New Shepard

New Shepard

New Shepard is a reusable suborbital launch vehicle designed, built, and operated by Blue Origin, the American aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos. Named after astronaut Alan Shepard — the first American to fly in space — the vehicle is intended primarily for crewed tourism flights and microgravity research missions, carrying passengers and payloads to altitudes above the Kármán line before returning to Earth.

Design and Configuration

New Shepard follows a vertically integrated, two-element architecture: a reusable booster rocket paired with a pressurized crew capsule. Standing 15 meters tall with a diameter of 3.7 meters, the vehicle is relatively compact by orbital launch standards, a reflection of its suborbital mission profile. Both the booster and the capsule are designed for recovery and reuse — the booster performs a powered vertical landing near its launch site, while the capsule descends under parachutes. This emphasis on reusability is central to Blue Origin's operational philosophy and business model.

Launches take place from Launch Site One in the West Texas desert near Van Horn, a privately owned and operated facility purpose-built by Blue Origin for New Shepard operations.

Role and Significance

New Shepard occupies a distinct niche in the modern launch landscape. Rather than delivering satellites to orbit, it provides brief but genuine spaceflight experiences — passengers experience several minutes of weightlessness and views of Earth against the blackness of space before the capsule returns to the ground. This positions the vehicle at the forefront of the commercial human spaceflight industry, alongside contemporaries such as Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo.

Beyond tourism, the vehicle has carried a wide range of scientific and research payloads for academic institutions, NASA, and other customers, taking advantage of the microgravity environment available during each flight's coast phase.

Flight Record

Our database records 38 New Shepard flights spanning 2015 through 2026, of which 37 are catalogued as successful and one as a failure or partial failure. This reflects a strong overall reliability record across a sustained operational period of more than a decade.

The vehicle's top customer in our records is Blue Origin itself, consistent with the company's practice of using New Shepard for both internal development flights and its own crewed tourism manifest. Recent missions in our database include NS-33, NS-34, NS-35, NS-36, NS-37, and NS-38, indicating a steady operational cadence in the program's mature phase.

Development History

New Shepard's first flight took place in 2015, making it one of the earliest vehicles to demonstrate propulsive vertical booster landing — a milestone Blue Origin achieved ahead of broader industry adoption of the technique. The program progressed through uncrewed test flights before inaugurating crewed commercial operations, with the capsule configured to carry multiple passengers in large observation windows widely described as among the largest ever flown on a spacecraft.

Over its operational life, individual New Shepard boosters have flown multiple times, demonstrating the practical viability of booster reuse in a commercial context and helping to establish operational norms that have informed the broader reusable launch vehicle industry.