NS-23 Mission Patch

An uncrewed Blue Origin New Shepard flight with plant experiments onboard suffered a launch anomaly yesterday. A booster failure triggered the emergency escape system, which ejected the payload capsule and allowed it to make a safe landing. The FAA will now investigate the incident, and assess any risk to public safety, before New Shepard is cleared for launch again.

NS-23 launched from Launch Site One in West Texas, carrying 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe, including:

Principal investigators Rob Ferl and Anna-Lisa Paul from the UF Space Plants Lab adapted technology designed for the International Space Station for suborbital flights. The FLEX fluorescence imaging system enables increasingly precise and dynamic understanding of biological responses to suborbital missions. This will be the fifth flight of the technology development series on New Shepard and includes science collaboration with the University of Wisconsin. Funding was provided by the NASA Flight Opportunities and Biological and Physical Sciences programs.

Space Lab Technologies is flying the µG-LilyPond suborbital payload on NS-23 with tiny aquatic plants called duckweed. During the flight, the team will observe how the hydroponic watering and plant harvesting function in microgravity. Space Lab hopes that one day the µg-Lilypond™ growth chamber will feed astronauts in Earth orbit, on the moon, and beyond.

You can hear Space Lab Technologies’ VP Christine Escobar talk about the µG-LilyPond in episode 11 of Gardeners of the Galaxy.

The experiment from Honeybee Robotics doesn’t involve plants, but is on a topic of interest to future space gardeners. ASSET is a testbed designed to study the strength of planetary