With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This was the first flight of Blue Origin\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The flight on Tuesday also didn\u2019t carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019 space company, lofted 33 payloads for NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin\u2019s capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company\u2019s nonprofit.<\/p>\n
For Tuesday\u2019s return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin\u2019s capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cA special thank you to all of our customers who flew important science today and the students who contributed postcards to advance our future of living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,\u201d said Phil Joyce, Blue Origin\u2019s senior vice president for the New Shepard program, in a statement. \u201cDemand for New Shepard flights continues to grow and we\u2019re looking forward to increasing our flight cadence in 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took 15 months for Blue Origin to return to flight with New Shepard, but Tuesday\u2019s successful launch puts the company on a path to resuming human missions. Most of Blue Origin\u2019s customers for these suborbital flights have been wealthy individuals or special guests invited to strap in for a ride to space. Blue Origin\u2019s passengers have included Bezos, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and actor William Shatner, eager for a taste of spaceflight. New Shepard passengers experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin hasn\u2019t disclosed its ticket price, but seats on a New Shepard flight last year reportedly sold for $1.25 million. This is more than double the price for a seat on Virgin Galactic\u2019s suborbital spaceship.<\/p>\n
So when will Blue Origin start flying people again? \u201cFollowing a thorough review of today\u2019s mission, we look forward to flying our next crewed flight soon,\u201d said Erika Wagner, a longtime Blue Origin manager who co-hosted the company\u2019s webcast of Tuesday\u2019s flight.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
But \u201csoon\u201d is a conveniently vague term. In March, when Blue Origin announced the results of its investigation into last year\u2019s launch failure, the company said it would return to flight \u201csoon\u201d with New Shepard. Nine months later, New Shepard finally flew again.<\/p>\n
Engineers probing the New Shepard accident last year concluded a nozzle failure on the rocket\u2019s BE-3PM was the direct cause of the launch failure. The engine operated at higher temperatures than expected, leading to thermal damage to the nozzle, Blue Origin announced earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin said corrective actions to address the cause of the failure included design changes to the engine combustion chamber and adjustments to operating parameters. These changes were expected to reduce operating temperatures. Engineers also redesigned parts of the nozzle to help it better handle thermal and dynamic loads, the company said.<\/p>\n
In September, the Federal Aviation Administration closed its investigation into the New Shepard launch failure, and Blue Origin targeted an uncrewed return-to-flight mission in early October. However, Ars previously reported that an additional two-month delay was caused by an issue with certifying an engine part intended for flight.<\/p>\n
The long-term grounding of the New Shepard rocket caused speculation about the program\u2019s future, particularly at a time when Blue Origin is ramping up preparations for the inaugural flight of the much larger orbital-class New Glenn launcher. Last year\u2019s launch failure left Blue Origin with just one New Shepard booster in its inventory\u2014the rocket that made its ninth flight to space on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Before Tuesday\u2019s uncrewed flight, this particular booster has been exclusively used for crewed missions. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t confirmed whether it has another New Shepard rocket in production for human flights.<\/p>\n
But statements from Blue Origin officials Tuesday suggest New Shepard has a future. Wagner said Blue Origin aims to open New Shepard missions to researchers on future flights, allowing scientists to directly work with their experiments in microgravity.<\/p>\n
Dec. 20, 2023: This story was updated to correct a reference to this booster\u2019s previous flights.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin\u2019s 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\u2019s 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,291,25,1250,1490],"class_list":["post-45613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-commercial-space","tag-launch","tag-new-shepard","tag-ns-24"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}