An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

NASA has successfully beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video from a record-setting 19 million miles away. The Deep Space Optical Communications experiment, as it is called, is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming HD video from deep space to enable future human missions beyond Earth orbit. From a NASA press release: The [15-second test] video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system's maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent "live" to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA's Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet's greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity's next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche's orbital path, Palomar's telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater's heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. There's also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. "Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections," said Ryan Rogalin, the project's receiver electronics lead at JPL. "In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL's DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology -- everyone loves Taters."