The capsule carrying Jeff Bezos and the other passengers on board Blue Origin’s New Shepard has successfully landed in the west Texas desert, following the craft’s first crewed trip into space. Bezos was joined by his brother Mark, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch teenager whose wealthy father paid for an auctioned seat on the craft. All the passengers appear to be safe.
After briefly floating in space, the craft descended back to Earth, using parachutes to guide it back to the flat terrain of west Texas.
The craft’s reusable rocket also made a safe landing. After propelling the capsule towards space, it used brakes, fins, and a last-minute booster to touch down on solid ground.
New Shepard had just launched around 11 minutes earlier from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One, located in a stretch of remote desert in the Guadalupe Mountains in west Texas.
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.
Blue’s efforts to fly astronauts to space on New Shepard, produce reusable liquid rocket engines, create a highly-reusable orbital launch vehicle with New Glenn and return Americans to the surface of the Moon—this time to stay—will add new chapters to the history of spaceflight and move us closer to fulfilling that founding vision. Everything we do follows our motto “Gradatim Ferociter” or “Step by Step Ferociously”.
