Blue Origin’s New Shepard Rocket Experiences Propulsion Failure; Mid-Flight Mission Aborted

The New Shepard rocket recently experienced a propulsion failure about a minute from leaving the Launchpad.

According to BBC News, US Billionaire Jeff Bezos needed the New Shepard rocket and capsule system to abort a mission mid-flight above the Texas desert.

The media report also said that a motor pushed the capsule clear, allowing it to make a soft comeback to the ground with the help of parachutes.

New Shepard regularly carries people, but on this particular occasion, the only payload was a batch of "zero-G experiments."

The Anomaly with the Flight

The incident occurred at an altitude of only over 20,000 while the vehicles were moving upwards at 700 mph.

The system is designed to perceive problems in the booster rocket and then push the capsule away to a safe distance.

Senior director Dr. Erika Wagner was doing the in-flight webcast commentary at Bezos's Blue Origin space company.

Briefly, after separating the capsule from the rocket booster, Wagner said it seemed that an anomaly with that day's flight was experienced.

New Shephard's 23rd Mission

She explained that this was not planned, and no details were available. This was the 23rd mission of New Shepard since its introduction in 2015.

In July last year, during the 16th outing of the system, it began to carry people on short hops over the atmosphere. The crew on that occasion was composed of Jeff Bezos and his brother, Mark.

Flight 18 was able to obtain international attention when it carried the Star Trek movie actor William Shatner aloft.

The mission early this week was uncrewed. The capsule was carrying 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students from all over the world, largely paid for by the United States space agency NASA.

FAA Support

Such experiments were targeted to exploit the particular conditions of weightlessness encountered at the top of the routine apogee of the capsule of a little more than 100 kilometers or 62 miles.

Had people been in the flight during the abort, they would have encountered a sharp jolt at the time of separation yet should have been none of the worse for their experience during landing.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration, licensing commercial spaceflight in the US, said it would be investing in the said incident, as the Thespeednews report specified.

Before the new Shepard vehicle can go back to flight, the FAA will identify whether any system, procedure, or process connected to the mishap affected public safety. The statement specified that this is standard practice for all mishap investigations.

A report about the malfunctioning New Shepard rocket is shown on the Associated Press's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Blue Origin in Science Times.