New Shepard capsule
The crew capsule from Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle after landing Dec. 12 on a suborbital test flight. The capsule carried experiments as well as a test dummy to collect data on what people will experience on future flights.

After carrying out a successful test flight of a new version of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, a Blue Origin executive said Dec. 18 that the company was now about a year away from starting to fly people.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...