Blue Origin has had only one working New Shepard rocket booster since a 2022 explosion took out one of the two it had been using. A replacement booster along with a new crew-capable capsule is set to debut as early as Monday.
Slated to fly on the NS-27 mission, the new booster topped with the capsule named the RSS Kármán Line is targeting liftoff at 9 a.m. EDT from the company’s west Texas launch site.
The name Kármán Line is a reference to the 62-mile altitude (100 km) that is the internationally recognized altitude for having made it into space. New Shepard flights are suborbital missions with the booster lifting the capsule up past this altitude for short trips that take less than 12 minutes from launch to landing.
NS-27 will be the 27th flight of all New Shepard capsules, of which this is the third one constructed, but only the second designed to take humans into space. This mission won’t fly any crew though for its debut flight.
The other crew-capable capsule has flown humans to space eight times, including company founder Jeff Bezos on its debut human spaceflight in 2021 as well as the likes of William Shatner, NFL Hall of Famer and “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, for whom the rocket is named.
That capsule, named the RSS First Step, has flown atop the same booster each time, Booster 4.
RSS Kármán Line gets the Booster 5, which features new space for payloads, while the crew capsule has technology upgrades to improve vehicle performance and reusability, as well as an updated paint job.
Instead of humans on board, NS-27 will fly 12 payloads, including five within the booster, including a new navigation system to be used both on New Shepard and Blue Origin’s heavy lift rocket New Glenn that is slated to make its debut from Cape Canaveral as early as November.
Other payloads include two different laser-based sensors related to lunar landings, proximity sensors developed from a NASA grant and a commercial payload, re-creations of the black monoliths from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as part of a special edition being printed by a book publisher.
Also on board will be tens of thousands of student-designed postcards for Blue Origin’s STEM nonprofit Club for the Future.
This the first new booster built since the September 2022 demise of a booster that was flying on an uncrewed mission that forced its capsule to make a dramatic escape blasting away to safety as designed and making a parachute-assisted landing shortly after takeoff.
The Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded New Shepard after the incident, even though the booster in question had never been used for its human spaceflights, which at the time had flown six missions flying up 32 people to space.
Flights resumed 16 months later first with an uncrewed flight in December 2023 followed by two human spaceflights in 2024, so now Blue Origin has sent 44 people to space, including one who flew twice.
Among the customers from Central Florida have been Winter Park power couple Marc and Sharon Hagle, who flew in March 2022, followed by Brevard County millionaire Steve Young in August 2022. The Hagles have already announced they will be flying again.
Plans were to ramp up passenger flights to as many as six a year before the grounding.
That uncrewed launch, though, dubbed NS-23, suffered an “anomaly” about one minute after liftoff, which the company said was because an engine nozzle got too hot, suffered a structural failure and threw the booster’s trajectory out of line.
The capsule, which is still among Blue Origin’s usable capsules, was the RSS H.G. Wells.
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