Blue Origin built the New Shepard rocket used for its first crewed spaceflight.
New Shepard carried four people above the internationally recognized 100-kilometre Kármán line on 20 July 2021. The mission, NS-16, included company founder Jeff Bezos, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, Oliver Daemen, and Mark Bezos. The system is designed for short suborbital flights rather than orbital missions: the capsule separates from the booster, both return, and the capsule lands under parachutes.
New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is not the same kind of vehicle as SpaceX’s orbital Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon system. Virgin Galactic also conducts suborbital tourism, but it uses a spaceplane launched from a carrier aircraft rather than a vertical rocket-and-capsule architecture.