• Blue Origin has successfully launched and landed its 24th mission with New Shepard.
• The NS24 mission was originally scheduled to take place on Monday 18th December but bad weather and other issues delayed the launch.
• Phil Joyce, senior vice president at Blue Origin says he hopes the firm can increase its launch cadence in 2024.

Despite SpaceX being the private darling of the space exploration world, multiple companies are trying to plot humanity’s path through the stars. Among those is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin which this week completed its 24th mission.

Originally scheduled to launch on Monday, the New Shepard 24 (NS24) mission was scrubbed due to cold weather and a ground issue that needed troubleshooting. Thankfully a second launch window opened on Tuesday which Blue Origin jumped on.

The mission launched from Launch Site One in West Texas and lasted a little over 10 minutes. The spacecraft contained 33 payloads including 38 000 postcards from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future’s Postcards to Space Program.

“A special thank you to all of our customers who flew important science today and the students who contributed postcards to advance our future of living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” said Phil Joyce, senior vice president at Blue Origin.

The mission saw the separation of the rocket and the crew capsule with both returning to Earth safely. In the replay of the mission below you can even see Blue Origin land its rocket booster SpaceX style.

Notably, this mission comes over a year after Blue Origin’s NS23 mission. That mission was scrubbed due to a booster failure and it appears as if the firm has been hard at working fixing the issue.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues a regular cadence of launches. The firm is responsible for more than half of the orbital launch attempts for 2023 and it’s a rarity that a SpaceX mission doesn’t move forward or end successfully.

Blue Origin looks to be encroaching on that market and there is clearly demand.

“Demand for New Shepard flights continues to grow and we’re looking forward to increasing our flight cadence in 2024,” the SVP said.

Private space-faring firms are incredibly important for cosmic exploration and it’s good to see that Blue Origin is working hard to improve its launch systems.