Blue Origin’s eleventh space tourism launch carries a crew that features some notable celebrities, and you can watch the mission live here at Space.com.
The 31st overall mission of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle (known as NS-31) will launch a six women — the first all-female space crew since the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space during a solo mission to orbit in 1963. The NS-31 crew are pop star Katy Perry, “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King, author and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, STEMBoard CEO and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn and mission leader Lauren Sánchez, who is the partner of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origin is targeting 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Monday (April 14) for liftoff of NS-31 from the company’s Launch Site One, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Van Horn, Texas. A livestream of the New Shepard launch will be available on Blue Origin’s website about 15 minutes before liftoff, and it will be simulcast on YouTube and the Blue Origin X account. The broadcast will also be carried at the top of this page as well as the Space.com homepage and YouTube channel.
The flight will last a little more than 10 minutes from liftoff to the soft, parachute-aided touchdown of the NS-31 crew capsule downrange in the Texas desert. Between engine ignition and landing, the NS-31 flight will go through about 10 major milestones.
NS-31 launch sequence:
00:00 – Liftoff
— Max-Q
— Main Engine cutoff
02:40 – Booster separation
— Aerobrake deploy
— Engine reignition
07:30 – New Shepard booster landing
— Capsule drogue chutes deploy
— Capsule main cutes deploy
~10:30 – Crew capsule landing.
The New Shepard booster will separate from the crew capsule 2 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff. From there, the capsule will continue on a trajectory arc reaching above an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) — the internationally recognized “boundary” of space known as the Kármán line.
The NS-31 crew will experience several minutes of weightlessness while soaking in views of Earth through the capsule’s very large, 3.6-foot (1.1-meter) windows. As the crew enjoys floating around the capsule, the 60-foot-tall (18 m) New Shepard booster will use a set of aerobrakes to control its descent before reigniting its engine for a controlled touchdown on the Blue Origin landing pad, 2 miles (3.2 km) north of the launch site.
Minutes later, the New Shepard capsule will begin its descent back to Earth, deploying a set of drogue parachutes and main parachutes that will enable a soft desert landing 10 to 11 minutes after liftoff.
Blue Origin’s launch window for the NS-31 mission opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT), but the company may push later into the morning if there are any launch delays. Historically, New Shepard launches have been pushed up to an hour or more, as a result issues with the launch vehicle or ground infrastructure.
In the event of a delay prior to the start of Blue Origin’s livestream, the broadcast will be similarly delayed to begin about 15 minutes ahead of a new T-0 launch target.
