According to the National Diplomat, Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos, announced on Tuesday that it would resume space travel after more than a year of being grounded. The announcement comes after the engine failure of its New Shepard rocket in September 2022. Blue Origin has planned to start flying again as early as Monday.
The company stated on X, formerly known as Twitter, that it is targeting a launch window that opens on December 18 for its next New Shepard payload mission. The mission, named #NS24, will carry 33 science and research payloads and 38,000 postcards to space from users like username_1. The company added that the mission is for the benefit of Earth.
There won’t be any human passengers on the next voyage, but there may be passengers on subsequent flights. Jeff Bezos was one of the passengers on the inaugural flight of New Shepard in 2021. Since then, the rocket has completed five crewed missions, including actor William Shatner and TV personality Michael Strahan, as per the Post.
Last year, during a test flight from a Blue Origin site in West Texas, New Shepard, a rocket designed to carry passengers to the edge of space, experienced a malfunction. The only BE-3 engine of the rocket caught fire barely a minute after takeoff. The emergency abort mechanism was triggered, and the rocket booster crashed, rendering it unusable. However, the rocket and the 36 payloads it was carrying landed safely under a parachute.
