The vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961, because it replicates that early, brief visit to the vacuum beyond the planet. Blue Origin has built out an extensive test facility there, far from heavily populated areas, as well as the home of its space tourism business. The New Shepard launch will take place in Van Horn, Texas, about two hours south of El Paso. But two successful flights in January and April this year apparently answered any lingering questions. ![]() Blue Origin refused to say what it was testing, or learning about the vehicle. It carried experiments that needed exposure to a few minutes of near-weightlessness in microgravity, but no people, despite plans to start selling tickets in 2019. While Musk’s SpaceX operates reusable vehicles-the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon crew capsule-that carry US astronauts to the International Space Station, an order of magnitude more difficult than flying them to the edge of space, the New Shepard continued to fly one or twice a year. The New Shepard won the prestigious Collier Trophy in 2016, recognizing the greatest American aerospace accomplishment that year, after the same vehicle flew five times.Īnd then nothing happened. And both agree building spacecraft that are reusable is the way to do it. ![]() It was seen as a first step towards bigger things, and an ideal vehicle for luxury tourist flights just out of the atmosphere.īezos, and his rival in space business, Elon Musk, both believe the key to doing more beyond earth’s atmosphere is making it cheaper to get there. But with the 2015 debut of the New Shepard rocket, Blue’s engineers had a major success on their hands: A vehicle capable of carrying six passengers some 100 km (62 miles) into the sky, but more importantly, one that returns safely to be reused again and again. ![]() It took Blue Origin a long time to evolve from an organization that invited experts to space-themed barbecues to a company that actually developed space hardware.
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