaut telemetry and scientific studies.
The flight also served research purposes for both NASA and the DLR.
Blue Origin is excited to share its upcoming test flights as they move forward toward making human spaceflight accessible. They’ve been developing a rocket factory locally, right here in Cape Canaveral. Maybe we’ll be able to watch Blue Origin’s rockets launch in our very own backyards soon..
Check out April 29th’s mission highlights from their CEO Jeff Bezos here.
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