Between November 2015, and October 2016, the reusable New Shepard rocket and spacecraft made five suborbital flights, surviving some pretty harsh scenarios. But during the last six months, Blue Origin, the semi-secretive rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has not flown any new vehicles. So what has it been up to?

This week, the company brought the rocket that made those five flights to the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado and displayed it along with a mockup of the spacecraft that will eventually begin carrying customers on 11-minute suborbital flights. Bezos said he was not ready to disclose a price yet or sell tickets, but these consumer flights remain on track for sometime in 2018.

The original rocket has been retired and will likely go on a road show before ending up in a museum. To find out what has been happening behind the scenes with the second iteration of the New Shepard rocket, Ars spoke with Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson. He said the company's engineers have learned a lot of "little lessons" from the test flights of the New Shepard module in late 2015 and early 2016.

For example, the "ring fins" at the top of the vehicle, which help control its descent through the atmosphere, are part of the leading edge of the vehicle as it comes back to Earth. Originally, the company had applied ablative thermal protection to the bottom of these (the material can be seen browning over time in this descent video). "We had to go and repair that in between flights, and it was a pretty labor-intensive activity," Meyerson said, requiring dozens to hundreds of hours of sanding and smoothing. Blue Origin has since begun using a metallic panel to shield this area.

After making a few dozen fixes and modifications to the New Shepard system, Blue Origin is now building three operational propulsion modules and two crew capsules. A testing program will begin by "late summer or early this fall," Meyerson said. After uncrewed test flights, "test passengers" could be added early in 2018 before customer flights later in the year—if all goes as planned.

Big ambitions

During his remarks in Colorado, Bezos said he is selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance Blue Origin, which has seen dramatic growth in its workforce during the last year. Blue Origin has also begun building a large complex in Florida to assemble its next rocket, New Glenn, which will have the capacity to lift 45 tons to low Earth orbit. Bezos estimated it will cost about $2.5 billion to develop New Glenn.

The rocket already has a couple of launch customers, and Blue Origin is close to completing one of its key elements, the BE-4 rocket engine. The company has shipped the first engine to its test facilities in west Texas, and a second engine is close to being shipped from Kent, Washington, Meyerson said. The company is working on pre-burner and powerpack tests and will begin full-scale tests soon. "We’ll test it when we’re ready," Meyerson said. "It could be weeks away, or a few months away."

Blue Origin has also responded to inquiries from the Trump administration's transition team, which early on signaled that it is interested in working with commercial companies to augment to NASA's exploration capabilities. In response to that, the company proposed the Blue Moon concept, a cargo-delivery service to the surface of the Moon, with the intent of building a permanently inhabited human settlement on the Moon.

Bezos believes that many of the industrial practices that pollute Earth should be moved off-world, and he envisions millions of people living in and working in space. To that end, he has identified the Moon as the next key step in human exploration, rather than reaching for Mars. "We really believe that success comes from not skipping steps," Meyerson said. "The Moon is a great place to demonstrate living in space." He added that Bezos has told NASA and the Trump administration that he's willing to invest substantially in a public-private partnership to make that happen.