(Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos and his crewmates won’t be hopping aboard for a suborbital redo on the next New Shepard mission. The Amazon founder’s space venture announced Wednesday that the 17th flight of the reusable rocket ship will carry scientific and research payloads.

Blue Origin scheduled the launch for 6:35 a.m. PT on Aug. 25 from its West Texas facility. It’s the fourth flight for the program in 2021 and the eighth for this particular vehicle.

The NS-17 mission will carry NASA lunar landing technologies being tested to help reduce risk and increase confidence for successful missions to the moon. The payload, which flew in a previous experiment on Oct. 13, 2020, is mounted to the exterior of the rocket booster. According to Blue Origin, information from the first flight informed improvements to technology that determines a spacecraft’s location and speed as it approaches the surface of the moon.

Blue Origin’s continued interest and work on future moon missions comes in the wake of the company’s recent legal action against the U.S. government. Blue Origin is suing NASA over its decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build what would be the first lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon since the Apollo era.

NS-17 will also carry 18 commercial payloads inside the crew capsule, 11 of which are NASA supported.

The rocket will also have another unique payload on the exterior — an art installation called “Suborbital Tryptych,” a series of three portraits by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo painted on the top of the crew capsule on the main chute covers. “The portraits capture the artist, his mother, and a friend’s mother … and is part of Uplift Aerospace’s Uplift Art Program, whose purpose is to inspire new ideas and generate dialog by making space accessible and connected to the human experience,” Blue Origin said.

Bezos and three crewmates took a 10-minute ride as the first humans aboard a New Shepard ship on July 20.

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