Blue Origin’s New Shepard will be used for private space launches
Blue Origin’s New Shepard will be used for private space launches
Blue Origin, LLC, a private American aerospace company, is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal to dramatically lower costs and increase reliability. The Company develops both rocket propulsion systems for vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) vehicles for access to suborbital and orbital space. Since the founding, the company was very secretive about its plans and emerged from its “self-imposed silence” only after 2015. The company’s name refers to the blue planet, Earth, as the point of origin.
Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos founded the Company in 2000. Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington USA, is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal to dramatically lower costs and increase reliability. The company motto is Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for Step by Step, Ferociously and is spending 1 billion USD a year, funded by Jeff Bezos’ sales of Amazon stock. In 2017 and again in 2018, Bezos made public statements that he intends to fund Blue Origin with 1 billion USD per year from sales of his equity in Amazon.
The New Shepard (named after Alan Shepard, who became the first NASA astronaut to take a suborbital trip to space in 1961) is a fully reusable, vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) space vehicle composed of two principal parts: a pressurized crew capsule and a booster rocket that Blue Origin calls a propulsion module, powered using a Blue Origin BE-3 bipropellant rocket engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
The New Shepard 2.0 space capsule is designed to fly six passengers on suborbital space tourism flights, trips that reach space but don’t orbit Earth, and can also carry commercial payloads and experiments. The 15m3 Crew Capsule Escape Solid Rocket Motor (CCE-SRM) is sourced from Aerojet Rocketdyne. After separation two or three parachutes deploy. Just before landing, retro rockets fire.
The Blue Origin’s New Shepard will be used for private space launches, is controlled entirely by on-board computers, without ground control or a human pilot.
On April 29th, 2018 the Company launched its New Shepard 2.0 in a test flight to a target altitude of 351,000 feet (107,000 meters), carrying a dummy astronaut, nicknamed “Mannequin Skywalker”. The altitude that was reached was slightly higher than the company’s typical target of 62 miles (100 km), the altitude widely accepted as the boundary of space.
From liftoff to landing, the test flight lasted about 10 minutes and 19 seconds. After launching the New Shepard capsule, the booster separated and returned to its launch site, where it made a smooth vertical landing. The capsule fell back to Earth a few minutes later, descending on parachutes and cushioning its own landing with retrorockets.