Blue Origin returns with successful New Shepard flight

After a one day delay to fix a technical issue, Blue Origin successfully launched its NS-24 mission Tuesday morning. This marked the company’s first flight in over 15 months after NS-23 suffered an anomaly mid-flight.

Blue Origin is back in the game

With an official launch time of 10:42:28 AM CT, thank you Blue Origin for sharing these details with us, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifted off from its launch site in West Texas. On top were science experiments, some of which originally flown on NS-23, and post cards from Club for the Future.

This was Blue Origin’s first launch in nearly 15 months after a lengthly investigation went underway after NS-23’s launch failure. In typical Blue Origin fashion, we aren’t sure if this was a brand new booster or not, but obviously the company had to build a new one after losing the previous one.

The launch performed as expected. The New Shepard “propulsion module,” or what everyone else is calling just the booster, launched the capsule up to an altitude of 347,601 feet above ground level.

This allowed the experiments inside to receive a few minutes of micro-gravity before touching back down in the Texas desert. The total mission time from launch to landing for NS-24 was just over 10 minutes.

While Blue Origin was unable to fly this year, its competitor, Virgin Galactic, took over and pretty much dominated any launch cadence the Jeff Bezos owned company ever did. Virgin hopes to launch almost weekly with its new Delta Class spaceplanes expected to come online in 2025 or 2026. We aren’t exactly sure what Blue Origin’s launch goals are but they have in the past only launched every few months.

However there is more than just launch rate that goes into the success, or at least I’m certain there will be as this is a new market that will possibly require new metrics.

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Crewed flight coming next

At the end of the stream the Blue Origin hosts closed out the broadcast announcing that next up will be a crewed flight of New Shepard.

Given this was the first flight post failure, NS-24 was never going to have crew on board. However, now that the team has returned to flight, Blue Origin hopes to go over data to ensure the upgrades worked so they can go back to flying ticket holders.

Blue Origin’s list of ticket holders is not public but has usually been filled with high wealth individuals, sometimes paired with celebrities or high ranking Blue Origin employees. We have yet to see any researchers make flights on New Shepard yet, unlike Virgin who can have dedicated missions for both private and government institutions.

The only flight we know could take place in the future is one led by Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez. Not to disrespect her with just that title, Sánchez is also an accomplished TV host and helicopter pilot. With that background, she has a passion to increase the number of female pilots.

The mission would be the first all female New Shepard flight (first all female spaceflight?) and per the interview with the Wall Street Journal, could take place by “early 2024.”

That was announced in January so timelines could have shifted since then, but usually Blue Origin is very public about their next missions a few weeks before they happen. So sit tight.