The NS-25 mission was the first after the long suspension of New Shepard flights, a fully reusable suborbital carrier and spacecraft. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, who founded Blue Origin 24 years ago, once planned that this carrier would become the base for serious revenue from space tourism.
At 17.46 Moscow time, the rocket and the New Shepard 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 boundary of space. There are six people on board the ship, including Ed Dwight, the oldest man who has ever flown into space (90 years and 8 months). Thus, this flight was aimed at eliminating the well-known injustice committed against Dwight.
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Ed Dwight was the first black astronaut candidate to enroll in flight training courses. The requirement to select such a candidate was a personal initiative of the Kennedy brothers (they opposed racial segregation), who played a key role in American politics at the beginning of the moon race (in fact, one of them launched it).
Ed Dwight during his service in the US Armed Forces
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
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 death of a political customer for the Agency's black astronaut, he could not be brought to space flights. Under appropriate pressure, Ed Dwight was forced to resign. He cited "racist politics" as the reason, which forced him to leave both NASA and the US armed forces, where he had previously served as a captain.
After his dismissal, he was a sculptor and an artist, in 2020 he was named an honorary member of the US Space force, but in the public consciousness he has always remained an example of unjustified segregation by NASA. The new flight is an obvious step by Jeff Bezos to correct this injustice.
New Shepard is a fully reusable rocket and ship, with a total weight of no more than 75 tons, diameters of 3.7 meters and a height of 17 meters. The rocket is single-stage, uses an oxygen-hydrogen reusable BE-3 engine. Approximately 2 minutes and 50 seconds after launch, the rocket separates from the capsule and sits down for reuse, and the capsule, with an internal volume of 15 cubic meters, reaches a height slightly above the Pocket line (one hundred kilometers). Immediately after the engines are turned off (even before reaching the Pocket line), weightlessness occurs in the ship for a short time. Landing at the end of the flight is carried out by parachutes, the speed of impact with the surface is 24 kilometers per hour.
The advantage of the rocket from the point of view of the developers is that it is very small in mass and size — suborbital flights require relatively low energy costs. At the same time, places for tourists there were sold at a price of up to $ 28 million, which is quite a lot. Jeff Bezos placed special emphasis on the safety of his company's ship, equipped with an emergency rescue system. The head of Amazon himself flew the New Shepard in 2021, demonstrating confidence in its safety.
Crew members of the New Shepard launch on May 19, 2024. Ed Dwight is sitting in the center, in a tracksuit
Image source: Blue Origin
However, on September 12, 2022, during a flight without people on board (only with scientific equipment for experiments in zero gravity), the system experienced severe turbulence due to a nozzle problem. After that, New Shepard flights were suspended for 15 months, and they decided to repeat the manned flight only now. It took so long because of the redesign of the combustion chamber of the engine. The company did this to ensure that it would not repeat similar events in the future.
Today, the "window of opportunity" for New Shepard does not look big. A Starship is brought, a carrier and a ship, one flight of which should be no more expensive than New Shepard. But unlike him, Starship will make full-fledged orbital flights, where it will be able to take not six people, like a competitor's ship, but, in theory, up to hundreds. Blue Origin will not be able to compete with it in terms of space tourism, despite the fact that it started working in the space industry before SpaceX. Therefore, every successful flight of New Shepard before the start of manned Starship flights is of great importance to Bezos.
