Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is heading back to the launch pad again early Tuesday to send its New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed space mission for the first time in 15 months.
Monday’s first launch attempt ended with a postponement, due to a ground system issue that needed troubleshooting at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas.
The second attempt is scheduled for no earlier than 10:37 a.m. CT (8:37 a.m. PT), depending on weather and technical readiness. Blue Origin will provide streaming video coverage of the countdown, launch and landing via its website starting at T-minus-20 minutes.
This mission, known as NS24, will send 33 science payloads to the edge of space and back, providing a few minutes of zero gravity for research purposes. It’s essentially a do-over for a flight in September 2022 that ended prematurely due to a malfunction of the New Shepard booster’s hydrogen-fueled rocket engine.
No people were on the spacecraft for that NS23 mission, no injuries were reported on the ground, and New Shepard’s escape system worked as designed to push the capsule away from the booster for a safe, parachute-aided landing. Nevertheless, the anomaly led to the suspension of Blue Origin launches and a yearlong investigation overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.
This September, the FAA closed the investigation and required Blue Origin to take 21 corrective actions — including a redesign of the booster’s engine and nozzle as well as changes in procedures. Blue Origin began making the fixes even before the FAA issued the investigation’s findings, setting the stage for NS24.
More than half of the science payloads for NS24 have been developed with support from NASA. Others have been built by schools, universities and other education-oriented organizations. Among the payloads to be reflown is an experiment from Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin, which will study the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions.
The New Shepard capsule is also carrying 38,000 postcards that have been submitted — on paper and online — by students through a program organized by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational nonprofit group.
If NS24 goes well, that’s expected to smooth the way for Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard flights in the months ahead. Since mid-2021, 31 people — including notables such as Star Trek actor William Shatner and Jeff Bezos himself — have taken suborbital space trips without incident. Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, has said that she hopes to lead an all-woman space mission early next year.
New Shepard’s return to flight comes amid an organizational handoff at Blue Origin, with veteran aerospace executive Bob Smith passing the CEO reins to former Amazon executive Dave Limp.
During an interview with podcast host Lex Fridman, Bezos said he wants Blue Origin to speed up progress on projects such as its orbital-class New Glenn rocket and its Blue Moon lunar lander. “Blue Origin needs to be much faster,” Bezos said. “It’s one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. Blue Origin needs me right now. … We are going to become the world’s most decisive company, across any industry.”
Bezos told Fridman that Limp would help him get the job done. “He’s amazing,” Bezos said. “So we’re super lucky to have Dave, and you’re going to see us move faster there.”
This is an updated version of a report first published at 5:59 a.m. PT today.
