Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

How to watch Blue Origin’s rocket return to flight

By

UPDATE: Blue Origin scrubbed Monday’s launch attempt to deal with a ground system issue. It’s now targeting Tuesday, December 19, with a launch window opening at 10:37 a.m. CT (11:37 a.m. ET/8:37 a.m. PT).

The rocket company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will launch its sub-orbital New Shepard vehicle for the first time in 15 months on Tuesday, and the whole event will be live-streamed.

Recommended Videos

The uncrewed mission will carry 33 science and research payloads to the edge of space, along with 38,000 postcards for Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s initiative aimed at inspiring future generations to pursue careers related to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Blue Origin suspended flights in September 2022 after an uncrewed New Shepard rocket exploded in midair shortly after launch from the company’s facility in West Texas.

Before that, Blue Origin had been using the single-stage New Shepard rocket to carry high-paying tourists on flights to the edge of space, with the most recent one taking place in August 2022.

While the midair failure was clearly a setback for Blue Origin, engineers were pleased to see that the crew capsule’s emergency escape system functioned properly, propelling the capsule away from the exploding rocket before making a safe, parachute-assisted landing in the desert.

An investigation into the incident revealed that a nozzle on the New Shepard’s engine experienced a “structural fatigue failure,” causing a thrust misalignment that triggered the capsule’s emergency escape system.

As a result, several corrective steps have been taken, including redesigning the engine’s combustion chamber and adjusting some of its operating parameters.

A successful flight on Tuesday will pave the way for a return to tourism flights, though Blue Origin may still choose to send at least one more crewless capsule skyward before confirming any such decision.

How to watch

#NS24 is targeting lift off tomorrow at 8:30 AM CST / 14:30 UTC. Webcast begins T-20 minutes on https://t.co/7Y4TherpLr. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/u6ptLwCPfa

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 17, 2023

Blue Origin plans to launch the New Shepard rocket from its facility in West Texas on Tuesday, December 19.

The lift-off is targeted for 10:37 a.m. local time, which is 11:37 a.m. ET and 8:37 a.m. PT. The mission will be live-streamed at blueorigin.com, and the webcast will begin 20 minutes before the launch.

Viewers will get to see the rocket launch, the separation of the capsule from the rocket, the moment the capsule reaches its maximum altitude near the Kármán line (the place generally considered as where space begins), the upright landing of the New Shepard rocket, and the parachute-assisted landing of the crew capsule.

Be sure to check Blue Origin’s social media feeds for any late changes to the schedule.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Zoom over the surface of the moon in new Blue Ghost low lunar orbit footage
Still from Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, captured during its third lunar orbit maneuver on February 24.

Just ahead of a planned lunar landing this weekend, Firefly Aerospace has shared more gorgeous footage from its Blue Ghost mission. Currently in low lunar orbit, the spacecraft is passing within 60 miles of the moon's surface and has captured a stunning video as it sweeps over the surface of the moon.

"Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured more incredible footage of the Moon during its third lunar orbit maneuver on February 24 that inserted the spacecraft in a near-circular low lunar orbit," Firefly wrote in an update. "The video below, sped up by 10X, was taken about 100 km above the lunar surface, showing the far side of the Moon and a top-down view of Blue Ghost’s RCS thrusters (center) and radiator panels on each side. The radiator panels are moving nominally to protect Blue Ghost’s subsystems from extreme temperatures."

Read more
Watch SpaceX’s cinematic trailer for Friday’s Starship rocket launch
SpaceX's Starship rocket launching in January 2024.

SpaceX is making final preparations for the eighth flight test of its Starship megarocket on Friday.

As part of the buildup, the Elon Musk-led spaceflight company has just shared a cinematic look at the Starship’s most recent flight test, which took place in January.

Read more
How to watch NASA launch its cosmic detective mission, SPHEREx
NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), a space telescope, is situated on a work stand ahead of prelaunch operations at the Astrotech Processing Facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025.

Update: The launch has been moved to Thursday, March 4. NASA states, "The teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data." The article has been updated accordingly.

This coming week sees the launch of a new NASA astrophysics mission, SPHEREx. This space telescope will investigate the origins of the universe, looking at how everything that exists went from being a tiny dot in the milliseconds after the big bang to being trillions of times that size.

Read more