Since Blue Origin completed recovering from a flight anomaly nine months ago, it expects to be ready to resume launches of the New Shepard suborbital spacecraft in the next few weeks. Speaking at the Financial Times’ Investing in Space event on June 6, Blue Origin Chief Executive Officer Bob Smith said the company is on the verge of continuing the launch of new Shepards pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

New Shepard retired in September 2022 as NS-23 only due to failure of payload. In March, Blue Origin said that the BE-3PM’s engine nozzle had a structural failure caused by temperatures exceeding design. The failure of the nozzle caused the crew capsule’s emergency engine to ignite, sending it to a safe parachute landing, while the propulsion module was destroyed.

“We knew exactly what had happened very soon after the incident,” Smith said, noting that the company was “working with the FAA on our return to flying process.”

Blue Origin said in an announcement in March that it plans to resume flights “soon”, starting with the re-flight of the NS-23 mission, but did not provide a timeline. At the time, the FAA said Blue Origin should review its plans before allowing these flights to resume.

“We’re currently marking the i’s and crossing the t’s to get around this and get our system ready to fly again,” Smith said. “From that perspective, New Shepard should be ready to fly in the next few weeks.”

The crash and disruption to launches did not affect demand for space tourism flights on the device, with new customers signing up in the past nine months. “People saw a very secure system,” he said, “a real cancellation scenario where the pod lands normally and is ready to go the next day.”

New Glenn and other cases

Smith was less outspoken about the timeline for the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle, which was once expected to fly in 2020.

“If you want to know what the New Glenn launch date is, I can give it to you, but that won’t be accurate,” he said. “I don’t know if it will come sooner or later.”

He said the company has the flight equipment to assemble the device and is preparing the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. He noted that the vehicle’s BE-4 engines were one of the biggest “fixes” for the launch.

Smith said New Glenn’s manifesto was full for the first few years, but did not disclose how many launches were listed in that manifesto. It includes 12 launches of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband cluster, announced in April 2022, and the possibility of 15 more launches.

Smith described Blue Origin as a company that has moved from an R&D mindset to a more commercial focus with multiple lines of business since taking over as CEO in 2017. This includes New Shepard and New Glenn, as well as the BE-4 engines produced for United Launch Alliance’s New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur. The company also received a $3.4 billion NASA award on May 19 to develop a second lunar lander for the Artemis lunar exploration campaign, and is working with Sierra Space and other companies on the Orbital Reef commercial space station project.

“When I joined Blue, we had very little income,” he said. “We now have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and billions of dollars in orders, so we’re in very good shape.”

New Shepard said its business had “good profit margins overall,” but did not elaborate. He acknowledged the tension between profitability and investment, especially in projects he called “capital-intensive” such as launch vehicles. “There will always be a balance between how much you want to invest and how much you want to pay for yourself.”

Blue Origin has long counted on investments from its founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos. A few years ago, Bezos said he invests $1 billion a year in Blue Origin. Smith declined to provide up-to-date figures, except to say that Bezos made a “significant” investment in the company. As for Blue Origin’s profitability plan, Smith said it “depends on how much Jeff is willing to invest.” Source