New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, for being the first American to travel into space, also being the fifth person to walk on the Moon. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landings. Additionally, it is also capable of carrying humans and customer payloads into a sub-orbital trajectory. New Shepard consists of a launch rocket and a crew capsule. The capsule can be configured to house up to six passengers, cargo, or a combination of both. The launch rocket is powered by one BE-3PM engine, which sends the capsule above the Kármán line, where passengers and cargo can experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the capsule returns to Earth. The launch vehicle is designed to be fully reusable, with the capsule returning to Earth via three parachutes and a solid rocket motor. The rocket lands vertically on a landing pad 3.2 km north of the launch pad. The company has successfully launched and landed the New Shepard launch vehicle 36 times with 1 partial failure deemed successful and 1 failure. The launch vehicle has a length of 19.2 meters (63 ft), a diameter of 3.8 meters (12 ft) and a launch mass of 35,000 kilograms (77,000 lb). The BE-3PM engine produces 490 kilonewtons (110,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff. On January 30, 2026, Blue Origin announced further New Shepard launches would be paused for at least two years to allow the company to shift resources to their Blue Moon series of landers in support of the Artemis Program.
History
The first development vehicle of the New Shepard development program was a sub-scale demonstration vehicle named Goddard that was built in 2006 following earlier engine development efforts by Blue Origin. Goddard was assembled at the Blue Origin facility in Kent, Washington, United States and made its first flight on November 13, 2006. A second test flight was scheduled for December 2, but never took place. According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records, two further flights were performed by Goddard. Blue Engine 1, or BE-1, was the first rocket engine developed by Blue Origin and was used in the company's Goddard development vehicle. On the path to developing the New Shepard launch vehicle, a crew capsule was also needed, and design was begun on a space capsule in the early 2000s. One development milestone along the way became public. On October 19, 2012, Blue Origin conducted a successful pad escape of a full-scale suborbital crew capsule at its West Texas launch site. For the test, the capsule fired its pusher escape motor and launched from a launch vehicle simulator. The Crew Capsule traveled to an altitude of 703 m (2,307 ft) under active thrust vector control before descending safely by parachute to a soft landing 500 m (1,630 ft) downrange. In April 2015, Blue Origin announced that they had completed acceptance testing of the BE-3PM engine that would power the New Shepard launch vehicle. The company also announced that they intended to begin flight testing of the New Shepard later in 2015, with initial flights occurring as frequently as monthly, with "a series of dozens of flights over the extent of the sub-orbital test program [taking] a couple of years to complete". The same month, the FAA announced that the regulatory paperwork for the test program had already been filed and approved, and test flights were expected to begin before mid-May 2015. By February 2016, three New Shepard vehicles had been built. The first was lost in a test in April 2015, the second had flown twice (see below), and the third was completing manufacture at the Blue Origin factory in Kent, Washington, United States. In 2016, the Blue Origin team were awarded the Collier Trophy for demonstrating rocket reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle. On July 20, 2021, the company successfully completed its first crewed mission, Blue Origin NS-16, into space using its New Shepard launch vehicle, carrying passengers Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. The flight was approximately 10 minutes and crossed the Kármán line. New Shepard performed six crewed flights between July 2021 and August 2022, taking a mix of sponsored celebrities such as Wally Funk, William Shatner as well as paying customers. New Shepard ticket sales brought in $50 million through June 2022. The second and third crewed missions of New Shepard took place in October and December 2021. The fourth crewed flight happened in March 2022. On June 4, 2022, New Shepard completed its fifth crewed mission launch and the sixth crewed flight took place on August 4, 2022. In September 2022, an uncrewed mission of the New Shepard had an anomaly due to a failure of the BE-3PM main engine. The launch escape system triggered and the capsule landed safely. The remaining New Shepard launch vehicles were grounded pending an FAA investigation into the incident. After a six-month investigation, Blue Origin pinpointed the cause of the anomaly as a thermal-structure failure of the BE-3PM engine nozzle caused a thrust misalignment that triggered the capsule's emergency escape system to activate. Blue Origin said in its press release that New Shepard flights would resume as soon as possible. As of June 2022, the company had generated more than $100M from the New Shepard space tourism program. The return to flight mission happened on December 19, 2023. On February 4, 2025, an uncrewed New Shepard rocket was launched. The NS-29 mission was intended to launch about 30 moon-related technologies. On April 14, 2025, Blue Origin completed a successful sub-orbital crewed mission of six women aboard its Blue Origin NS-31 as part of the New Shepard Program. Passengers included Gayle King, Katy Perry, Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe, Lauren Sanchez, and Kerianne Flynn. The flight reached a peak altitude of 106 km and lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds. On January 30, 2026, Blue Origin announced further New Shepard launches would be paused for at least two years to allow the company to shift resources to their Blue Moon series of landers in support of the Artemis Program.
New Shepard vehicles
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