Blue Origin confirms New Shepard launch on Monday – with Monolith on board

A new Blue Origin space capsule will be launched into space for the first time on Monday. This was confirmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company on Sunday. The launch will take place on Monday, October 7, at 3 p.m. German time.

It will be the debut for Blue Origin's second capsule for manned space flights. However, Monday's flight will still take place without passengers. The capsule is named "RSS Kármán Line". The most important innovation is likely to be additional space for payload on the booster.

More payload, more reusability

In the announcement,Blue Origin also mentions improved performance and greater reusability of the new capsule. According to the company, 99 percent of the components of the New Shepard rocket are already being reused.

Instead of passengers, this time the capsule will carry 12 payloads - five on the launcher and seven in the crew capsule. The payloads include new navigation systems developed for Blue Origin's New Shepard and New Glenn rockets and two different LIDAR sensors for the Lunar Permanence Program. These are likely to be related to Blue Origin's 2025 moon landing.

Known monolith on board

There are also several ultra-wideband short-range sensors on board and something that should please fans of the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Croatian book publisher is sending seven replicas of the famous black monolith into space to promote a book publication based on the movie.

Several tens of thousands of postcards created by schoolchildren as part of a Blue Origin educational support program are also on board. If all goes to plan, it will be the second launch of New Shepard since Blue Origin's manned flight in May. An unmanned New Shepard mission also took off into space in August. In November, New Glenn, Blue Origin's larger, also reusable booster, is to be launched for the first time.

(nen)