Blue Origin’s First 2018 Flight Is a Success

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ dear project, successfully completed its first test flight of 2018. 

This marks the eighth time that Blue Origin’s New Shepard completes a launch and a landing, but that isn’t the most impressive part. The New Shepard Mission 8 reached a peak of 351,000 feet, a record altitude for Jeff Bezos’ company.

This mission shows that Blue Origin is indeed capable of holding up its ambitious mission and launch a human-crewed flight this year. It’s also good competition for SpaceX.

The New Shepard Mission 8 carried multiple payloads from NASA’s Johnson Space Center to the University of Duisburg-Essen.

What caught our eye was this project:

“The Daphnia experiment investigates the effects of microgravity on gene expression and the cytoskeleton of daphnia water fleas. This small invertebrate species is popular in design of future bioregenerative life support systems for human space exploration.”

Can’t wait to see what’s on Mission 9!