Six people seated in a capsule atop Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket were launched from the company’s remote Van Horn, Texas launch facilities.
The reusable rocket is expected to separate from the capsule and return to land, while the crew capsule will ascend further beyond the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere.
The New Shepard crew includes Ed Dwight, the first Black astronaut candidate who was picked by former US president John Kennedy in 1961 to train as an astronaut, but never flew to space. He is 90.
All passengers, including a venture capitalist and a pilot, are paying customers of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, though Dwight’s seat was sponsored by a space-focused non-profit and a private foundation. Blue Origin has not disclosed how much it charges customers.
The crew members are expected to unfasten their safety belts and float around the gumdrop-shaped pod for a few minutes in the weightlessness of space before the capsule descends back to land under parachutes, capping a mission that would increase Blue Origin’s private astronaut headcount to 37.
The grounding of New Shepard, Blue Origin’s only active rocket, came after a mid-flight failure in September 2022 during an uncrewed research mission. A structural failure in the rocket’s engine nozzle, the company concluded, forced the capsule full of science experiments to abort.
The US Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees launchsite safety and commercial rocket mishaps, examined Blue Origin’s probe into the failure and required the company to take 21 corrective actions, including an engine redesign and “organisational changes”.
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At 90, Star Trek actor William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach space
At 90, Star Trek actor William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach space
New Shepard returned to flight last December with an uncrewed mission, carrying 33 science and research payloads to the edge of space.
While New Shepard is back to flying people, other pressing priorities remain at the company. Chief among them is debuting Blue Origin’s much larger rocket, New Glenn, a reusable heavy-lift rocket designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in the business of launching commercial and government satellites into Earth’s orbit and beyond.
Development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines has been delayed for years, though Blue Origin expects a debut launch from Florida by the end of this year.
Limp, who started as CEO in December, has sought to speed up the company’s production line for BE-4, which is also used by the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket.