All Reusable Crewed Suborbital Vehicles

A class of piloted or human rated spacecraft designed to reach suborbital altitudes, typically the boundary of space around 100 kilometers, and return for reuse rather than being discarded after a single flight. Blue Origin's New Shepard, named for astronaut Alan Shepard, is a vertical takeoff and vertical landing system pairing a reusable booster with a crew capsule, developed for space tourism and short duration research flights. Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne, an air launched rocket powered aircraft, achieved the first crewed private spaceflight in 2004 using a distinctive feathering reentry system that folds its wing and tail booms upward to increase drag during descent. Both vehicles depart from the expendable capsules of early human spaceflight by recovering the same airframe or capsule for repeated missions, and both are staged specifically for a suborbital arc rather than orbital velocity, distinguishing this class from orbital crewed spacecraft and from uncrewed suborbital research rockets.