New Shepard
Blue Origin
Fully reusable suborbital launch system for crew and payloads, featuring a pressurized capsule and propulsively-landing booster.
Key figurescomparable across the catalogue
- Thrust
- 489,000 N
Normalised to common units so this product can be compared with others in its category. The supplier's own wording is below.
As published by the supplier
- Max altitude
- >100 km (above Kármán line)
- Crew capacity
- 6 passengers
- Microgravity duration
- ~3 minutes
- Booster engine
- BE-3 (LH2 / LOX)
- Booster thrust
- 489 kN
- Reusability
- Fully reusable — booster and capsule
- Launch site
- Corn Ranch, West Texas
- First crewed flight
- July 20, 2021
About
New Shepard is Blue Origin’s fully reusable suborbital launch system, designed to carry both commercial passengers and research payloads above the Kármán line (100 km) and return them safely to Earth. The system consists of a booster vehicle powered by a single BE-3 engine (burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen) and a pressurized crew capsule accommodating up to six passengers.
After the capsule separates from the booster, the booster performs a propulsive vertical landing near the launch site at Blue Origin’s West Texas facility, while the capsule descends under parachutes and a retro-thrust system for a soft landing. Both the booster and capsule have been reflown numerous times, demonstrating fully reusable operations.
New Shepard first carried passengers in July 2021, with Jeff Bezos and three others as the inaugural crew, making Blue Origin the first company to fly astronauts to space on its own vehicle from its own launch facility. The vehicle has since completed numerous crewed and uncrewed science/research flights. Research customers can fly experiments in the pressurized capsule, access microgravity during the 3-minute weightless period, or fly payloads externally on the booster’s payload ring.
Blue Origin’s NASA Flight Opportunities and research payload programs have flown hundreds of experiments under microgravity conditions on New Shepard missions.
Documentation
No public datasheet yet — request the datasheet / ICD from the supplier.