Blue Origin will end its 15-month spaceflight hiatus next week, if all goes in keeping with plan.
The corporate, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, hasn’t flown since its Latest Shepard suborbital vehicle suffered an anomaly during an uncrewed research flight on Sept. 12, 2022. But that long drought is about to finish.
“We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next Latest Shepard payload mission. #NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads in addition to 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space,” Blue Origin announced today (Dec. 12) via X (formerly often called Twitter).
Latest Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo that Blue Origin uses to take people and payloads to suborbital space. The vehicle has launched 23 times so far, six times with people on board.
The September 2022 flight, often called NS-23, was a research-only jaunt. It didn’t go well: About 65 seconds after launch, Latest Shepard’s booster suffered a major problem and got here crashing back to Earth. The capsule managed to jet away from the issue and landed softly under parachutes, its 36 research payloads intact.
Blue Origin soon undertook a mishap investigation, which was overseen by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In March, the corporate announced that it had pinpointed the reason for the crash — a “thermo-structural failure” of the nozzle on the BE-3PM engine that powers Latest Shepard’s booster.
The FAA agreed with that conclusion and, in September, closed the mishap investigation. But Blue Origin couldn’t return to flight quite yet; the FAA required the corporate to “implement 21 corrective actions to forestall mishap reoccurrence, including redesign of engine and nozzle components to enhance structural performance during operation in addition to organizational changes,” agency officials wrote in a Sept. 27 press release.
“Blue Origin must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the subsequent Latest Shepard launch,” the FAA added.
That work is seemingly all done, for Latest Shepard is headed back to the pad at Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site.
Blue Origin is not the only company that launches paying customers to and from suborbital space; Virgin Galactic, which is a component of British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group of firms, does in order well. Within the 15 months that Latest Shepard has been grounded, Virgin Galactic has launched six crewed missions with its VSS Unity space plane.