Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
For many years, Blue Origin’s New Shepard program has been mostly known for taking wealthy customers on short suborbital flights—a few minutes above the atmosphere before returning to Earth. It became a symbol of the early space tourism market, with tickets aimed at high-net-worth individuals. But the most recent mission, NS-35, signals that the company is adjusting its priorities. Rather than focusing only on selling brief passenger trips, Blue Origin is increasingly using New Shepard as a dedicated vehicle for scientific and research purposes. This change could play a significant role in how the company positions itself against SpaceX in the years ahead.
In its earlier years, New Shepard got attention by sending famous passengers—such as Jeff Bezos and Katy Perry—on quick journeys above the Kármán line. While these celebrity flights drew global headlines, they contributed little to practical space exploration. Occasionally, however, New Shepard was used in a way that pushed the boundaries of research. A notable example is the NS-29 mission in February 2025. During that flight, the capsule’s reaction control system was used to spin it at a rate of 11 revolutions per minute. This created a simulated lunar gravity environment—about one-sixth of Earth’s gravity—for nearly two full minutes. That duration is far longer than the roughly 20 seconds of reduced gravity achievable in standard parabolic aircraft flights. The data from NS-29 provided NASA with valuable insights for its Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon.
Fast forward to August 23, 2025. The NS-35 mission flew more than 40 research payloads, with 24 of them coming from NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge. This allowed students to run experiments in suborbital space. With this flight, New Shepard’s total number of payloads passed 200. That is a clear sign the program is becoming an accessible platform for space-based research, not just tourism. Experiments from institutions like Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Florida took advantage of over three minutes of microgravity time during NS-35.
For many years, Blue Origin’s New Shepard program has been mostly known for taking wealthy customers on short suborbital flights—a few minutes above the atmosphere before returning to Earth. It became a symbol of the early space tourism market, with tickets aimed at high-net-worth individuals. But the most recent mission, NS-35, signals that the company is adjusting its priorities. Rather than focusing only on selling brief passenger trips, Blue Origin is increasingly using New Shepard as a dedicated vehicle for scientific and research purposes. This change could play a significant role in how the company positions itself against SpaceX in the years ahead.
In its earlier years, New Shepard got attention by sending famous passengers—such as Jeff Bezos and Katy Perry—on quick journeys above the Kármán line. While these celebrity flights drew global headlines, they contributed little to practical space exploration. Occasionally, however, New Shepard was used in a way that pushed the boundaries of research. A notable example is the NS-29 mission in February 2025. During that flight, the capsule’s reaction control system was used to spin it at a rate of 11 revolutions per minute. This created a simulated lunar gravity environment—about one-sixth of Earth’s gravity—for nearly two full minutes. That duration is far longer than the roughly 20 seconds of reduced gravity achievable in standard parabolic aircraft flights. The data from NS-29 provided NASA with valuable insights for its Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon.
Fast forward to August 23, 2025. The NS-35 mission flew more than 40 research payloads, with 24 of them coming from NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge. This allowed students to run experiments in suborbital space. With this flight, New Shepard’s total number of payloads passed 200. That is a clear sign the program is becoming an accessible platform for space-based research, not just tourism. Experiments from institutions like Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Florida took advantage of over three minutes of microgravity time during NS-35.
