New Shepard

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket has successfully completed its 14th flight. On January 14, 2021, at 11:20 am, mission NS-14 lifted off on a suborbital trajectory with an improved crew capsule containing a dummy astronaut named Anakin Skywalker.

Private space company Blue Origin had a doubly successful outing with its New Shepard rocket today, reusing the same booster for a record seventh time and doing so with a particularly important payload onboard.

Blue Origin's New Shepard booster completed its 12th successful test flight on December 11, marking the first time a booster has made six consecutive missions. At 11:53 am CDT, the single-stage rocket lifted off for a 10 min 16 sec flight.

A Blue Origin New Shepard rocket lifted off from the company's Texas launch site at 10:11 am CDT on July 19. On its ninth test flight, engineers studied how the launch system operates on the edge of its design envelope.

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket made its fourth suborbital flight and powered landing while carrying the currently-unmanned Crew Capsule 2.0 for the second time. The 10-minute test flight reached an altitude of 351,000 ft (66 mi, 107 km) with the capsule separating and returning by parachute.

Sunday marked the fourth successive landing of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and crew capsule, with the testing of emergency parachute systems also carried out as planned. ​

​​You can't accuse Blue Origin of being entirely secretive. But when Jeff Bezos' New Shepard vehicle is fired into the air on Sunday he'll be giving space fans a real-time look at the action, with the company set to live stream one of its launches for the first time.​

When the New Shepard suborbital launch system takes to the skies later this month, flight engineers will create a controlled parachute failure to test the emergency systems designed to protect the crew in the event of such a scenario.

Last month, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket touched down for the third time in a row, and the company has now offered us a fresh (and pretty awesome) perspective from the side of the booster as it returned to Earth.