Blue Origin lofts new New Shepard capsule into space for test run before carrying crew
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture successfully sent a brand-new New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed shakedown cruise today, with the aim of increasing the company’s capacity to take people on suborbital space trips.
The capsule, dubbed RSS Karman Line, carried payloads instead of people when it lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 10:27 a.m. CT (8:27 a.m. PT). But if all the data collected during the 10-minute certification flight checks out, it won’t be long before crews climb aboard for similar flights.
“Hopefully very soon we’ll see astronauts on board this vehicle,” launch commentator Joel Eby said after the capsule’s touchdown. “I want to say ‘welcome to the fleet’ for this brand-new vehicle.”
New Shepard spacecraft have now flown 27 times since 2015, with this mission designated NS-27. Eight of those missions have carried a total of 43 crew members in a human-rated capsule called RSS First Step. (RSS stands for “reusable spaceship.”) RSS Karman Line, which is named after the internationally accepted 100-kilometer boundary of outer space, should open the way for Blue Origin to pick up the pace of crewed flights going forward.
Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin says Karman Line incorporates a set of technology upgrades to improve the vehicle’s performance and reusability, The spacecraft also sports a simplified livery that does away with the giant feather that was previously painted on the booster and capsule. Eby said the new color scheme will make it easier for the spaceship to be touched up between missions.
This was the third time that Karman Line and its booster were brought out to the launch pad. Two previous attempts had to be called off due to glitches that cropped up during the countdown.
A couple of delays marked today’s countdown, but once the booster’s hydrogen-fueled rocket engine lit up, the certification mission followed the playbook for suborbital space trips. Minutes after liftoff, the capsule separated from its booster and rose above 100 kilometers (62-miles) in altitude, making good on its name.
The booster flew itself back to an autonomous landing on a pad not far from its launch tower, while the capsule floated down on the end of parachutes for its own touchdown amid the scrubland surrounding the launch site.
Twelve payloads were packed aboard the rocket ship — five on the booster, and seven more inside the capsule. Those payloads included new navigation systems that Blue Origin has developed for New Shepard and its orbital-class New Glenn rocket; two different LIDAR sensors for Blue Origin’s lunar landing system; and ultra-wideband proximity operations sensors funded by NASA’s TechFlights program.
One of the payloads was a set of small-scale reproductions of the black monoliths from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The monoliths were flown on behalf of Spacemanic for a special edition printed by Amaranthine Books.
The mission also carried tens of thousands of student-designed postcards on behalf of the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational nonprofit organization. The “Postcards to Space” program collects the cards from kids, sends them to space and back on New Shepard flights, and then returns them to the kids as keepsakes.