Blue Origin gets a crew dress rehearsal
Two people are loaded into capsule before its latest unmanned launch
Blue Origin loaded two people into the capsule. They strapped in, checked communications with mission control and prepared to launch from West Texas.
It would be the 15th New Shepard launch outside of Van Horn, a town about two hours southeast of El Paso. This is where Blue Origin plans to fly paying customers. But thus far, only Mannequin Skywalker (who, as the name suggests, is not alive) has taken the 11-minute journey to space and back.
He would be the sole occupant on Wednesday, too, as the Blue Origin employees unloaded 70 minutes before the engine sputtered to life. Blue Origin had never planned to launch people on Wednesday. The company sought only to test the experience its customers would have prior to liftoff.
Still, it brings the 21-yearold company one step closer to putting humans in space.
“Launch Site One is the site from where we’ll soon fly humans,” a Blue Origin spokesperson said in an email. “Incrementally, each one of our 15 missions has been essential to building a safe, reliable vehicle.”
Kent, Wash.-based Blue
Origin was founded in 2000 by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. It broke ground on the West Texas launch site a few years later.
The company has taken a quiet approach to developing its rockets and spacecraft. Blue Origin built and tested numerous New Shepard components for a decade before conducting the first full launch of the reusable system in 2015.
“It’s been very, very quiet. Not flashy,” said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at analytics and engineering firm BryceTech. “It doesn’t really get into the news the way SpaceX does, and they do that on purpose. Very deliberative.”
SpaceX, which has a launch facility in South Texas outside of Brownsville, snags headlines for its battles with federal regulators and its fiery crash landings of prototypes. The SpaceX mantra is a fastpaced cadence of test, fly, fail, fix, test and fly again.
Blue Origin did have a crash landing on its first New Shepard launch, but even that test was considered a success. The rocket booster pushed the capsule to the proper height, and the capsule separated and gently returned to Earth. But the rocket booster did not complete its gentle vertical landing.
“If New Shepard had been a traditional expendable vehicle, this would have been a flawless first test flight,” Bezos said in an April 2015 news release. “Of course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortu
nately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module. … We continue to be big fans of the vertical takeoff, vertical landing architecture.”
New Shepard consists of a 60foot-tall rocket booster and a crew capsule that can hold six people.
The combined vehicle launches together for about 2½ minutes. Then the engine shuts off and the capsule separates from the booster to coast above the Kármán line, which is largely identified as the boundary of space 62 miles above the Earth. The booster returns for a controlled, rocketpowered vertical landing. In the spacecraft, which descends more slowly, occupants would have three minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. Parachutes slow it down and then, right before landing, a retro-thrust system creates an air cushion for the capsule.
Since the first New Shepard test flight, Blue Origin has stuck all its rocket booster landings.
On Wednesday’s flight, the crew capsule flew 347,574 feet (nearly 66 miles) above ground level. The fastest velocity during launch was 2,234 mph. The mission lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
After the capsule landed, the Blue Origin employees returned to practice post-flight procedures, including opening the hatch and exiting the capsule.
Its next flight, the 16th launch, could have people on board, Smith said.
“New Shepard has really not encountered any incident,” he said.
Blue Origin is also building a reusable orbital rocket, New Glenn, to launch satellites and other payloads into space.
New Shepard, the suborbital vehicle, is named for the first American in space. NASA astronaut Alan Shepard flew 116 miles high and then came back down.
The flight on May 5, 1961, lasted about 15½ minutes; Shepard did not circle the Earth.
Following the same theme, New Glenn is named for the first American to orbit the Earth. NASA astronaut John Glenn circled the globe three times in a Feb. 20, 1962, flight that lasted nearly five hours.
The New Glenn rocket has not yet launched into space. Its first flight could be in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Blue Origin is also building a lunar lander that NASA could use in its Artemis program to lower the first woman and next man to the moon.
In April 2020, NASA named three companies that would design and develop human landing systems. Blue Origin, the prime contractor for its lander, is partnering with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. SpaceX was also selected to design a lander, and Dynetics, a company that has worked with NASA for decades and was acquired by Leidos Holdings last year, is partnering with more than 25 contractors for the third lander.
NASA has not yet announced which companies will progress to the next stage of development.
Launching people would be a momentous milestone as companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic seek to make space more accessible. Flying people will also be a big source of revenue for suborbital spaceflight.
But there is more demand for launching satellites into orbit, Smith said. And developing a lunar lander that NASA pays to use when exploring the moon could generate long-term future revenue.
“The focus of the company seems to be more so on New Glenn and the lunar landing system,” Smith said. “That seems to be their primary focus.”