Blue Origin is aiming to launch its New Shepard rocket as early as next week in what will be its first flight since September 2022 when the vehicle exploded in midair shortly after lift-off.
Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company said in a post on social media on Tuesday that it’s targeting December 18 for a return to flight.
Blue Origin had been using the single-stage New Shepard rocket to carry high-paying tourists on six flights to the edge of space between July 2021 and August 2022.
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But just a month after its last successful flight, an uncrewed New Shepard suffered an anomaly at 27,800 feet above the company’s launch site in West Texas, causing it to suddenly explode.
While a massive disappointment for the Blue Origin team, a big positive was that the crew capsule’s emergency escape system activated precisely as designed, propelling the capsule away from the explosion at high speed before making a successful, parachute-assisted landing in the desert.
With oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin conducted a six-month investigation into the doomed flight. It found that a nozzle on the rocket’s engine suffered what it described as “structural fatigue failure,” causing a thrust misalignment that triggered the capsule’s emergency escape system.
Engineers have since taken a number of steps to put things right, including redesigning the engine’s combustion chamber and adjusting some of its operating parameters.
Now, more than a year on, Blue Origin has said it’s ready to send its New Shepard rocket skyward again, carrying 33 science and research payloads together with 38,000 postcards for Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s initiative aimed at inspiring future generations to pursue careers related to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.
However, it’s not clear how long it will be before the company puts space tourists back inside the capsule for the ride of a lifetime to the edge of space, a trip that Bezos himself took in the New Shepard’s first crewed flight in 2021.
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