Blue Origin

Blue Origin has taken the wraps off Blue Ring, its multi-orbit, multi-mission space platform that will provide a wide variety of logistical services to commercial and government customers, from medium Earth orbit to interstellar space.

With the aim of allowing astronauts to live off the land as much as possible when they return to the Moon, NASA has awarded Blue Origin a US$35-million contract to develop the company's Blue Alchemist process to make solar cells out of lunar soil.

After an initial disappointment, Jeff Bezos is back in the Moon business. NASA selected Blue Origin's Blue Moon crewed lander for the space agency's Artemis V mission to the lunar South Pole in 2029 under a firm-fixed price contract of (US)$3.4 billion.

Are Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos astronauts? Though both billionaires flew to at least the edge of space, they may not qualify for official astronaut wings according to recently revised FAA rules.

A newly announced upgrade to Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket system will serve as a new type of testbed for NASA's Moon exploration efforts, offering minutes of simulated lunar gravity by spinning through suborbital space.

Private space company Blue Origin had a doubly successful outing with its New Shepard rocket today, reusing the same booster for a record seventh time and doing so with a particularly important payload onboard.

A full-sized mock-up of the lander that may one day put the next US astronauts on the Moon was unveiled today in Houston. The mock-up of the Human Landing System will be used to help astronauts and NASA engineers provide feedback on the final design.

Blue Origin has unveiled a multi-purpose lunar lander called Blue Moon and declares that it will be able to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. At an invitation-only media event in Washington DC on Thursday, Blue Origin founder and CEO Jeff Bezos showed off a full-scale mock-up of the lander.

​The Blue Origin rocket family got a bit larger today as founder and CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the company's New Glenn heavy booster. Named after Colonel John Glenn, it's a heavy-lift version of the New Shepard rocket and will carry both astronauts and orbital payloads.​

Sunday marked the fourth successive landing of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and crew capsule, with the testing of emergency parachute systems also carried out as planned. ​

Blue Origin recently conducted wind tunnel tests on a model of its spacecraft, which may eventually take the place of the space shuttle.