WASHINGTON — Blue Origin conducted the tenth crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Feb. 25, carrying six people, one of whom remained at least semi-anonymous.
The New Shepard vehicle lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 10:49 a.m. Eastern after a 19-minute hold in the countdown due to an unspecified technical issue. The vehicle’s crew capsule reached a peak altitude of 107 kilometers above sea level before making a safe landing 10 minutes and 8 seconds after liftoff. The booster made a powered landing about two and a half minutes earlier.
The NS-30 mission was the tenth private astronaut mission flown by Blue Origin, starting with the July 2021 flight of company founder Jeff Bezos and three others on the NS-16 mission.
NS-30 carried six people, five of whom Blue Origin identified in advance of the flight:
- Lane Bess, an investor who previously flew on the NS-19 New Shepard flight in December 2021;
- Jesús Calleja, a Spanish television host and adventurer;
- Elaine Chia Hyde, owner of a Chicago media company and another company working on “AI-assisted media products”;
- Richard Scott, a physician and chief executive of a medical company; and
- Tushar Shah, partner and co-head of research at a hedge fund.
In a break from past missions, the company did not disclose the identity of the sixth person, with hosts of the company webcast saying that individual “requested we not share his name today.” Photos released by the company before the launch, and footage from the webcast, showed that person to be a man wearing a flight suit with an “R. Wilson” nametag, and the NS-30 mission patch also included “Wilson” with the names of the other members of the crew.
Not disclosing the name of someone who has been to space has little precedent. Astronauts flying on China’s Shenzhou missions are usually not identified until shortly before launch, and Virgin Galactic, on some of the flights of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane, did not identify the customers on board until after landing. But in those cases, all the people who travel to space on those vehicles are publicly named at some point.
NS-30 was the second New Shepard launch of the year for Blue Origin after a payload-only flight, NS-29, three weeks earlier. That flight spun the crew capsule to simulate lunar gravity for the payloads inside, a first for the vehicle.
The company has not disclosed how many launches of New Shepard it is projecting this year, but Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said at the Commercial Space Conference Feb. 12 that the vehicle remained important to the company even as it debuts the New Glenn orbital rocket and works on the Blue Moon lunar lander.
“New Shepard serves two really big purposes. The first is that it is a testbed for almost everything that we do,” he said, such as the lunar technology demonstrations flown on NS-29 as well as testing vehicle avionics and other systems.
The second purpose is tapping into the space tourism market, where he argued there remains strong interest in the “profound experience” of suborbital spaceflight. “The tickets aren’t inexpensive,” he said, “and there’s no buyer’s remorse.”
“I do believe New Shepard will be a very good business for us,” he concluded.