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Jeff Bezos led Blue Origin suffered a mid-flight failure of its New Shepard capsule. An anomaly in its boosters caused it to abandon the mission and land on Earth.
In a scary incident, Jeff Bezos led Blue Origin suffered a massive setback during the launch of its space mission. According to the company, the New Shepard capsule faced an anomaly in its boosters due to which the emergency escape system had to be turned on. As a result, the mission had to be abandoned but the capsule itself narrowly escaped a crash and landed successfully. However, the booster impacted the ground. Blue Origin has recovered the capsule. Luckily, the mission was uncrewed so no human was present inside the capsule when the unfortunate incident took place.
Responding to the situation, the official Twitter account of Blue Origin posted, “We’re responding to an issue this morning at our Launch Site One location in West Texas. This was a payload mission with no astronauts on board. The capsule escape system functioned as designed”.
In a later tweet, the company revealed that there were no injuries in the process. “During today’s flight, the capsule escape system successfully separated the capsule from the booster. The booster impacted the ground. There are no reported injuries; all personnel have been accounted for”.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suffers from booster anomaly
Even before the launch, the lift off was delayed by more than an hour, the reasons for which have not been revealed by the company. At the moment, it is not known what caused the booster failure, but it occurred right before the capsule reached a height of 30,000 feet (9,000 meters). Using its contingency mechanism, the escape system pulled it away from the site and triggered a parachute to make it land safely.
The NS-23 mission was not carrying any humans and was an uncrewed space mission. It was carrying cargo of 36 payloads which would have been taken on a short trip to the suborbital space and back to ground. According to a Space.com report, 18 of them were funded by NASA.
This is only the second in-flight anomaly suffered by New Shepard, the first of which came in 2015, shortly after the debut of the launch vehicle. An internal investigation by the company will likely follow which will find out what exactly went wrong during the mission.
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