NS-13
New Shepard
Blue Origin
Mission
NS-13
- Type: Suborbital
- Orbit: Suborbital
This will be the 13th New Shepard mission and the 7th consecutive flight for this particular vehicle (a record), demonstrating its operational reusability.
New Shepard will fly 12 commercial payloads to space and back on this mission, including the Deorbit, Descent, and Landing Sensor Demonstration with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate under a Tipping Point partnership. This is the first payload to fly mounted on the exterior of a New Shepard booster rather than inside the capsule, opening the door to a wide range of future high-altitude sensing, sampling, and exposure payloads.
Location
Rocket
Landing
Core NS-3
Booster NS-3 last launched 09/12/2022 and has seen 8 successful launches and landings. New Shepard vehicle #3 was the third flight vehicle of the New Shepard suborbital rocket. It suffered an anomaly during its ninth flight.
Corn Ranch Landing Pad, West Texas – CR
New Shepard landing site.
Return to Launch Site – RTLS
A return to launch site usually means that after stage separation the booster flips and does a burn back towards the launch site, landing near where it initially launched from.
Agency
Blue Origin
Blue Origin is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company set up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos with its headquarters in Kent, Washington. The company is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal to dramatically lower costs and increase reliability. Blue Origin currently launches its New Shepard sub-orbital vehicle from its West Texas launch site, they are currently constructing a launch pad for their orbital vehicle New Glenn at Cape Canaveral LC-36.