LIMESTONE, Maine — A small rocket, engineered in Maine, is set to liftoff from Aroostook County.
The Brunswick, Maine-based startup bluShift Aerospace will launch its first Stardust suborbital rocket prototype.
Liftoff was originally scheduled for 9 a.m. but due to weather it's been postponed to Noon or later. If it can't take place Friday, it will be postponed to another day. Regardless, it will happen from the runway on the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, in Aroostook County.
The Stardust Gen.1 rocket stands 20 feet tall and can carry just over 17 pounds into the sky.
It is powered by bluShift's hybrid rocket motor called MAREVL (Modular Adaptable Rocket Engine for Vehicle Launch).
The motor runs on a proprietary biofuel that is non-toxic, carbon-neutral, and "can be cheaply sourced from farms across America," the company told reporters from SPACE.com.
Stardust's first launch will carry three small payloads to an altitude of 4,000 feet and then parachute back to Earth. It's a critical first step in bluShift's plans to build a family of rockets to launch small satellites into orbit. The entire flight should last about a minute and a half.
The first Stardust rocket is carrying a trio of experiments, each from a different customer. They include a CubeSat prototype built by Falmouth High School and Maine university students carrying a GoPro camera, radio transmitter, and other sensors; an experiment from Kellogg's Research Labs of Nashua, New Hampshire to test the vibration-dampening effects of the nickel-titanium shape memory alloy nitinol; and a CubeSat enclosure filled with stroopwafels — the Dutch wafer cookies — being flown by the software development company Rocket Insights as an homage to their Amsterdam-based parent company Dept.
NEWS CENTER Maine will update this story as we learn more.
