Ars: Blue Origin could return to flight as soon as next month

According to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, We might finally see a Blue Origin rocket launch after a year of down time. The flight would be the company’s first since suffering a failure of the New Shepard booster which led to the loss of the booster.

NS-24 NET early October according to sources

According to two sources familiar with Blue Origin’s launch schedule, a redo of NS-23’s uncrewed scientific mission will be launched in early October. The return to flight mission has yet to be announced by the company but from from these sources via Berger.

Last year Blue Origin suffered its first inflight failure of its New Shepard rocket. The suborbital uncrewed mission carried several experiments looking for just a few minutes of zero gravity. However, shortly after max-q, the peak of maximum aerodynamic forces, the booster suffered a failure in its BE-3’s engine.

In March the company shared its findings as to what caused the launch failure and confirmed the engine was the cause. Since then it has been radio silent from Blue Origin on the status of its next launch. In the mean time, Blue has received its much coveted Human Landing Contract from NASA for future Artemis missions.

Blue Origin’s NS-24, or whatever they will call it, will supposedly be a reflight of the experiments that flew on NS-23. Most likely confirming while the capsule did experience microgravity after the abort, they did not successful perform their experiments.

A rather unique aspect compared to its competitor, Virgin Galactic, that even in a booster failure the capsule can fire its abort motor to save it from destruction. As we witness during NS-23, that motor is engaged for both crewed and uncrewed flights.

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Can Blue Origin meet its competitor’s rate?

Speaking of competitors, Virgin Galactic has already announced its fourth commercial flight for next month. That would continue it’s five month streak of monthly launches, a rate Blue Origin didn’t even meet when it was launching all last year.

With the loss of NS-23’s booster it’s unclear how many boosters Blue Origin has. Previously, the company used one booster for uncrewed missions and one for crewed flights. You would assume it would build a new booster to replace NS-23’s, however the secretive company has yet to confirm anything.

Both companies have a large backlog of ticket holders to get through, something neither provider will get through for a few years. Until that backlog is cleared, which Galactic’s goes way back until 2006, direct competition between the two will be minimal.

Blue Origin has always been more cautious with its approach to everything, but maybe we’ll see a change in launch rate due to its counter part absolutely schooling them at the moment.