The company said it was building a new set of propulsion modules and crew capsules. In recent months, company officials said that test flights using the new vehicles would resume before the end of this year.
“We’re looking forward to flying the next tail number of New Shepard by the end of the year,” Ariane Cornell of Blue Origin said in a Sept. 26 panel discussion at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
Those future test flights, she said then, would also use a version of the crew capsule that includes the large windows the company has promoted as the largest ever to be flown on a spacecraft. The capsule on the earlier test flights had only the locations of the windows painted on its exterior. “It’s a really important next step,” she said.