Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital rocket fails during liftoff
WEST TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Blue Origin was poised for its fourth flight this year, with New Shepard's Sept. 12 launch. But the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos suffered its first launch failure.
No one was on board, only 36 science experiments (half sponsored by NASA) and research payloads along with tens of thousands of postcards from Club For Future.
It was the 23rd flight for the New Shepard program but the rocket veered off course over West Texas about a minute after liftoff. The capsule's launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor.
Blue Origin's launch commentary went silent when the capsule catapulted off the rocket, later announcing: "It appears we've experienced an anomaly with today's flight. This wasn't planned."
The mishap happened as the rocket was traveling nearly 700 mph at an altitude of about 28,000 feet.
No video of the rocket was shown - only the capsule - after the failure happened. The rocket usually lands upright on the desert floor and then is recycled for future flights; clearly, that did not happen this time.
Launch commentator Erika Wagner said the capsule managed to escape successfully, with the webcast showing it reaching a maximum altitude of more than 37,000 feet.
"We're responding to an issue this morning at our Launch Site One location in West Texas. More information to come as it is available," the aerospace manufacturer tweeted.
But back on July 20, 2021, there were people on board, making it Blue Origin's first piloted sub-orbital flight. The rocket blasted off from Van Horn, Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Bezos, 57, his brother Mark, 53, and crewmates, aviation pioneer from Texas Wally Funk, 83, and 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen, experienced about three minutes of weightlessness and took in views of Earth out of the largest windows ever built into a space capsule.
The crew cheered then as they floated around the capsule. Funk, one of the "Mercury 13" who was deemed 'not fit' for spaceflight because she was a woman, said, "It's dark up here, oh my word."
Another crewed New Shepard flight followed on Dec. 11, 2021. And again March 31 this year and most recently on June 4 and August 2022 when the sixth New Shepard passenger flight took off. Inside, a half dozen space tourists enjoyed a supersonic dash to the edge of space and back, complete with a few minutes of weightlessness and out-of-this world views from 66 miles above west Texas.
On board: a British-American mountain climber, an Egyptian space enthusiast, a Portuguese investor and adventurer, a telecom executive-turned restauranteur, an engineer and a co-founder of the YouTube channel "Dude Perfect."
Mission duration, from launch to landing: 10 minutes and 20 seconds.
Named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, New Shepard is a reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.
Blue Origin started flight testing New Shepard and its redundant safety systems in 2012. Altogether, it has carried 31 people to the edge of space.
