The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket similar to the one Blue Origin used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, came 1 minute 4 seconds after launch and just as the vehicle was reaching the maximum dynamic pressure, known as ‘max q’. An onboard ejection system launched the crew capsule away from the booster to about 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometers) altitude and deployed parachutes that dropped it back to earth. The booster is presumed to have been damaged. “It looks like we encountered an anomaly with today’s flight – this was unplanned and we don’t have the details yet, but our crew capsule was able to escape successfully,” said Erika Wagner, senior director of emerging space markets at Blue Origin. during the live stream of the launch on the space company’s website. Wagner continued, “You can see how our backup safety systems kicked in today to keep our payload safe in an off-designation state. Safety is our highest value at Blue Origin. That’s why we created so much redundancy in the system.” A subsequent tweet from the company said: “This was a payload mission with no astronauts on board. The capsule’s escape system worked as designed.” Independent experts on Twitter said they suspect a failure of the propulsion system was the cause of the malfunction. The mission, called NS-23, carried “36 payloads from academia, research institutions and students around the world” in the ninth overall flight of this particular vehicle, Blue Origin said. The company believes two additional experiments attached to the booster’s exterior to analyze the effects of environmental exposure to the space environment were destroyed. It was the fourth flight of the New Shepard program this year and the first dedicated payload-only flight since August 2021. In six crewed “tourist” flights lasting between 10 and 15 minutes each, Blue Origin has carried 31 people into space on New Shepard launches, most recently last month. Previous passengers have included Bezos in July 2021 and Star Trek actor William Shatner three months later. Although today’s flight used a different booster and capsule than those that carry people, Blue Origin’s program is likely to face delays as engineers try to identify and fix the cause of the malfunction. Blue Origin has more ambitious plans beyond its tourist flights, including the New Glenn project for orbital flights – scheduled for a first test flight next year – and developing a manned lunar lander in partnership with Nasa. NASA’s own plans to return to the moon have suffered their own setbacks in recent weeks, with two separate attempts to launch the first test flight of the Artemis 1 rocket aborted due to technical problems.
