Blue Origin’s New Shepard is formally again in motion, with the corporate in the present day efficiently launching the suborbital rocket for the primary time in additional than 15 months.
The rocket lifted off from Blue Origin’s launch website in West Texas at round 10:42 AM native time. The mission, dubbed NS-24 to mark the 24th launch of the car, carried 33 payloads a swathe of consumers together with NASA, Honeybee Robotics and non-profit analysis and engineering agency Draper. The mission efficiently concluded after a interval of ten minutes, when the capsule safely returned to Earth after a short suborbital flight.
The corporate was initially concentrating on Monday for the mission however scrubbed the launch attributable to a “ground system issue.” Blue Origin didn’t elaborate additional on the precise subject.
That is the primary time Blue Origin has launched New Shepard since September 2022, when an anomaly triggered an auto-abort mid-flight. The capsule – which was carrying no folks on the time – was ejected from the booster and landed on Earth underneath parachutes, however the booster was destroyed. The corporate found that an engine nozzle subject that precipitated higher-than-normal working temperatures.
Blue flew New Shepard 4 instances in 2022, together with the failed launch. In an announcement issued after launch, Blue’s SVP of the New Shepard program, Phil Joyce, stated that the corporate would fly the rocket much more usually subsequent yr: “Demand for New Shepard flights continues to grow and we’re looking forward to increasing our flight cadence in 2024,” he stated.
Erika Wagner, a senior director at Blue Origin, stated on the launch livestream that the corporate was trying ahead to flying the subsequent crewed flight “soon.” Little doubt potential prospects are heaving a sigh of aid seeing one other profitable flight notched in Blue’s belt.
Rewatch the launch right here:
