The NS-25 mission was the first since the long shutdown of New Shepard, a fully reusable suborbital launch vehicle and spacecraft. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin 24 years ago, once planned that this vehicle would form the basis for generating serious income from space tourism.

The New Shepard rocket and ship took off from a private ranch in Texas, where the Blue Origin launch pad is located. Minutes later, the ship reached an altitude of more than 100 kilometers, the official limit of space. There are six people on board, including Ed Dwight, the oldest person to fly into space (90 years and 8 months). So this escape was also intended to eliminate the known injustice against Dwight.

Ed Dwight was the first black astronaut candidate to undergo flight training. The demand for the election of such a candidate was a personal initiative of the Kennedy brothers (they opposed racial segregation), who played an important role in the policy of starting America’s race to the moon (one of them actually initiated it).

However, after the assassination of the eldest of the Kennedy brothers and shortly before the murder of the second, NASA management decided that due to the presence of a black astronaut at the Agency, due to the death of a political client, he could not be deployed. brought to space flights. Under appropriate pressure, Ed Dwight was forced to resign. He cited “racist policy” as the reason that forced him to leave both NASA and the US military, where he previously served as a captain.

After his release, he became a sculptor and painter and was named an honorary member of the US Space Force in 2020, but in the public mind he always remained an example of unfair discrimination by NASA. The new flight is a clear step by Jeff Bezos to correct this injustice.

New Shepard is a fully reusable rocket and ship with a diameter of 3.7 meters and a height of 17 meters, with a total mass of not more than 75 tons. The rocket is single-stage and uses the oxygen-hydrogen BE-3 reusable engine. Approximately 2 minutes and 50 seconds after launch, the rocket is separated from the capsule and placed in place for reuse, and the capsule, with an internal volume of 15 cubic meters, reaches an altitude of just above the Pocket Line (one hundred kilometers) after launch. In short, weightlessness. Landing is done using a parachute, the contact speed with the surface is 24 kilometers per hour.

The advantage of the rocket, from the developers’ point of view, is that it is very small and compact; Suborbital flights require relatively little energy consumption. At the same time, tourist attractions there were sold for up to 28 million dollars, which is quite a lot. Jeff Bezos paid special attention to the safety of his company’s ship, which is equipped with an emergency rescue system. Amazon’s president personally flew New Shepard in 2021, demonstrating confidence in its safety.

However, on September 12, 2022, during an unmanned flight (with only scientific equipment for zero gravity experiments) the system experienced severe turbulence due to a nozzle problem. After that, New Shepard’s flights were suspended for 15 months, and only now did manned flight dare to repeat it. It took this long due to the change in the design of the engine’s combustion chamber. The company did this to insure itself against a recurrence of similar incidents in the future.

The “window of opportunity” for New Shepard today isn’t looking good. A Starship, a carrier and a ship are needed, one flight of which should not cost more than the New Shepard. But unlike this, Starship will perform full-fledged orbital flights, in which it can theoretically take hundreds of people, rather than six people like a competitor’s ship. Although Blue Origin started working in the space industry before SpaceX, it will not be able to compete with it in space tourism. For this reason, every successful flight of New Shepard before the start of manned Starship flights is of great importance to Bezos.