The payload among others includes tens of thousands of postcards (source)
Among the NS-23 payloads are tens of thousands of postcards from Blue Origin’s nonprofit, Club for the Future, whose Postcards to Space program gives people across the world access to space on New Shepard. The Club’s mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM for the benefit of Earth. The postcards on this mission come from 19 Club for the Future grant recipients and their partners, including Guayaquil’s Space Society in Ecuador, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, students who participated in STEM NOLA and Kenner Planetarium events in New Orleans, and schools across Kentucky
I guess you could say the postcards were marked RTS?
There are a variety of experiments that involve testing things in the weightless environment or exposing instruments to space which do not require the long duration of an orbital mission. These have traditionally flown on sounding rockets or in zero-g parabolic airplane flights (for those that don’t need exposure to space), but a craft like New Shepard provides a longer period of weightlessness, a gentler ride than a sounding rocket, and the ability to recover the payload, which many sounding rockets do not. NASA has a Flight Opportunities program which funded some of the payloads on this flight.
This flight carried 36 payloads, “24 of which are from K-12 schools, universities and private organizations focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)”. Here is a description of some of the payloads from Everyday Astronaut.
Blue Origin has the ability to provide payloads a simulated lunar or Mars gravity environment by rolling the capsule at a rate where centrifugal force provides artificial gravity for experiments fastened to the capsule walls. This is something which is not practical on sounding rocket or vomit comet flights, or on the International Space Station.
Blue Origin has released their report on the NS-23 failure on 2023-03-24, “Blue Origin NS-23 Findings”. The summary is:
The direct cause of the NS-23 mishap was a thermo-structural failure of the engine nozzle. The resulting thrust misalignment properly triggered the Crew Capsule escape system, which functioned as designed throughout the flight.
The Crew Capsule and all payloads onboard landed safely and will be flown again.
All systems designed to protect public safety functioned as planned. There were no injuries. There was no damage to ground-based systems, and all debris was recovered in the designated hazard area.
Blue Origin expects to return to flight soon, with a re-flight of the NS-23 payloads.
The direct cause is described as follows:
Aided by onboard video and telemetry, flight hardware recovered from the field, and the work of Blue Origin’s materials labs and test facilities, the MIT [Mishap Investigation Team] determined the direct cause of the mishap to be a structural fatigue failure of the BE-3PM engine nozzle during powered flight. The structural fatigue was caused by operational temperatures that exceeded the expected and analyzed values of the nozzle material. Testing of the BE-3PM engine began immediately following the mishap and established that the flight configuration of the nozzle operated at hotter temperatures than previous design configurations. Forensic evaluation of the recovered nozzle fragments also showed clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures. The fatigue location on the flight nozzle is aligned with a persistent hot streak identified during the investigation.
The MIT determined that design changes made to the engine’s boundary layer cooling system accounted for an increase in nozzle heating and explained the hot streaks present. Blue Origin is implementing corrective actions, including design changes to the combustion chamber and operating parameters, which have reduced engine nozzle bulk and hot-streak temperatures. Additional design changes to the nozzle have improved structural performance under thermal and dynamic loads.
