Jeff Bezos is trying to destroy his own spacecraft—and that’s a good thing

Normally Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft would require three parachutes to land. (credit: Blue Origin)

Spaceflight entrepreneur Jeff Bezos has promised to test his New Shepard spacecraft to the limit, and perhaps it is time to take him at his word. On Thursday, the founder of Blue Origin said his company has nearly finished planning the next test flight for his space capsule, and this time the crew vehicle will attempt to land with one of its three parachutes intentionally failing. The goal, Bezos said, is to demonstrate New Shepard’s ability to safely handle such a scenario. “It promises to be an exciting demonstration,” he wrote, perhaps understatedly, in an e-mail.

One of the maxims of spaceflight is that every launch is a test flight—rockets and spacecraft just don’t fly frequently enough, like airplanes, for spaceflight to become routine. So every time the space shuttle, or Saturn V or any other vehicle flew, engineers on the ground would learn more about the launch system, and how it operated. The same is true today, even for frequently flown rockets such as the Atlas V or Soyuz launch vehicle.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? With the New Shepard architecture, a capsule atop a propulsion module powered by a single BE-3 engine, Blue Origin has fashioned a suborbital launch system that is not only completely reusable but is one that also appears to be relatively inexpensive to fly, costing a few tens of thousands of dollars to turn around. Critically for testing purposes, it is also completely autonomous. This means Blue Origin can test New Shepard as much as it likes to ensure the vehicle is safe without taking any meaningful risk. It might even get to the point where, one day, each flight is not a test flight.