WATCH: Blue Origin's Historic West Texas Launch

 

VANHORN, TX – The owner of Amazon and leader of the Blue Origin campaign Jeff Bezos his younger brother, Mark, Mary Wallace "Wally" Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, 18, made history on Tuesday morning after going to space.

The rocket named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, New Shepard is the reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space. 

In the flight that took place on Jul. 20 the crew successfully took the New Shepard into space and successfully landed. Below is the full video of the launch and landing.

The rocket is made up of six parts:

  1. Crew Capsule - Pressurized crew capsule environmentally controlled for comfort with room for six and the largest windows to have flown in space.
  2. Ring & Wedge Fins - Aero dynamically designed to stabilize the booster and reduce fuel use on its flight back to Earth. 
  3. Drag Brakes - Deploy from the ring to reduce the booster's speed by half on its descent from space.
  4. Engine - The BE-3 (Blue Engine 3) propels the rocket to space and restarts for a controlled pinpoint landing on the pad. The uniquely throttleable engine slows the booster down to just 5 mph for landing.
  5. Aft Fins - Stabilize the vehicle during ascent, steer it back to the landing pad on descent, and guide the rocket through airspeeds of up to Mach 4.
  6. Landing Gear - All rockets take off, not all rockets land. As a fully reusable rocket, the New Shepard booster uses landing gear that deploys for touchdown.

Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space. Blue is working on this today by developing partially and fully reusable launch vehicles that are safe, low cost and serve the needs of all civil, commercial and defense customers.

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