New Shepard’s 24th mission is on track for launch on Monday, December 18th at 08:30 CST/ 14:30 UTC. The West Texas launch site will be home to a stream featuring the takeoff, showing a fully-laden New Shepard take to the skies to rack up its scientific payload count. Once in flight, it will have brought more than 150 projects into space, with the narrow majority of them being sourced from NASA programs. The rest are a mix, some from K-12 schools, colleges, and STEM groups.
The recent International Council of Air Shows convention brought out the best and brightest in the field, setting a "positive tone for the upcoming North American air show seasons in 2024 and beyond." The convention was held at the ritzy Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, with about 1,500 attendees present. That number included 781 event organizers from 188 distinct air shows, primarily from the US and Canada. The schedule for the next airshow season in North America was largely solidified throughout the 4-day conference, with announcements filling the wire throughout the week.
Sierra Space's "Dream Chaser", the "world's only commercial spaceplane", has begun its final testing phase ahead of planned operations in 2024. Dream Chaser nestled into the NASA test facility to join Sierra's cargo module, the Shooting Star. Both will be unified in a launch stack for testing in the coming weeks, evaluating their resilience to forces, vibration, and wear. NASA's Mechanical Vibration Facility will provide "rigorous" testing to emulate the "extreme conditions of launch vibrations" using a large shaker table.
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