Blue Origin, a space exploration company led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, successfully launched a New Shepard rocket on December 19 from a launch site in Texas, United States, Engadget reports.
After launch, the New Shepard rocket reached a suborbital orbit at an altitude of approximately 107 kilometers before returning to Earth. The rocket booster landed vertically seven and a half minutes after liftoff, and the space capsule deployed its parachute and successfully returned to Earth ten minutes after launch.
The mission carried 33 scientific instruments and 38,000 postcards written by students from around the world into space.
The New Shepard rocket was developed by Blue Origin for space tourism and scientific experiments
This is Blue Origin’s 24th launch, and the first 15 months after its last failure, which occurred in September 2022.
The New Shepard rocket, which was in full preparation for a new space tourism flight, was suspended from all flight activity in September last year after an engine failure caused the rocket to crash a minute and four seconds after takeoff, at an altitude of 8 kilometers. In March 2023, Blue Origin said the cause of the rocket’s launch failure was a structural defect in an engine nozzle that overheated.
The New Shepard rocket was developed by Blue Origin for space tourism and scientific experiments. It consists of a first booster stage 18 meters long and a capsule containing people and equipment. Both the booster and the capsule are reusable and the rocket can reach a suborbital altitude of 100 kilometers.
With this successful launch, Blue Origin plans to accelerate the recovery of space tourism. Bezos’ last trip to space aboard a New Shepard rocket was in July 2021. Only 6 of the last 23 launches were carried out with humans in the crew capsule.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”