Blue Origin Successfully Completes its Seventh Human Spaceflight and New Shepard’s 25th Mission to Space, NS-25
Today’s mission marked Blue Origin’s first private space tourist mission since 2022.
(Van Horn, Texas) Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket lifted off form Launch Site One in West Texas this morning at 10:36am, launching New Shepard’s 25th mission to date, and Blue Origin’s first private space tourist mission since 2022 and seventh human flight to date.
The New Shepard capsule landed successfully shortly after reaching space; photo courtesy of Blue Origin.
New Shepard’s crew includes six people: Ed Dwight, a former U.S. Air Force Captain and the U.S.’s first-ever Black astronaut candidate (selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961); venture capitalist Mason Angel; Sylvain Chiron, the founder of French craft brewery Brasserie Mont Blanc; entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess; retired accountant Carol Schaller; and pilot and aviator Gopi Thotakura.
Per Space.com, the six passengers onboard experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space, from a maximum altitude of around 65.7 miles (105 km). The trip ended with a parachute-aided touchdown in the Texas dust at 10:47 a.m. ET (1447 GMT), approximately ten minutes after liftoff.
Today’s mission marks the seventh human flight for Blue Origin’s New Shepard program and the 25th flight in the rocket’s history (with the remaining 18 missions being robotic research efforts); to date, the program has flown 31 humans above the Kármán line (which is conventionally defined as the ‘edge of space,’ where traditional aircraft can no longer fly), according to Blue Origin.
Today marks the first mission Blue Origin has flown in 2024; the company completed its 24th mission to space – its 24th New Shepard flight and 13th payload mission – on December 19, 2023.
The last crewed Blue Origin Flight, NS-22, was flown in August 2022; one month later, during an uncrewed research mission, New Shepard suffered an anomaly as its first-stage booster was destroyed – although the vehicle’s capsule returned to Earth safely under parachutes. Thereafter, New Shepard flights were suspended as engineers addressed the anomaly – attributed to a “thermo-structural failure” of the nozzle on the rocket’s single BE-3PM engine – and suborbital flights resumed in December 2023 with the uncrewed NS-24 mission, per Space.com.
New Shepard is a reusable rocket that touches down vertically shortly after takeoff, with the capsule and its passengers – when crewed – returning to Earth under parachutes approximately 11 minutes after liftoff. The rocket’s passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness as they view Earth from space – while prices for New Shepard flights have not been release, competitor Virgin Galactic’s seats start at $450,000 per seat.
