Blue Origin plans to return to New Shepard flights next week

With a post on social media, Blue Origin announced its return to flight for the New Shepard rocket. Flying science equipment and postcards from its charity Club for the Future, launch is set for no earlier than December 18.

After a year, Blue origin returns to flight

Blue Origin announced via posts on social media that the company will attempt its next New Shepard flight on December 18. “We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission. #NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads as well as 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space,” the post read.

This will be the return to flight since NS-23 experienced an anomaly mid-launch, causing the capsule to trigger its abort system. With the loss of a booster, the company has taken the last year to investigate and mitigate the cause of the failure.

In March, Blue Origin shared the root cause of the failure. It stemmed from inside the BE-3 engine used on the New Shepard booster. The overheating and burn through of the engine nozzle caused sideways thrust that pushed the rocket off its trajectory.

The FAA mishap investigation remained open until September, however, the launch company remained quiet about when it would fly until now.

As expected, the mission will not be crewed and will fly science experiments for various research institutions. Details have not been released yet as to what experiments will be flying on the NS-24 mission.

Along side those experiments will be 38,000 postcards from Blue Origin’s STEM outreach charity Club for the Future. Since its inception the group has allowed anyone to design a postcard that will be flown to space and then returned to you.

Usually you can do this at events where Club for the Future have a booth, but the group also has instructions on how to create your own and mail it to Blue Origin online.

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Back on top, for at least a few more years

With this announcement of New Shepard returning to flight, it’s also a return to Blue Origin being the top option for sub-orbital space tourism. Although there is a pretty big asterisk to that.

Virgin Galactic will soon retire its VSS Unity spaceplane as it focuses on developing the new “Delta Class” spaceplanes. This will take several years, possibly as late as 2026.

While a few flights are left until sometime next year, unless you have some serious cash, you’ll have to wait for the new planes for your chance to fly with Virgin. In the mean time, New Shepard will now be your option for space flights.

However at best, Blue Origin was only able to fly a handful of times a year while Virgin was launching monthly. When the Delta Class spaceplanes come online, we expect them to launch at a even quicker rate than Unity.

There is obviously a lot more than just launch rate that will make these companies successful. Customers aren’t just simply buying tickets to flights like you would on a commercial airline. Each ticket from both companies come with month long programs that include retreats ahead of the flight. And when you’re talking about people that have this much disposable income, who knows what reasons why they go with one rather than the other.

Anyways, if launch rate is going to be a key to determining who is a better launcher, at least by public opinion that is the metric used, Blue Origin has had a year to hopefully work on improvements.