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Monday morning marked the first launch in more than a year of Blue Origin’s New Shepard tourist rocket, designed to take paying customers on short trips to the edge of space.
The company founded by Jeff Bezos said the scrubbing of the uncrewed science mission was “due to a ground system issue that the team is troubleshooting,” according to an update shared on X, formerly known as Twitter.
First, Monday’s launch of New Shepard was delayed by an hour due to cold temperatures at the launch site at Blue Origin’s facilities on a private farm in West Texas, according to the company.
Blue Origin said it will make another launch attempt on Tuesday starting at 11:37 AM ET. The launch will be broadcast live on the company’s website.
The mission would have marked the rocket’s return to flight after Blue Origin spent months recovering from a failed uncrewed test flight.
Failure 2022 New Shepard
The New Shepard rocket and spacecraft were set to launch a batch of scientific instruments on September 12, 2022. Just one minute into flight, the rocket experienced Max Q – an aerospace term that refers to the moment of maximum stress on a vehicle at a reasonable speed. low altitude where the atmosphere is still quite thick, and the rocket moves at almost the speed of sound.
Around that time, the rocket seemed to release a huge burst of flames. The New Shepard capsule, which rides on top of the rocket, then initiated its launch-inhibition system – firing a small engine to safely blast itself away from the malfunctioning rocket. That system worked as intended, parachuting the capsule to a safe landing.
Blue Origin later revealed that the cause of the failure was a problem with the engine’s nozzle, a large cone that directs the flaming exhaust at the bottom of the rocket. On-board computers accurately detected the failure and shut down the engine, according to the company.
No injuries were reported on the ground, and Blue Origin said the science payloads and capsule could be flown again.
But the rocket, left without a functioning engine, smashed back into the ground and was completely destroyed. Normally after launching a New Shepard, the rocket booster guides itself back to a safe landing just so it can be flown again.
During an interview Thursday with podcaster Lex Fridman, Bezos said the escape system that sent the capsule to safety was the most difficult piece of engineering in the entire rocket — but “it’s because I’m comfortable letting anybody go on New Shepard. “
“The (rocket) booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it,” Bezos added. “The power density is so huge that you can never be sure that nothing will go wrong. … So the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system.
“A tourist vehicle has to be designed in my opinion … to be as safe as it can be,” he said. “You can’t do it safely. It’s impossible.”
What went wrong
When New Shepard takes off again, the company may succeed in restarting its trips to space for thrill seekers.
Before the September 2022 failure, the New Shepard rocket had flown 22 consecutive successful missions – including six with passengers on board. Bezos flew aboard the rocket in 2021.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which authorizes commercial rocket launches and is responsible for ensuring public safety, oversaw an investigation into the failure. The probe revealed that the engine nozzle failed because it had higher temperatures than the company expected.
To fix the issue, Blue Origin said it implemented “design changes to the combustion chamber” — the area of the engine where fuel explosively mixes with an oxidizer — and changed “operating parameters,” or the data the company uses to model safe flights.
“Further design changes to the nozzle improved structural performance under thermal and dynamic loads,” the company said in a statement in March.
The FAA formally concluded the disaster investigation on September 27, outlining 21 “corrective actions” that Blue Origin must implement before it can return to flight. The agency did not disclose details of those actions, noting in the report that it “contains proprietary data and US Export Control information and is not available for public release.”
A new Glenn on the horizon
New Shepard hopes to return to flight as Blue Origin races to complete another flagship project: It is developing a giant rocket called New Glenn that will be able to haul satellites and other large payloads into orbit.
That rocket is years overdue. And the same engines that will power the New Glenn rocket booster, the BE-4 engines, will also power a new line of rockets developed by United Launch Alliance – a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket is set to launch its first mission, delivering a NASA-sponsored lander to the moon, in January.
Likewise, New Glenn is the first important launch into the sky, and could carry a NASA satellite to study the magnetized area of space around Mars as early as next year.
Bezos admitted during a podcast interview last week that he was “extremely nervous” about New Glenn’s first launch.
“Every launch I go to for New Shepard, for other vehicles as well, I’m always nervous about these launches,” he said. “The first launch – no nerves about that – would be a sign.”
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