New Shepard

New Shepard is a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL), crew-rated suborbital launch vehicle that is being developed by Blue Origin as a commercial system for suborbital space tourism. Blue Origin is owned and led by Amazon.com founder and businessman Jeff Bezos. NASA Silver Snoopy Award winner Robert Smith is the company's chief executive officer.
Rob Meyerson led Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017 and served as its first president.
The name New Shepard makes reference to the first American astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts, who ascended to space on a suborbital trajectory similar to that planned for New Shepard.
Prototype engine and vehicle flights began in 2006, while full-scale engine development started in the early 2010s and was complete by 2015. Uncrewed flight testing of the complete New Shepard vehicle (propulsion module and space capsule) began in 2015.
On 23 November 2015, after reaching altitude (outer space), the suborbital New Shepard booster successfully performed a powered vertical soft landing, the first time a suborbital booster rocket had returned from space to make a successful vertical landing. The test program continued in 2016 and 2017 with four additional test flights made with the same vehicle ("NS-2") in 2016 and the first test flight of the new "NS-3" vehicle made in 2017.
Blue Origin planned their first crewed test flight to occur in 2019, however this is now planned for 2021, and has since announced that tickets would begin to be sold for commercial flights up to 7 people. The first passenger seat to fly on 20 July 2021 is being auctioned.
History.
Early Blue Origin vehicle and engine development.
The first development vehicle of the New Shepard development program was a sub-scale demonstration vehicle named "Goddard", built in 2006 following earlier engine development efforts by Blue Origin. Goddard made its first flight on 13 November 2006.
The Goddard launch vehicle was assembled at the Blue Origin facility near Seattle, Washington. Also in 2006, Blue Origin started the process to build an aerospace testing and operations center on a portion of the Corn Ranch, a land parcel Bezos purchased north of Van Horn, Texas. Blue Origin Project Manager Rob Meyerson has said that they selected Texas as the launch site particularly because of the state's historical connections to the aerospace industry, although that industry is not located near the planned launch site, and the vehicle will not be manufactured in Texas.
On the path to developing New Shepard, a crew capsule was also needed, and design was begun on a space capsule in the early 2000s. One development milestone along the way became public. On 19 October 2012, Blue Origin conducted a successful Pad Escape a full-scale suborbital Crew Capsule at its West Texas launch site. For the test, the capsule fired its pusher escape motor and launched from a launch vehicle simulator. The Crew Capsule traveled to an altitude of under active thrust vector control before descending safely by parachute to a soft landing downrange.
In April 2015, Blue Origin announced that they had completed acceptance testing of the BE-3 engine that would power the larger New Shepard vehicle. Blue also announced that they intended to begin flight testing of the New Shepard later in 2015, with initial flights occurring as frequently as monthly, with "a series of dozens of flights over the extent of the suborbital test program [taking] a couple of years to complete". The same month, the FAA announced that the regulatory paperwork for the test program had already been filed and approved, and test flights were expected to begin before mid-May 2015.
By February 2016, three New Shepard vehicles had been built. The first was lost in a test in April 2015, the second had flown twice (see below), and the third was completing manufacture at the Blue factory in Kent, Washington.
In 2016 the Blue Origin team were awarded the Collier Trophy for demonstrating rocket booster reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle.
Flight test program.
A multi-year program of flight tests was begun in 2015 and is continuing in 2018. By mid-2016, the test program was sufficiently advanced that Blue Origin has begun flying suborbital research payloads for universities and NASA.
New Shepard 1.
The first flight of the full-scale New Shepard vehicle — NS1 — was conducted on 29 April 2015 during which an altitude of was attained. While the test flight itself was deemed a success, and the capsule was successfully recovered via parachute landing, the booster crash landed and was not recovered due to a failure of hydraulic pressure in the vehicle control system during descent.
New Shepard 2.
The New Shepard 2 (NS2) flight test article propulsion module made five successful flights in 2015 and 2016, being retired after its fifth flight in October 2016.
First vertical soft landing.
After the loss of NS1, a second New Shepard vehicle was built, NS2. Its first flight, and the second test flight of New Shepard overall, was carried out on 23 November 2015, reaching altitude with successful recovery of both capsule and booster stage. The booster rocket successfully performed a powered vertical landing. This was the first such successful rocket vertical landing on Earth after travelling higher than that the McDonnell Douglas DC-XA achieved in the 1990s, and first after sending something into space. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying that Blue Origin planned to use the same architecture of New Shepard for the booster stage of their orbital vehicle.
