During her presentation at the Space Access ’07 conference this afternoon, Michelle Murray of FAA/AST mentioned that Blue Origin had a successful* test flight yesterday (March 22), their second under their experimental permit and the first since their initial flight in November. No other information about the flight is available, but I’ll update this as information comes out.
* “successful” here means successful in protecting public safety, the FAA’s primary concern for these tests. There has been no information released about the success of the flight itself.
Update: I fired off a quick query to Blue Origin’s media contact and got the following boilerplate reply: “Blue Origin’s policy is not to comment on or confirm whether any test flights are scheduled or conducted.”
Hi, Jeff … As I told Clark, wish I was there. I did get a little bit more info about the test from unofficial sources this morning and wrapped it up with other rumblings (including your report from SA 07) on Cosmic Log:
http://www.cosmiclog.com