I'm wondering if GH has joined the Blue Origin team and talked them into pranging the New Shepard. Well at least it's not a power prang.... yet?We’re also finishing our mission planning for another flight of New Shepard, which will be our fourth flight with this vehicle. One of the fundamental tenets of Blue Origin is that the safest vehicle is one that is robust and well understood. Each successive mission affords us the opportunity to learn and improve our vehicles and their modeling. We have stepwise expanded our flight envelope on the booster and crew capsule on every mission. On our most recent flight, we performed maneuvers on the crew capsule to help characterize its aerodynamics and reduce our model uncertainties. On this next mission, we’ll execute additional maneuvers on both the crew capsule and the booster to increase our vehicle characterization and modeling accuracy.
On this upcoming mission we also plan to stress the crew capsule by landing with an intentionally failed parachute, demonstrating our ability to safely handle that failure scenario. It promises to be an exciting demonstration. We’ll be sharing more with you about the upcoming mission as we have it.
Gradatim Ferociter!
Jeff Bezos
I guess they feel that at a minimum 4 flights for a capsule is a pretty good return, although I'm not certain that this crew capsule was used on all of the previous flights.