Blue Origin to fly with NASA payloads amidst lunar legal drama

Blue Origin's New Shepard Mission NS-17 is slated to launch on Thursday morning carrying NASA payloads. 

The uncrewed mission was previously targeted for Wednesday morning but was delayed for an unspecified reason. 

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Now, the New Shepard is set to liftoff at 8:35 a.m. CDT from Launch Site One in West Texas.

The reusable rocket and capsule combination will carry 18 research payloads, 11 of which are agency-supported.

The NS-17 flight will further test a suite of lunar landing technologies – NASA's Deorbit, Descent and Landing Sensor Demonstration, which is mounted on the exterior of the New Shepard booster – to reduce risk and increase confidence for successful missions to the moon.

The senor suit first flew aboard New Shepard in October of 2020 and has since been upgraded.

"The technologies could allow future missions – both crewed and robotic – to target landing sites that weren’t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters," Blue Origin said in a release detailing the mission. 

In addition, in research NASA's Kennedy Space Center hopes will improve the sustainability of future long-duration human space exploration, NS-17 will re-fly the Orbital Syngas / Commodity Augmentation Reactor (OSCAR) payload.

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"OSCAR aims to reuse and repurpose common spaceflight waste products by using heat and an oxygen supply stage to transform the trash into useful resources, such as water and propellant," the company noted. 

Notably, Blue Origin will also be taking its first art installation: Amoako Boafo's  Suborbital Tryptych. 

The Ghanaian artist painted the three portraits – one of his mother, a friend's mother and a self-portrait – on top of the crew capsule on the main chute covers as a part of Uplift Aerospace’s Uplift Art Program,

The flight, the 17th New Shepard mission and the fourth flight for the program this year, will also bring several experiments funded by the NASA Flight Opportunities Program, including the University of Florida's "Biological Imaging in Support of Suborbital Science," the Texas-based Southwest Research Institute's Liquid Acquisition Device (LAD-3) and NASA and the Carthage College Space Sciences program's Modal Propellant Gauging Experiment.

Like previously missions, NS-17 will also fly thousands of postcards from Blue Origin's Club for the Future foundation.

This is the first mission since a New Shepard vehicle carried company founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen and female aerospace pioneer Wally Funk to suborbital space in July.

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It's also the first since Blue Origin sued NASA over its decision to award a $3 billion lunar lander contract to rival SpaceX, prompting NASA to temporarily table its work with billionaire Elon Musk's company.