Tag: Blue Origin

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Amazon signs deals for 83 satellite launches to compete with Starlink

Nov 22, 2019 Palo Alto / CA / USA – Close up of Amazon logo and Smile symbol at one of their corporate offices located in Silicon Valley, San Francisco bay area

Amazon has signed deals with three companies to launch internet satellites in space.

There will be up to 83 launches under Project Kuiper over the next five years, Reuters reports.

38 launches are with United Launch Alliance, and 18 are with Arianespace. 12 launches are through a contract with Blue Origin, another company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. There’s an option to add an additional 15 launches with Blue Origin.

The move heats up the race to provide internet from space.

“Amazon is investing billions of dollars across the three agreements. Together, it is the largest commercial procurement of launch vehicles in history,” a company spokesperson told the publication.

But despite the new agreements, Amazon is still trailing behind SpaceX. According to CNBC, the company, owned by Elon Musk, has launched 2,000 Starlink subscribers and serves roughly 250,000 customers.

The service is available in Canada, where customers recently experienced a price hike.

Project Kuiper plans to use 3,000 satellites to support high-speed internet for various customers, Reuters reports.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Reuters, CNBC

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Blue Origin’s next space flight is scheduled for March 23rd

Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson is among six people heading to space aboard Jeff Bezos’ upcoming Blue Origin flight on March 23rd, the sub-orbital spaceflight services company announced via its Twitter account.

Davidson would be the third celebrity to go to space aboard a Blue Origin flight, following Canadian actor William Shatner and ‘Good Morning America’ host Michael Strahan.

The SNL star is accompanied by Party America CEO Marty Allen, University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen, president of Commercial Space Technologies Dr. George Nield, Tricor International CEO Marc Hagle and his wife Sharon Hagle.

The flight is scheduled for 8:30am CT/9:30am ET on Wednesday, March 23rd. The entirety of the flight, from liftoff to enjoying zero gravity in low Earth orbit to landing back in the West Texas desert will take about ten minutes.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: Blue Origin

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Amazon Prime Video to release documentary on William Shatner’s trip to space

Amazon Prime Video will premiere a new documentary focused on William Shatner’s recent voyage to outer space.

Titled Shatner in Space, the one-hour special will debut on Prime Video in Canada, the U.S. and select other territories on December 13th.

Shatner in Space will provide an inside look at the Canadian Star Trek star before, during and after the Blue Origin flight. Shatner, who’s 90, embarked on the trip alongside three others on October 13th.

Shatner in Space will also delve into Shatner’s friendship with Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

“My time in space was the most profound experience I could have ever imagined,” said Shatner in a statement. “This special documenting my journey gives a dramatic view of that experience, and my hope is that it inspires the world to see we must go to space to save Earth.”

Image credit: Blue Origin

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Amazon Prime Video to release documentary on William Shatner’s trip to space

Amazon Prime Video will premiere a new documentary focused on William Shatner’s recent voyage to outer space.

Titled Shatner in Space, the one-hour special will debut on Prime Video in Canada, the U.S. and select other territories on December 13th.

Shatner in Space will provide an inside look at the Canadian Star Trek star before, during and after the Blue Origin flight. Shatner, who’s 90, embarked on the trip alongside three others on October 13th.

Shatner in Space will also delve into Shatner’s friendship with Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

“My time in space was the most profound experience I could have ever imagined,” said Shatner in a statement. “This special documenting my journey gives a dramatic view of that experience, and my hope is that it inspires the world to see we must go to space to save Earth.”

Image credit: Blue Origin

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Bezos’ dream for the first commercial space station is a suburban nightmare

Source: Shutterstock https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/typical-light-industrial-small-business-offices-762000640

Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin has unveiled its initial plans for the world’s first-ever commercial space station.

While specifics are still scarce, the space station will be modeled after “business parks,” i.e. the blight of the suburbs.

As Mashable wearily reports, “a business park is a collection of office buildings, with some grass or hey even a water feature or two in between structures, if you’re lucky.”

For context, the first-ever business park has its roots in segregation, wealth and white flight, opening in “an upper-class white suburb of Birmingham, [Alabama], in the early 1950s as commuters became uneasy with simmering racial tension in city centers.”

In the years that followed, business parks received further criticism for their negative impact on surrounding communities and suburban sprawl, and tendency towards being abandoned and left in vacant disrepair.

For its part, Blue Origin says that its bold creative vision for humanity’s first permanent steps into that hallowed final frontier will “provide the essential infrastructure needed to scale economic activity and open new markets in space.” Yikes.

The station, tentatively named the “Orbital Reef”, is scheduled to be up and orbiting sometime between 2025-2030.

Blue Origin has so far completed two successful tourist flights into space — or more specifically, into low Earth orbit.

Passengers have included Bezos himself, naturally, and Canadian sci-fi legend William Shatner.

Source: Mashable

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How to watch William Shatner get launched into space

Source: @blueorigin Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CU3nF2rgYuC/

Today’s the day to watch Canadian actor William Shatner — known best for his role as Star Trek‘s Captain James T. Kirk — become the oldest person to go to space.

Originally scheduled for October 12th, the launch was delayed a day due to poor weather conditions.

Blue Origin, the aerospace company that organized this sub-orbital spaceflight, is currently streaming live from West Texas in lead-up to the “second human flight” of its New Shepard launch vehicle.

You can also follow @blueorigin on Twitter for launch updates.

 

Or, you can watch the livestream below:

New Shepard’s first-ever tourist flight took place on July 20th, with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on board.

Image source: @BlueOrigin

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Oh god, William Shatner is getting launched into space

Canadian actor William Shatner is on the passenger list for Blue Origin’s next commercial flight into space, because of course he is.

The Verge reports that Shatner will be joining the 11-minute voyage on the aerospace company’s New Shepard rocket alongside former NASA engineer and Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen, French software executive Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin vice-president of mission and flight operations Audrey Powers.

Shatner is best known for his role as James T. Kirk, the shirt-ripping, alien-wrestling, diplomat-smooching captain of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise — and best loved by this author as James Spader’s queer platonic husband in the criminally forgotten aughts’ court drama Boston Legal.

At 90 years old, Shatner will become the oldest person to ever visit space — you know, the nonagenarian-friendly place where “astronauts lose on average 1 percent to 2 percent of their bone mineral density every month.”

The New Shepard is a suborbital rocket system and Blue Origin’s entry into the complicated new frontier of space tourism.

Blue Origin’s CEO, noted soft-serve ice cream enthusiast Jeff Bezos, was among the passengers on New Shepard’s first tourist flight in July.

While the Canadian Space Agency’s website assures me a short-duration flight poses little risk to Shatner’s bones, I would kindly ask that no one contact me at 9:30am ET/6:30am PT on Tuesday, October 12th when live launch coverage is scheduled to begin, as I — alongside my father, who remembers sitting down to watch black-and-white ST:TOS episodes every week as a kid — will be busy.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Source: The Verge