A New Shepard booster comes to a rest Jan. 23 in West Texas after carrying its capsule and eight NASA experimental payloads to a peak altitude of 106.9 kilometers. It was the capsule and booster’s fourth mission and the 10th test flight overall for the New Shepard program since 2015.

Blue Origin plans to conduct the latest test flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle May 2 as the company, and others in the industry, seek ways to allow NASA-funded researchers to fly with their payloads on such missions.

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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...