Second vertical soft landing.
On 22 January 2016, Blue Origin successfully repeated the flight profile of 23 November 2015 launch with the same New Shepard vehicle. New Shepard launched, reached a maximum altitude of , and, after separation, both capsule and launch vehicle returned to the ground intact. This accomplishment demonstrated re-usability of New Shepard and a turnaround time of 61 days.
Third vertical soft landing.
On 2 April 2016, the same New Shepard booster flew for a third time, reaching , before returning successfully.
Fourth vertical soft landing.
On 19 June 2016, the same New Shepard booster flew, now for a fourth time, again reaching over , before returning successfully for a VTVL rocket-powered landing.
The capsule returned once again under parachutes but, this time, did a test descent with only two parachutes before finishing with a brief pulse of retro rocket propulsion to slow the ground impact velocity to . The two parachutes "slowed the descent to 23 mph, as opposed to the usual 16 mph with three parachutes". Crushable bumpers are used to further reduce the landing shock through energy-absorbing deformation.
Fifth and final flight test of NS2: October 2016.
A fifth and final test flight of the NS2 propulsion module was conducted on 5 October 2016. The principal objective was to boost the passenger module to the point of highest dynamic pressure at transonic velocity and conduct a flight test of the in-flight abort system. Due to subsequent buffet and forces that impact the propulsion module after the high-velocity separation of the passenger capsule that are outside the design region of the PM, NS2 was not expected to survive and land, and if it did, Blue had stated that NS2 would be retired and become a museum item.
In the event, the flight test was successful. The abort occurred, and NS2 remained stable after the capsule abort test, completed its ascent to space, and successfully landed for a fifth and final time.
New Shepard 3.
New Shepard 3 (NS3) was modified for increased reusability and improved thermal protection; it includes a redesigned propulsion module and the inclusion of new access panels for more rapid servicing and improved thermal protection. "NS3" is the third propulsion module built. It was completed and shipped to the launch site by September 2017, although parts of it had been built as early as March 2016. Flight tests began in 2017 and continued into 2019. The new Crew Capsule 2.0, featuring windows, is integrated to the NS3. NS3 will only ever be used to fly cargo; no passengers will be carried.
Its initial flight test occurred on 12 December 2017. 
This was the first flight flown under the regulatory regime of a launch license granted by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Previous test flights had flown under an experimental permit, which did not allow Blue to carry cargo for which it is paid for commercially. This made the flight of NS3 the first revenue flight for payloads, and it carried 12 experiments on the flight, as well as a test dummy given the moniker "Mannequin Skywalker."
Since the maiden flight, "Blue Origin has been making updates to the vehicle ... intended primarily to improve operability rather than performance or reliability. Those upgrades took longer than expected" leading to a several-month gap in test flights.
The second test flight took place on 29 April 2018.
The 10th overall New Shepard flight, and the fourth NS3 flight, had originally been planned for December 2018, but was delayed due to "ground infrastructure issues." Following a diagnostics of the initial issue, Blue rescheduled the launch for early 2019, after discovering "additional systems" that needed repairs as well.
The flight launched on 23 January 2019 and successfully flew to space with a maximum altitude of .
New Shepard 4.
New Shepard 4 (NS4), also known as "RSS First Step", was the fourth propulsion module to be built and is expected to be the first to carry human passengers. The vehicle was manufactured in 2018 and moved to the Texas Blue Origin West Texas launch facility in December 2019. The uncrewed maiden launch of NS4 occurred on January 14, 2021.
Commercial flight.
For many years, Blue Origin did not make public statements about the date of the start of commercial flights of New Shepard. This changed in June 2018 when the company announced that while it continued to plan to fly initial internal passengers later in 2018, it would not be selling commercial tickets for New Shepard until 2019. As of April 2021 after fifteen test flights, the company has not yet flown any humans with the rocket. However, the next mission, NS 16 planned for 20 July 2021, is intended to carry crew and a passenger. This seat is being auctioned.
Design.
The New Shepard 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.
The New Shepard is controlled entirely by on-board computers, without ground control or a human pilot.
Crew capsule.
The New Shepard Crew Capsule is a pressurized crew capsule that can carry six people, and supports a "full-envelope" launch escape system that can separate the capsule from the booster rocket anywhere during the ascent. Interior volume of the capsule is . The 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. (see "Fourth vertical soft landing" (19 June 2016) above)
Propulsion module.
