“Safety is our highest value at Blue Origin. “You can see how our backup safety systems kicked in today to keep our payloads safe during an off-nominal situation,” Wagner said after the capsule landed. The craft fired soft-landing thrusters and touched down on the desert floor in West Texas about five-and-a-half minutes after liftoff. “This was unplanned and we don’t have any details yet, but our crew capsule was able to escape successfully.” “It appears we have experienced an anomaly on today’s flight,” said Erika Wagner, Blue Origin’s payload sales director and host of the company’s launch webcast Monday. Launch abort! Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule has fired its abort motor after a failure of its booster. The capsule was designed to touch down at a speed of around 3 mph (5 kilometers per hour). Guided by reaction control system thrusters, the capsule’s motion stabilized as it deployed three drogue parachutes and three main chutes for a relatively gentle ride back to the ground. The four-ton capsule spun around and tumbled after the abort motor’s brief firing, which propelled the vehicle hundreds of feet away from the New Shepard rocket. The solid-fueled abort motor on bottom of the crew capsule fired immediately, delivering an instant pulse of 70,000 pounds of thrust to push the craft away from the failing rocket. About a minute after liftoff, as the rocket neared supersonic speed, the plume from the BE-3 engine appeared to change color and shape, then the powerplant appeared to shut down, causing the rocket to tilt off its planned trajectory at an altitude of around 28,000 feet (8,500 meters). CDT 1426 GMT), after a nearly hour-long delay.Ī single hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine powered the 60-foot-tall (18-meter) booster off the launch pad. But one of Blue Origin’s two operational suborbital New Shepard boosters, which hosted its own research payloads, was lost in the launch failure.īlue Origin’s live webcast showed the rocket lifting off from the company’s sprawling 80,000-acre launch facility north of Van Horn, Texas, around 10:26 a.m. The unplanned in-flight abort saved the company’s reusable capsule, and the mission’s experiment payloads stowed inside. The crew capsule, which carried NASA-funded experiments but no people, safely landed under parachutes after firing an abort motor to escape the stricken booster. The suborbital rocket developed by Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin suffered its first launch failure Monday, when the main engine on the New Shepard booster appeared to cut out about a minute after liftoff from West Texas. A frame-by-frame view of the apparent engine failure on Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster, followed by ignition of the capsule’s abort motor.
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