Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster touches down in Texas after a successful test. (Blue Origin Photo)
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his space venture, Blue Origin, launched the latest version of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship today for the company’s first test flight in 14 months, with an instrumented test dummy seated aboard.
The uncrewed, straight-up, straight-down trip was conducted at Blue Origin’s testing ground in West Texas. The video that Bezos included with his tweet showed the New Shepard blasting off and rising above a wide-open spread of ranchland.
In addition to the dummy, which was nicknamed “Mannequin Skywalker,” the New Shepard crew capsule carried 12 commercial, research and educational payloads, Blue Origin said.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin venture is getting ready for launch. (Blue Origin Photo)
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has alerted the Federal Aviation Administration that it’s planning to put a brand-new New Shepard rocket ship through an uncrewed flight test at its West Texas spaceport this week.
The notice alerts aviators to stay away from the testing ground, on Bezos’ ranchland north of Van Horn, Texas, between 6:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. PT daily starting Dec. 11 and ending Dec. 14.
JAmazon billionaire Jeff Bezos discusses Blue Origin New Shepard booster rocket and crew capsule, on display at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship performed beautifully during five trips to space and back, but the company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is already upgrading the next model to capitalize on the lessons learned to date.
Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson pointed out some of the upgrades this week here at the 33rd Space Symposium during an impromptu session with journalists who were waiting to climb inside a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule.
The scorch-scarred New Shepard booster was on display just a few yards away, and Meyerson said his team was getting ready for a new series of uncrewed test flights at Blue Origin’s suborbital launch facility in West Texas. “We’re building out the fleet, and we want to get multiple vehicles out in the field,” he said.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos takes questions in front of Blue Origin’s mock-up for the New Shepard spaceship’s crew capsule. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Are you worried about having to pee while you’re flying on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship? Or getting sick? Billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has a word of advice: Fuhgeddaboudit.
During this week’s visit to the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos handled the standard questions about, um, bodily needs while in the confines of the suborbital spaceship that Blue Origin is developing.
Those questions have been addressed before, but perhaps not quite as authoritatively (or humorously). Watch our video, and then we’ll sum up answers to all the burning questions that arose.
GeekWire’s Alan Boyle sits in one of the padded seats inside a mock-up of the crew capsule for Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship. The door of the capsule’s hatch is just to the right of Boyle’s head. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.
Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.
Our guide for the sit-in was Ariane Cornell, a member of Blue Origin’s strategy and business development team. Five other journalists and I ducked our heads, stepped through the hatch and settled into the six seats placed around the periphery of a cabin that’s about the size and shape of a big igloo.
Blue Origin’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, peers out the window of a New Shepard crew capsule mock-up. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has long said that he’s using his personal fortune to fund his Blue Origin space venture, and today he hinted at just how many billions of dollars he intends to spend.
“My business model right now for Blue Origin is, I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin,” he told reporters here at the 33rd Space Symposium. “So the business model for Blue Origin is very robust.”
Bezos threw out the figure half-jokingly, after noting that he typically doesn’t reveal how much he’s spending. But he made clear that his in-house space effort, headquartered in Kent, Wash., takes a noticeable chunk out of his estimated $78 billion fortune.
He said the development cost for Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch system, which should be taking off from a Florida launch facility by 2020 or so, is likely to be on the order of $2.5 billion.
And then there’s the New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, which has successfully flown to space and back five times during uncrewed test flights launched from Blue Origin’s West Texas facility. The space-flown booster and a mock-up of New Shepard’s crew capsule are on display this week at the Space Symposium.
A crane hoists Blue Origin’s space-flown New Shepard booster into position at the Space Symposium in Colorado. (Ariane Cornell Photo via Twitter)
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship is continuing its farewell tour this week with a stopover at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., and there’s even a mockup of the crew capsule for would-be space tourists to sit in.
The Seattle area’s best-known space company, founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos back in 2000, is making a splash by erecting the slightly toasted rocket booster near the Colorado conference’s hottest hot spot, the Broadmoor Hotel.
Tweets tell the story, starting with a snapshot of Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson and Ariane Cornell, who’s on the company’s strategy and business development team.
In this artistic view, a passenger takes a look at the interior of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. (Blue Origin Illustration via Jeff Bezos)
While Blue Origin’s scorch-scarred New Shepard spaceship continues its nationwide tour, billionaire founder Jeff Bezos is giving fans an updated look at what they could be riding (and wearing) when the company puts passengers on board.
The latest email update from Bezos, who created the Blue Origin space venture only a few years after starting up Amazon, includes a series of artist’s conceptions showing the interior of New Shepard’s spacious six-seat passenger cabin.
Jeff Bezos, Buzz Aldrin and the moonwalker’s son, Andrew Aldrin, are front and center in this picture taken at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. Buzz Aldrin’s longtime assistant, Christina Korp, is to the right and behind Andrew Aldrin. (Blue Origin Photo via Twitter)
It’s been a good week for Blue Origin, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture. Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin just paid a visit to the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and today the team behind Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship won one of the space industry’s most prestigious prizes.
Aldrin dropped by only a couple of days after starring in a New York fashion show, and in a picture that Bezos tweeted today, it looks as if the 87-year-old space icon is wearing the same T-shirt. Aldrin is the guy standing in the front row between his son, aerospace executive Andrew Aldrin, and Bezos himself.
An artist’s conception shows passengers looking through one of the windows in Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. (Blue Origin Illustration)
The folks who ride New Shepard, the suborbital spaceship being tested by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be given barf bags to tuck into their flight suits. But they almost certainly won’t need them.
That’s the word from former NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick, who is now working out what passengers aboard New Shepard will experience. His official title at Blue Origin is human integration architect.
Patrick and other Blue Origin employees showed off what the company’s done so far, and what it plans to do over the next couple of years, for a standing-room crowd of about 500 folks on Jan. 27 during an “Astronomy on Tap” presentation at the Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.
