New Shepard
New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, for being the first American to travel into space, also being the fifth person to walk on the Moon. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landings. Additionally, it is also capable of carrying humans and customer payloads into a sub-orbital trajectory.
New Shepard consists of a launch rocket and a crew capsule. The capsule can be configured to house up to six passengers, cargo, or a combination of both. The launch rocket is powered by one BE-3PM engine, which sends the capsule above the Kármán line, where passengers and cargo can experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the capsule returns to Earth.
The launch vehicle is designed to be fully reusable, with the capsule returning to Earth via three parachutes and a solid rocket motor. The rocket lands vertically on a landing pad 3.2km north of the launch pad. The company has successfully launched and landed the New Shepard launch vehicle 29 times with 1 partial failure deemed successful and 1 failure. The launch vehicle has a length of, a diameter of and a launch mass of. The BE-3PM engine produces of thrust at liftoff.
History
The first development vehicle of the New Shepard development program was a sub-scale demonstration vehicle named Goddard that was built in 2006 following earlier engine development efforts by Blue Origin. Goddard was assembled at the Blue Origin facility in Kent, Washington, United States and made its first flight on November 13, 2006. A second test flight was scheduled for December 2, but never took place.According to Federal Aviation Administration records, two further flights were performed by Goddard. Blue Engine 1, or BE-1, was the first rocket engine developed by Blue Origin and was used in the company's Goddard development vehicle. On the path to developing the New Shepard launch vehicle, a crew capsule was also needed, and design was begun on a space capsule in the early 2000s. One development milestone along the way became public. On October 19, 2012, Blue Origin conducted a successful pad escape of a full-scale suborbital crew capsule at its West Texas launch site. For the test, the capsule fired its pusher escape motor and launched from a launch vehicle simulator. The Crew Capsule traveled to an altitude of under active thrust vector control before descending safely by parachute to a soft landing downrange.
In April 2015, Blue Origin announced that they had completed acceptance testing of the BE-3PM engine that would power the New Shepard launch vehicle. The company also announced that they intended to begin flight testing of the New Shepard later in 2015, with initial flights occurring as frequently as monthly, with "a series of dozens of flights over the extent of the sub-orbital test program a couple of years to complete". The same month, the FAA announced that the regulatory paperwork for the test program had already been filed and approved, and test flights were expected to begin before mid-May 2015. By February 2016, three New Shepard vehicles had been built. The first was lost in a test in April 2015, the second had flown twice, and the third was completing manufacture at the Blue Origin factory in Kent, Washington, United States. In 2016, the Blue Origin team were awarded the Collier Trophy for demonstrating rocket reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle.
On July 20, 2021, the company successfully completed its first crewed mission, Blue Origin NS-16, into space using its New Shepard launch vehicle, carrying passengers Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. The flight was approximately 10 minutes and crossed the Kármán line. New Shepard performed six crewed flights between July 2021 and August 2022, taking a mix of sponsored celebrities such as Wally Funk, William Shatner as well as paying customers. New Shepard ticket sales brought in $50 million through June 2022. The second and third crewed missions of New Shepard took place in October and December 2021. The fourth crewed flight happened in March 2022. On June 4, 2022, New Shepard completed its fifth crewed mission launch and the sixth crewed flight took place on August 4, 2022. In September 2022, an uncrewed mission of the New Shepard had an anomaly due to a failure of the BE-3PM main engine. The launch escape system triggered and the capsule landed safely. The remaining New Shepard launch vehicles were grounded pending an FAA investigation into the incident. After a six-month investigation, Blue Origin pinpointed the cause of the anomaly as a thermal-structure failure of the BE-3PM engine nozzle caused a thrust misalignment that triggered the capsule's emergency escape system to activate. Blue Origin said in its press release that New Shepard flights would resume as soon as possible.
As of June 2022, the company had generated more than $100M from the New Shepard space tourism program.
The return to flight mission happened on December 19, 2023.
On February 4, 2025, an uncrewed New Shepard rocket was launched. The NS-29 mission was intended to launch about 30 moon-related technologies.
On April 14, 2025, Blue Origin completed a successful sub-orbital crewed mission of six women aboard its Blue Origin NS-31 as part of the New Shepard Program. Passengers included Gayle King, Katy Perry, Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe, Lauren Sanchez, and Kerianne Flynn. The flight reached a peak altitude of 106 km and lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds.
On January 30, 2026, Blue Origin announced further New Shepard launches would be paused for at least two years to allow the company to shift resources to their Blue Moon series of landers in support of the Artemis Program.
New Shepard vehicles
New Shepard propulsion modules
, there have been five propulsion modules built. They are NS1, NS2, NS3, NS4, and NS5.New Shepard 1
The first flight of the full-scale New Shepard vehicle was NS1, also called "Tail 1" and was conducted on April 29, 2015, during which an altitude of was attained. While the test flight itself was deemed a success, and the capsule was successfully recovered via parachute landing, the rocket crash landed and was not recovered due to a failure of hydraulic pressure in the vehicle control system during descent. The capsule was called RSS Jules Verne.New Shepard 2
The New Shepard 2, also called "Tail 2", flight test article propulsion module made five successful flights in 2015 and 2016, being retired after its fifth flight in October 2016.New Shepard 3
New Shepard 3, also called "Tail 3", along with capsule RSS H. G. Wells, was modified for increased reusability and improved thermal protection; it included a redesigned propulsion module and the inclusion of new access panels for more rapid servicing and improved thermal protection. NS3 was the third propulsion module built. It was completed and shipped to the launch site by September 2017, although parts of it had been built as early as March 2016. Flight tests began in 2017 and continued into 2019. The new Crew Capsule 2.0, featuring windows, was integrated to the NS3. NS3 was only ever be used to fly cargo; no passengers were carried.Its initial flight test occurred on December 12, 2017. This was the first flight flown under the regulatory regime of a launch license granted by the FAA. Previous test flights had flown under an experimental permit, which did not allow Blue Origin to carry cargo for which it was paid for commercially. This made the flight of NS3 the first revenue flight for payloads, and it carried 12 experiments on the flight, as well as a test dummy given the moniker "Mannequin Skywalker".
Since the maiden flight, "Blue Origin has been making updates to the vehicle... intended primarily to improve operability rather than performance or reliability. Those upgrades took longer than expected" leading to a several-month gap in test flights. The second test flight took place on April 29, 2018. The 10th overall New Shepard flight, and the fourth NS3 flight, had originally been planned for December 2018, but was delayed due to "ground infrastructure issues". Following a diagnostics of the initial issue, Blue Origin rescheduled the launch for early 2019, after discovering "additional systems" that needed repairs as well. The flight launched on January 23, 2019, and successfully flew to space with a maximum altitude of. It has been used to test SPLICE, a NASA lunar landing technology demonstration, on two separate flights in October 2020 and August 2021.
New Shepard 3 rocket was destroyed during the NS-23 mission once it impacted the ground on September 12, 2022, after a rocket engine anomaly led to the activation of the in-flight abort system. The capsule made a successful landing under parachutes. This was the ninth flight of NS3, and the flight was not carrying any people on board.