Blue Origin just took another big step towards human space flight.
The company, which is managed by the founder of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, launched its first upgrade New Shepard spacecraft for astronauts, the first step of the RSS, on a suborbital test flight with no latches from western Texas today (January 14).
“The success of this flight puts us a big step closer to flying astronauts,” said Ariane Cornell, director of sales for astronauts and orbitals at Blue Origin, during a live webcast. “There will be a lot of fun ahead in 2021.”
The new Shepard took off at 12:18 pm EST (1718 GMT), and its two elements – a rocket and a capsule, both reusable – hit their landings soon after. The booster descended to a vertical motorized touchdown in its designated landing zone near the launch pad, and the capsule then landed smoothly under parachute a short distance away, lifting a cloud of desert land about 10 minutes after takeoff.
The New Shepard capsule reached a maximum altitude of 350,827 feet (106,932 meters), according to Blue Origin. This is about 66 miles (107 kilometers) above, above the traditionally recognized 62-mile (100 km) space boundary.
“It looks like everything went perfectly today,” said Cornell.
Related: Blue Origin’s amazing NS-11 New Shepard test flight in photos
This test flight, the 14th overall for the New Shepard program, was special, featuring a booster and capsule that were new. (The previous mission, which flew in October 2020, involved a New Shepard vehicle that had flown six times before.) Blue Origin called the new First Step RSS capsule, with RSS meaning “Reusable Spaceship”.
The new capsule is “equipped with updates for the astronaut experience as the program approaches human space flight,” Blue Origin officials wrote yesterday (January 13) in a mission description.
“The updates include improvements in environmental features, such as acoustics and temperature regulation inside the capsule, crew display panels and speakers with a microphone and push-to-talk button on each seat,” they wrote. “The mission will also test several astronaut safety and communication alert systems.”
The capsule has six seats, they added, one of which was occupied today by “Mannequin Skywalker, “a dummy loaded with instruments that flew on previous New Shepard test missions.
Today’s mission also carried more than 50,000 postcards, some of them in the pockets of the Mannequin Skywalker. The postcards were sent by students from around the world through Blue Origin’s nonprofit organization, Club for the Future, who also organized these efforts on two previous New Shepard test flights.
Blue Origin is developing the New Shepard to transport people and payloads to suborbital space and back. Many scientific experiments have been carried out on the vehicle’s test missions so far, but New Shepard has not yet launched a person into space.
Blue Origin is not the only prominent company in the suborbital space tourism business. Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is developing a piloted space plane called SpaceShipTwo to take paying customers to the final frontier.
The latest SpaceShipTwo vehicle, known as VSS Unity, arrived in space on two test flights in December 2018 and February 2019. Unity tried its third space flight last month, but it was frustrated by a computer connection problem. The space plane and its two pilots landed safely.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.