\n<\/p>\n
The old saying \u2014 \u201cPractice makes perfect!\u201d<\/em> \u2014 applies to the Moon too. On Tuesday, NASA gave 17 technologies, instruments, and experiments the chance to practice being on the Moon\u2026 without actually going there. Instead, it was a flight test aboard a vehicle adapted to simulate lunar gravity for approximately two minutes.<\/p>\n The test began on February 4, 2025, with the 10:00 a.m. CST launch of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard reusable suborbital rocket system in West Texas. With support from NASA\u2019s Flight Opportunities program, the company, headquartered in Kent, Washington, enhanced the flight capabilities of its New Shepard capsule to replicate the Moon\u2019s gravity \u2014 which is about one-sixth of Earth\u2019s \u2014 during suborbital flight.<\/p>\n \u201cCommercial companies are critical to helping NASA prepare for missions to the Moon and beyond,\u201d said Danielle McCulloch, program executive of the agency\u2019s Flight Opportunities program. \u201cThe more similar a test environment is to a mission\u2019s operating environment, the better. So, we provided substantial support to this flight test to expand the available vehicle capabilities, helping ensure technologies are ready for lunar exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s Flight Opportunities program not only secured \u201cseats\u201d for the technologies aboard this flight \u2014\u00a0for 16 payloads inside the capsule plus one mounted externally \u2014 but also contributed to New Shepard\u2019s upgrades to provide the environment needed to advance their readiness for the Moon and other space exploration missions.<\/p>\n \u201cAn extended period of simulated lunar gravity is an important test regime for NASA,\u201d said Greg Peters, program manager for Flight Opportunities. \u201cIt\u2019s crucial to reducing risk for innovations that might one day go to the lunar surface.\u201d<\/p>\n One example is the LUCI (Lunar-g Combustion Investigation) payload, which seeks to understand material flammability on the Moon compared to Earth. This is an important component of astronaut safety in habitats on the Moon and could inform the design of potential combustion devices there. With support from the Moon to Mars Program Office within the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, researchers at NASA\u2019s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, together with Voyager Technologies, designed LUCI to measure flame propagation directly during the Blue Origin flight.<\/p>\n The rest of the NASA-supported payloads on this Blue Origin flight included seven from NASA\u2019s Game Changing Development program that seek to mitigate the impact of lunar dust and to perform construction and excavation on the lunar surface. Three other NASA payloads tested instruments to detect subsurface water on the Moon as well as to study flow physics and phase changes in lunar gravity. Rounding out the manifest were payloads from Draper, Honeybee Robotics, Purdue University, and the University of California in Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n Flight Opportunities is part of the agency\u2019s Space Technology Mission Directorate and is managed at NASA\u2019s Armstrong Flight Research Center.<\/p>\n