Blue origin has just taken another big step in the direction of human spaceflight.
The company, which is run by the founder of Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, launched its first upgraded New Shepard spacecraft for astronauts, the RSS First Step, today (January 14) on an unmanned suborbital test flight from West Texas.
“The success of this flight puts us a huge step closer to flying astronauts,” said Ariane Cornell, director of astronaut and orbital sales, of Blue Origin during a live webcast. “There’s going to be a lot of fun in 2021.”
New Shepard lifted at 12:18 EST (1718 GMT), and its two elements – a rocket and a capsule, both of which are reusable – reached their landings shortly thereafter. The booster came down for a powered, vertical touch in the designated landing zone near the launch pad, and the capsule then sat softly under parachutes a short distance away, releasing a plume of desert dirt about 10 minutes after the ramp.
According to New Origin, the New Shepard capsule reached a maximum height of 106,932 meters (106,932 meters). It is about 107 kilometers higher, above the traditionally recognized limit of 100 kilometers.
“Everything seems to have gone perfectly today,” Cornell said.
Related: Blue Origin’s Amazing NS-11 New Shepard Test Flight on Photos
This test flight, the 14th overall for the New Shepard program, was an exceptional flight with a booster and capsule that were both brand new. (The previous mission, which flew in October 2020, involved in a New Shepard vehicle that has flown six times before.) Blue Origin called the new capsule the RSS First Step, with RSS standing for ‘Reusable Spaceship’.
The new capsule is “equipped with upgrades for the astronaut experience as the program approaches human spaceflight”, Blue Origin representatives said yesterday (January 13) in a mission description.
“The upgrades include improvements in environmental features such as acoustics and temperature control in the capsule, crew display panels and speakers with a microphone and push-to-talk button at each seat,” they wrote. “The mission will also test a number of astronaut communications and safety alert systems.”
The capsule contains six seats, they added, one of which is occupied today by ‘Mannequin Skywalker, “an instrument-laden dummy that has flown on previous New Shepard test missions.
Today’s mission also carried more than 50,000 postcards, some of which were in Mannequin Skywalker’s pockets. The postcards were submitted by students around the world through Blue Origin’s non-profit organization, Club for the future, which also arranged such efforts on two previous New Shepard test flights.
Blue Origin develops New Shepard to transport humans and payloads to suborbital space and back. Many scientific experiments have so far flown with the vehicle’s test missions, but New Shepard has yet to let anyone walk in space.
Blue Origin is not the only high-profile suborbital enterprise space tourism company. Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is developing a controlled spacecraft called SpaceShipTwo to take paying customers to the final frontier.
The latest SpaceShipTwo vehicle, known as VSS Unity, reached space on two test flights in December 2018 and February 2019. Unity tried its third spaceflight last month, but was polluted by a computer connection problem. The spacecraft and its two pilots landed safely.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.