The New Shepard propulsion module is powered using a Blue Origin BE-3 bipropellant rocket engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, although some early development work was done by Blue Origin on engines operating with other propellants: the BE-1 engine using monopropellant hydrogen peroxide; and the BE-2 engine using high-test peroxide oxidizer and RP-1 kerosene fuel.
Mission.
The New Shepard is launched vertically from West Texas and then performs a powered flight for about 110 s and to an altitude of . The craft's momentum carries it upward in unpowered flight as the vehicle slows, culminating at an altitude of about . After reaching apogee the vehicle would perform a descent and restart its main engines a few tens of seconds before vertical landing, close to its launch site. The total mission duration is planned to be 10 minutes.
The crewed variant would feature a separate crew module that could separate close to peak altitude, and the propulsion module would perform a powered landing while the crew module would land under parachutes. The crew module can also separate in case of vehicle malfunction or other emergency using solid propellant separation boosters and perform a parachute landing.
Development.
Initial low altitude flight testing (up to ) with subscale prototypes of the New Shepard was scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006. This was later confirmed to have occurred in November 2006 in a press release by Blue Origin. The prototype flight test program could involve up to ten flights. Incremental flight testing to 100 km altitude was planned to be carried out between 2007 and 2009 with increasingly larger and more capable prototypes. The full-scale vehicle was initially expected to be operational for revenue service as early as 2010, though that goal was not met and the first full-scale test flight of a New Shepard vehicle was successfully completed 2015, with commercial service currently aimed for no earlier than 2020. The vehicle could fly up to 50 times a year. Clearance from the FAA was needed before test flights began, and a separate license is needed before commercial operations begin. Blue held a public meeting on 15 June 2006 in Van Horn, as part of the public comment opportunity needed to secure FAA permissions. Blue Origin projected in 2006 that once cleared for commercial operation, they would expect to conduct a maximum rate of 52 launches per year from West Texas. The RLV would carry three or more passengers per operation.
Prototype test vehicle.
An initial flight test of a prototype vehicle took place on 13 November 2006 at 6:30 am local time (12:30 UTC); an earlier flight on the 10th being canceled due to winds. This marked the first developmental test flight undertaken by Blue Origin. The flight was by the first prototype vehicle, known as Goddard. The flight to in altitude was successful. Videos are available on the Blue Origin website and elsewhere.
Second test vehicle.
A second test vehicle made two flights in 2011. The first flight was a short hop (low altitude, VTVL takeoff and landing mission) flown on 6 May 2011. The vehicle is known only as "PM2" as of August 2011, gleaned from information the company filed with the FAA prior to its late August high-altitude, high-velocity second test flight. Media have speculated this might mean "Propulsion Module".
This vehicle was flown a second time on a 24 August 2011 test flight, in west Texas. It failed when ground personnel lost contact and control of the vehicle. The company recovered remnants of the craft from ground search.
On 2 September 2011, Blue Origin released the results of the cause of the test vehicle failure. As the vehicle reached Mach 1.2 and altitude, a "flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered [the] range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle."
Involvement with NASA Commercial Crew Development Program.
Additionally, Blue Origin received US$3.7 million in Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) phase 1 to advance several development objectives of its innovative "pusher" Launch Abort System (LAS) and composite pressure vessel.
, with the end of the second ground test, Blue Origin completed all work envisioned under the phase 1 contract for the pusher escape system. They also "completed work on the other aspect of its award, risk reduction work on a composite pressure vessel" for the vehicle.
Commercial suborbital flights.
Passenger flights.
Following the fifth and final test flight of the NS2 booster and test capsule in October 2016, Blue Origin indicated that they were on track for flying test astronauts by the end of 2017, and beginning commercial suborbital passenger flights in 2018. As of April 2021 after fifteen test flights, the company has not yet flown any humans with the rocket, but with the next mission, NS 16 planned to fly on July 20, the company has announced it will carry crew and a passenger.
NASA suborbital research payloads.
, Blue Origin had submitted the New Shepard reusable launch vehicle for use as an uncrewed rocket for NASA's suborbital reusable launch vehicle (sRLV) solicitation under NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. Blue Origin projects altitude in flights of approximately ten minutes duration, while carrying an research payload.
By March 2016, Blue noted that they are "due to start flying unaccompanied scientific payloads later [in 2016]."