After years in development, Jeff Bezos’ private space company, Blue Origin, plans to transport its first passengers on a journey to the limits of space in a few months.
Blue Origin completed the fourteenth test flight of its New Shepard rocket and shell on Thursday. Named NS-14, the successful test flight featured the debut of a new booster and an updated capsule.
In addition to the updates, CNBC found that the NS-14 also marked one of the last remaining stages before Blue Origin flew its first crew into space.
The flight was the first of two “stable configuration” test flights, people familiar with Blue Origin’s plans told CNBC. Stable configuration means that the company plans to avoid major changes between this flight and the next.
In addition, these people said Blue Origin intends to launch the second test flight within six weeks, or in late February, and the first crewed flight six weeks after that, or in early April.
Blue Origin’s next flight, NS-15, will also include a loading and unloading test of the crew, people said.
The company declined CNBC’s request to comment on its plans for New Shepard.
An ambitious schedule
New Shepard’s schedule is ambitious, one person warned, with the goal of flying every six weeks from the company’s top leadership. Blue Origin’s previous mission, the NS-13, flew in October, after being delayed in September due to a power supply problem – and also occurred after a nine-month hiatus between flights.
The person also noted that one of the pending tasks for the launch of the New Shepard’s NS-15 is to finish the software qualification review, which they said should not be completed by the end of March or even April.
New Shepard was designed to transport people on walks beyond the edge of space, reaching an altitude of more than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 kilometers). The capsule spends several minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth, with huge windows to give passengers a view. Both rockets and capsules are reusable, with the boosters returning to land vertically and the capsules landing in the control of a parachute set.
The NS-14 mission featured several updates for the crew capsule, including a push-to-talk audio system for astronauts to talk to the mission control, a new crew alert system panel on each seat, wall coverings cushions and sound suppression devices to reduce noise in the capsule, and the addition of environmental systems, such as air conditioning and humidity control.
Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Bezos and now has more than 3,500 employees based in Kent, Washington. So far, Blue Origin has successfully launched the New Shepard 14 times and hit the booster rocket 13 times in a row. The company built four New Shepard boosters in total, the fourth of which was launched on Thursday for the first time.
Its third booster has flown seven times in a row and will be used to fly microgravity research payloads for NASA and other customers. The New Shepard is a fully autonomous system, with no pilots on board.
Bezos personally finances the development of Blue Origin by selling part of its shares on Amazon. Although he said earlier that he sells about $ 1 billion worth of Amazon stock annually to finance the space company, Bezos recently increased his sales of Amazon stock, withdrawing more than $ 10 billion in 2020.