After more than a year of grounding, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket recently successfully completed its first cargo mission. This is the first time it has re-embarked on a trip to the blue sky since a rocket malfunction in September 2022 led to mission failure.
The rocket lifted off from a launch site in western Texas at 11:43 a.m. ET on Tuesday. This reusable rocket reached a maximum altitude of 66For 5 miles (about 107 kilometers), the booster landed at 7:26 a.m. on mission, while the capsule landed safely at a safe point in time just over ten minutes later.
The mission carried 33 research payloads (excluding humans), more than half of which were developed and flown with NASA's support. The mission also packed 38,000 digital postcards for Blue Origin's nonprofit Club for the Future, which aims to spark young people's interest in space.
This is the 24th flight and 13th payload mission of the New Shepard rocket. At the time of the last rocket launch, its booster was on a non-manned mission**, when the rocket was flying at over 700 miles per hour (about 1,130 km) and about 29,000 feet (about 8,840 m) above the ground.
Earlier this year, Blue Origin attributed the rocket failure to a "thermal structural failure of the engine nozzle." "Heat damage and heat flow" due to overheating of the nozzle causes the booster to overheat. During the investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended the flight of the New Shepard rocket. A year later, the FAA concluded its investigation and ordered Blue Origin to implement a series of corrective actions before it could be reinstated.
The flight marked the successful return of the New Shepard rocket, which not only got rid of the effects of a rare malfunction, but also resumed the journey of suborbital flight. If you'd like to stay up to date with space updates, check out the X (formerly Twitter) account and bookmark Gizmodo's space page.
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