WASHINGTON – Blue Origin has announced plans to launch its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on its first flight since a mishap more than 15 months ago.
Blue Origin announced on social media on 12 December that it will launch its New Shepard vehicle from its West Texas test site on 18 December at the earliest. The vehicle will carry 33 experiments as well as 38,000 postcards from Club for the Future, the company’s non-profit educational organisation. The flight will be unmanned.
The mission, dubbed NS-24, would be the first for New Shepard since a mishap on a September 2022 flight, NS-23, which was also unmanned. A problem with the vehicle’s main engine triggered the crew capsule’s abort motor about a minute after liftoff. The capsule landed safely, but the booster crashed.
Blue Origin said in March that it had completed its investigation into the mishap and found that the BE-3PM engine in the propulsion module had suffered a structural failure of its nozzle. This failure was related to thermal damage caused by operating at higher than designed temperatures.
However, it took six months for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation to complete its investigation into the accident, identifying 21 corrective actions that the company needed to take before flying again. These actions ranged from engineering changes to the engine to unspecified “organisational changes”.
When the FAA closed the investigation on 26 September, Blue Origin said it would resume flights “soon” but did not offer a more specific timeframe. In June, then-Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said the company was ready to resume flights “within the next few weeks”. Smith announced on 25 September that he would step down as CEO in December, and the company is now led by former Amazon executive Dave Limp.
The company did not elaborate on the long delay in getting New Shepard back in the air. The delay has led to speculation that the company may be de-emphasising or phasing out New Shepard to free up resources for other company priorities. Since the vehicle’s last flight in September 2022, the company has won a NASA contract to develop a version of its Blue Moon lunar lander for NASA’s Human Landing System programme, unveiled an orbital transfer vehicle called Blue Ring, and continued work on its New Glenn orbital launch vehicle and Orbital Reef commercial space station projects.
During the hiatus in New Shepard launches, Virgin Galactic began commercial service with its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, VSS Unity, completing six flights in less than six months, five of which were commercial. However, Virgin Galactic announced on 8 November that it will transition from monthly to quarterly flights of Unity in the first half of 2024, and then cease flights altogether to ensure it has sufficient resources to complete development of its new Delta-class suborbital vehicles.
