Blue Origin is a private spaceflight company based in Kent, Washington that is working to send tourists to space on its reusable suborbital rocket called New Shepard. The company was created in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com.
In 2015, Blue Origin made history by successfully launching and landing a reusable rocket for the first time. The company is currently developing a lunar lander called Blue Moon that will make robotic cargo deliveries to the lunar surface, and it is partnering with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a human-rated moon lander that will carry astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024 under NASA’s Artemis Program.
Initially focused on suborbital spaceflight, the company has designed, built and flown multiple testbeds of its New Shepard vehicle at its facilities in Culberson County, Texas. Developmental test flights of the New Shepard, named after the first American in space Alan Shepard, began in April 2015, and flight testing is ongoing. Blue Origin has moved the date for first passengers back several times, with one recent planned timeframe being 2019 as of September 2018. In the event, it has not yet begun commercial passenger flights, nor announced a firm date for when they would begin. On nearly every one of the test flights since 2015, the uncrewed vehicle has reached a test altitude of more than 100 kilometers and achieved a top speed of more than Mach 3 (3,675 km/h), reaching space above the Karman line, with both the space capsule and its rocket booster successfully soft landing.
Blue Origin moved into the orbital spaceflight technology business in 2014, initially as a rocket engine supplier for others via a contractual agreement to build a new large rocket engine, the BE-4, for major US launch system operator United Launch Alliance (ULA). By 2015, Blue Origin had announced plans to also manufacture and fly its own orbital launch vehicle, known as the New Glenn, from the Florida Space Coast. BE-4 had been expected to complete engine qualification testing by late 2018, but the test program continued into 2019.
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