At its Boca Chica, Texas, location, SpaceX suffered a delay when a storm toppled the nose section of the Star Hopper test vehicle, setting back plans for testing. Meanwhile, across the state at Blue Origin’s launch facility, the company that could be SpaceX’s biggest rival in the near future got off another flight of its suborbital New Shepard rocket.
The 10th flight of the reusable New Shepard booster and capsule still didn’t carry any human crew, but it did bring along eight NASA-sponsored experimental payloads. Those payloads spent a brief time in space as the capsule arced to an altitude of 107 km (355,000 feet or 66 miles) in a flight lasting just over 10 minutes.
New Shepard is slated to begin carrying human beings on suborbital flights later in the year and is expected to eventually become Blue Origin’s platform for space tourism. Meanwhile, Blue Origin is also well along in the development of its much larger New Glenn vehicle. The scheduled first flight of the large (large) New Glenn orbital rocket is slated for 2021.
The actual launch doesn’t occur until just after the 42-minute mark in the linked video, so scroll ahead if impatient. The booster lands on its tail at the 50-minute mark, with the capsule parachuting to earth at 52:50.
Meanwhile, the first uncrewed mission for the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has been rescheduled for Feb. 7.