The New Shepard flight carried the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, into space.
On July 20, 2021, Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire to fly into space aboard the New Shepard rocket. The rocket was designed and built by Blue Origin, which is founded by Bezos himself.
Even if he wasn’t the first billionaire in space—Richard Branson beat him to it by only nine days—he still made history. The first-ever space tourist, who is also the youngest astronaut in history, accompanied him on the flight. Also onboard was Wally Funk, a pioneer of the aviation industry and the oldest astronaut in history, and Bezos’ brother Mark, a successful venture capitalist and volunteer firefighter.
The Rocket
New Shepard is a 60-foot tall reusable suborbital rocket system for taking crew and payloads into space past the Karman line.
It is powered by Blue Origin’s BE-3 rocket engine, a liquid oxygen/liquid nitrogen burning engine that can generate 110,000 pounds of force at full throttle at sea level—that’s over a million horsepower. When returning to the surface, the engine throttles down to 20,000 pounds of force, which enables a stable vertical landing on a pad.
It has room for six passengers in an environmentally controlled space capsule—and each passenger gets a seat with a view out of the biggest windows on a spaceship to date. The seats are equipped with five-point harnesses and individual screens to monitor flight status.
One notable thing is missing from the crew capsule: flight controls. The New Shepard is completely autonomous—meaning every person on the flight is a passenger. In fact, of the four passengers on New Shepard’s maiden crewed flight, not one of them was a certified and trained astronaut. Funk, who was part of the Mercury 13 in the early 1960s and has had a successful and groundbreaking career as an aviator, had the most flight experience.
While the spacecraft limits crew input so much, it has been extensively tested for safety and includes multiple redundant safety systems. Since 2012, the company has flown 15 successful uncrewed missions, including three successful escape tests that demonstrate the crew escape system works properly in every phase of flight.
The escape system is modeled on NASA’s Mercury and Apollo programs. If an issue is detected, the system pushes the capsule away from the booster. Blue Origin tested the system on the launch pad, in mid-flight and the vacuum of space.
The landing system also features multiple redundancies. Three parachutes will deploy to slow the craft’s descent—and if one chute malfunctions, the other two can more than adequately handle the load.
The capsule has a retro-thrust system built into its bottom. Like other components, it kicks in as the capsule is about to touch down, slowing the craft so it lands at one mile an hour. Should the retro-thrust system fail, the vehicle would land at 16 miles an hour—equivalent to a rough but not fatal car crash. Even the seats have been designed to flex and absorb g-forces should the landing get rough.
However, none of these measures were needed on the flight. All systems worked perfectly and the craft landed in the Texas desert.
The booster features ring and wedge fins designed to stabilize the booster’s flight and reduce fuel consumption as the vehicle descends back to Earth. And drag brakes are deployed from the ring fin to reduce the booster’s speed in half during its descent.
During liftoff and ascent, the rocket’s aft fins stabilize its trip upwards, maneuver the rocket at speeds up to Mach 4 and assists in steering it back to the landing pad.
The Flight
The New Shepard’s first crewed flight lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds. The rocket blasted off from New Origin’s launch site near the small town of Van Horn in a remote part of West Texas—an event without a crowd to watch. The rocket’s engine fired for two and a half minutes, powering the spacecraft to a maximum speed of 2,233 miles per hour.
Once the booster used up its propellant, about 47 miles up, the capsule detached and the booster began its descent to its landing pad. The two passed the Karman Line, a boundary 62 miles high officially considered to be the border of space.
At that moment, the passengers unbuckled their harnesses and floated around in the zero-gravity of the capsule; they experienced four minutes of weightlessness as the capsule reached its apogee and then entered its descent. They enjoyed spectacular views of space and the planet’s surface from the capsule’s large windows.
“You have a very happy crew up here, I want you to know,” said Bezos.
The flight is technically considered a suborbital flight since the New Shepard didn’t go out far enough to get into orbit.
The booster section maneuvered its way back to Earth to touch down, vertical and on target, blackening the launch pad as it reignited its engine to slow down.
The capsule took a slower descent. After the passengers strapped themselves back in, the capsule reentered the atmosphere, its speed climbing to around Mach 5—much faster than its ascent speed, its speed reduced by its three parachutes.
One Giant Step for Blue Origin
Not only is the successful first human flight for Blue Origin’s New Shepard a major accomplishment for the company, but it is also one for the rapidly growing private-sector space industry. And space tourism is only one of the company’s ambitious projects.
For example, Blue Origin deliberately chose a vertical launch rather than flying a plane to space the way Branson’s Virgin Galactic team did.
“The fact of the matter is that the architecture and the technology we have chosen is complete overkill for a suborbital tourism mission,” said Bezos. “We have chosen the vertical landing architecture. Why do we do that? Because it scales. It’s an architecture that can grow to a very large size … So to have the idea that you want to build big from the beginning, lets you choose an architecture because the whole point of doing this is to get practice.
The engine choice was also made looking beyond space tourism. Bezos stated that a liquid oxygen engine was more than what’s needed for a suborbital tourism mission. The reason Blue Origin did: “every time we fly this tourism mission, we’re practicing flying the second stage of New Glenn,” said Bezos. “That’s where you really do want hydrogen, on the second stage of a vehicle that is designed not only to go into low earth orbit but to bodies outside of low earth orbit.”
Blue Origin’s entire first flight.
The company is clearly not planning on resting on its laurels. Blue Origin is already working on an upper stage variant of the BE-3 engine for its larger New Glenn rocket, which will transport people and payloads orbit—as early as 2022. And tickets for future space tourists opened for sale moments after the New Shepard capsule landed, with Blue Origin planning to launch two more crewed flights later this year and many more next year.
Read more about the path Blue Origin took to reach its first crewed flighty at Blue Origin Launched—and Landed—First New Shepard Flight of 2019.
