Dr. Bob Dempsey – Director of Flight Operations / New Shepard, Blue Origin

THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS TALK.

This event WILL be live-streamed on YouTube and as a webinar on Zoom. Our speaker will be joining us remotely and sadly, the classroom WILL BE CLOSED for this talk. However, it will be posted to the Westport Astronomical Society’s YouTube channel afterwards.

We welcome back WAS member and our friend Robert “Dr. Bob” Dempsey for his third time to the Westport Astronomical Free Science Lecture Series. This time around we’ll learn some more about New Shepard’s suborbital program. You can see some of Dr. Bob’s other talks that are archived on the WAS YouTube channel. In September 2021, the former NASA Flight Director gave a talk on Tales From The Trenches – When Things Go Wrong in Space and in 2023 returned for a great talk on The Blue Screen of Death – The near loss of the ISS. Dr. Bob has a new gig now that he’s no longer with NASA, he’s the Director of Flight Operations / New Shepard, Blue Origin

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What goes up, must come down:  Private Spaceflight in the era of “new space”

Blue Origin’s vision is as grandiose as it is audacious:  Millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth. Dr. Dempsey will talk about how a company that sends scientific payloads or paying customers into space for a couple of minutes is building the infrastructure to achieve that vision. He will talk about the sub orbital new Shepard flights and their stepping stone to the New Glenn rocket which will be taking vehicles to space stations and the moon.

Dr. Bob Dempsey received his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Toledo in 1991. He went on to both observe with, and operate, the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1997 he joined NASA’s International Space Station program where he controlled the computer and communication systems on the ISS. In 2005 he was selected as a Flight Director (call sign: Galileo). In this role he supported numerous Space Shuttle assembly missions, space walks, rendezvous and dockings of autonomous or crewed vehicles and supported many shifts in Mission Control. For 10 years he led the operations team that developed and operated the Boeing Starliner crewed vehicle. In 2022 he retired from NASA and joined Blue Origin serving as the Director of Mission Systems and Flight Operations for the Orbital Reef space station program.

The July Cal‘s Corner
will feature a galaxy that may have you on edge.