Blue Origin successfully completes 7th space tourism mission after safety probe

Blue Origin has successfully completed its 7^th space tourism mission, after needing to take almost two years to re-evaluate the safety of launching equipment following a failed uncrewed mission in September 2022.

1. 7^th space tourism mission

The mission, which was Blue Origin’s 25^th overall, was launched into sub-orbital space by the company’s New Shephard rocket, hence the name NS-25. Yesyerday (19 May), the rocket took off from the company’s private launching site in West Texas at 9:30 am local time. New Shepard pushed the capsule, which had 6 passengers aboard, just past the Kármán line, a conventional boundary for “the edge of space”, around 100 kilometres above sea level. Once detached from the capsule, the rocket returned to Earth where it performed a safe landing, just 7 minutes after take-off.

Meanwhile, the capsule reached a maximum altitude of 105 kilometre, where the crew experienced a few minutes of weightlessness. The 6 passengers then headed back down to Earth and landed in the desert just 10 minutes after take-off, at 9:40 am local time. Although one of the parachutes did not deploy, Blue Origin ensured that “there are multiple redundancy factors in this in this system and so landing with two parachutes is perfectly okay.”

2. Crew

At the beginning of 2023, Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announced that the next mission would be all female, headed by his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, a licensed helicopter pilot and founder of Black Ops Aviation, an aerial film and production company. NS-25 however only had one woman aboard – retired accountant Carol Schaller.

Along her, the crew was formed of venture capitalist Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, founder of the French craft brewery Brasserie Mont-Blanc, software engineer and entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess, aviator Gopi Thotakura and Ed Dwight, a retired US Air Force captain selected by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to be the nation’s first Black astronaut candidate.

Dwight never did become an astronaut, although he completed training at the Aerospace Research Pilot School and received an Air Force recommendation. “I had no intention of being an astronaut. That was the last thing on my bucket list”, Dwight said in National Geographic’s “The Space Race” documentary. However, his feelings on space travel have since changed.  “I thought I didn’t need it in my life”, he said on Sunday. “But I lied. I really, really did need it. It’s a life-changing experience. Everybody needs to do this.”

3. Safety

On 12 September 2022, the NS-23 mission was carrying science instruments to space, but shortly after take-off, the rocket’s engine caught fire. A subsequent investigation found that the issue was caused by the engine reaching far higher temperatures than the company had foreseen when designing the equipment. Although sensors detected the problem and triggered an escape system for the capsule, which safely landed back on Earth using its own propulsion system, New Shephard crashed back on land and was destroyed.

Commenting on the incident and successful operation of the safety escape system, Bezos said “it is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard”. “The (rocket) booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it, [but] the power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. (…) So the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system”, the founder said in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) carried an investigation and re-authorised Blue Origin for tourist space flights after “design changes to the combustion chamber” and “additional design changes to the nozzle have improved structural performance under thermal and dynamic loads”. Following the green light in September 2023, the company successfully completed NS-24, an uncrewed mission, in December.