Third Time's the Charm Following Two Scratched Launches

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched its brand-new New Shepard rocket for an uncrewed flight test on October 23. The spacecraft aims to expand the company’s capacity for commercial suborbital space trips.

After a few short delays, the new-New-Shepard took flight from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in western Texas at 10:27 am local time. The capsule separated from the booster a few minutes later and soared 62 miles up to reach the Kármán line: an unconfirmed boundary separating Earth's atmosphere from outer space.

The booster headed home and made an autonomous landing on the designated pad, while the capsule parachuted down near the launch site.

New Shepard’s recent flight debuted the program’s second human-rated capsule. It is titled the RSS Karman Line and is intended to carry crews of up to six passengers. This time, however, it hosted seven of the spacecraft’s twelve cargo payloads. The other five were on the booster.

These payloads included new navigation systems developed for the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets, two LiDAR sensors for the company’s lunar landing system, and ultra-wideband proximity sensors. The ship also contained a set of small-scale black monolith replicas based on the “2001: A Space Odyssey” movie and thousands of student-made postcards that will soon be returned to their designers.

“We look forward to welcoming crew onboard RSS Kármán Line soon and offering the New Shepard flight experience to people across the world from all backgrounds,” commented Phil Joyce, SVP of New Shepard. “On every New Shepard mission, we’ve witnessed people return to Earth changed by this experience, and with a renewed sense of commitment to preserve our planet.”

This marks the 27th flight of New Shepard rockets since 2015. Eight of these were crewed, bringing a total of 43 passengers.

The USS Karman Line and its booster made two previous launch attempts before this success. They were both called off due to vehicle and system errors that surfaced during countdown.

FMI: www.blueorigin.com