Blue Origin’s New Shepard is officially back in action, with the company today successfully launching the suborbital rocket for the first time in more than 15 months. The rocket lifted off from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at around 10:42 AM local time. The mission, dubbed NS-24 to mark the 24th launch of the vehicle, carried 33 payloads a swathe of customers including NASA, Honeybee Robotics and non-profit research and engineering firm Draper. The mission successfully concluded after a period of ten minutes, when the capsule safely returned to Earth after a brief suborbital flight. The company was originally targeting Monday for the mission but scrubbed the launch due to a “ground system issue.” Blue Origin did not elaborate further on the specific issue. This is the first time Blue Origin has launched New Shepard since September 2022, when an anomaly triggered an auto-abort mid-flight. The capsule – which was carrying no people at the time – was ejected from the booster and landed on Earth under parachutes, but the booster was destroyed. …