Blue Origin Has Delayed Its New Shepard Rocket Launch Once More

Blue Origin's NS-23 mission is not launching today.

Jeff Bezos' commercial space company has recently announced it is delaying its NS-23 mission again due to weather conditions at the launch site.

This delay is the second time Blue Origin's NS-23 mission suffered due to bad weather conditions.

Blue Origins NS-23 Mission Delay Details

Blue Origin mentioned on its official Twitter account on Sept. 1 at 4 PM that it is delaying the launching of its NS-23 mission due to bad weather conditions at Launch Site One, where the mission is set to launch.

The company also said in the tweet that it would continue monitoring the weather closely in West Texas to see if future weather conditions will allow for the NS-23's launching.

According to Space.com, the mission was supposed to be launched on Aug. 31 but was delayed due to bad weather as well.

Blue Origin NS-23 Mission Details

Blue Origin's NS-23 mission, as the name implies, is the 23rd mission that would be undertaken by Blue Origins' New Shepard rocket.

If the mission's launch is successful, this will be the fourth flight for the company's New Shepard program in 2022 and the ninth flight for the current New Shepard rocket.

However, unlike recent launches, this mission won't involve human passengers.

Instead, NS-23 will be uncrewed and would contain only cargo that will take 36 payloads on a brief visit to suborbital space and back.

This amount of education-focused payloads is double the previous payload flight manifests, Blue Origin stated.

These payloads also expose students as young as those attending elementary school to STEM skills like coding, environmental testing, and CAD design - courses usually not taught until college.

According to Blue Origin's post on Aug. 24, 18 of the 36 payloads NS-23 will bring to suborbital space are funded by NASA's Flight Opportunities program, while 24 of them are from K-12 schools, universities, and STEM-focused organizations.

Lastly, two of them will fly on the exterior of the rocket's booster for ambient exposure to the space environment.

These payloads consist of postcards from Blue Origin's nonprofit organization, Club for the Future, whose Postcards to Space program gives people worldwide access to space on New Shepard.

It also has Infinity Fuel Cell's AMPES experiment, Honeybee Robotics' ASSET-1, and the University of Florida's Biological Imaging in Support of Suborbital Science.

The rocket's payload also has NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center's CFOSS, OlympiaSpace's ENGARTBOX, and John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's Janus-APL.

Blue Origins NS-23 New Launch Date

Should weather conditions be ideal enough for Blue Origins to launch its NS-23 mission anytime soon, the company said that the launch would proceed on Sept. 2 at 9:30 AM CDT.

People interested in watching the launch happen live can do so at Blue Origin's official website.

The live webcast, which will be hosted by Erika Wagner, will start at T-20 minutes.