Heatstroke in Texas! Barely more than a minute after taking off from the Van Horn site, the New Shepard “HG Wells” capsule had to eject urgently, because its booster was the victim of a major anomaly. The flight was unmanned, but authorities will investigate with Blue Origin.
If there had been passengers, they would have been shaken, but lowered gently to the ground.
It’s when you least expect it…
With three manned flights of its New Shepard capsule (RSS First Step) in the first half of the year, Blue Origin was preparing for a studious fall, starting with a liftoff to over 100 km altitude with a dedicated mission to scientific experiments. Some may have forgotten this since Blue Origin now flies wealthy volunteers, but the experiments also represent a market share, especially vis-à-vis universities and NASA, for small research programs. .
Blue therefore offered in September the possibility of flying with several hundred kilograms of equipment within its “RSS HG Wells” capsule. However, the launch had been postponed for several days due to bad weather conditions, until Monday when, for an unknown reason, the countdown remained more than an hour stand by. At 4:27 p.m., New Shepard fired up its single BE-3 engine and took off from the Van Horn (Texas) site.
The security system reacted as expected
But for his 23e attempted theft in eight years, this time a New Shepard mission unintentionally went wrong. After a minute of flight, past Max-Q (the instant when the atmospheric pressure is maximum on the body of the rocket according to its speed), the hydrogen and oxygen engine BE-3 produced unusual flames. Then, the body of the rocket began to tilt… A fraction of a second later, the capsule’s emergency evacuation system activated: leaving the booster far behind, the small pressurized vehicle propelled itself away from danger.
A totally automated system, which reacted as if there were astronauts in the capsule…and fortunately. Because off camera, the booster falls and crashes to the ground (it will cause no material or human damage). The capsule reaches almost 11 km in altitude, before opening its three parachutes and landing safely in the dry bushes of the large Blue Origin site.
A first flight accident for Blue Origin
If the accident is embarrassing for Blue Origin after 22 successful missions (all projects combined, it’s a first), the teams can be proud of having designed an evacuation and rescue system that worked in real conditions! These sets are complex and extensively tested, but nothing replaces experience, and Blue customers will now know that even in the face of the unexpected, the measures put in place for their security are working exactly as they should.
However, the resumption of manned flights of the New Shepard system will probably be postponed for a few months: Blue Origin will investigate the circumstances and causes of this failure with the propulsion, probably a break in the BE-3 engine. And will receive for this the help of the FAA, the federal agency of the American aviation. The company will not be able to resume flights (which moreover is manned) before having the consent of the authorities.
It may also be the flight limit for the New Shepard system: the booster that flew yesterday was performing its 9e round trip at 100 km altitude. A few minutes before takeoff, the commentator explained that the device and its capsule were built for 25 flights…
What consequences?
It should be noted that this accident occurs in a particular context for suborbital tourism, since Blue Origin is for the moment the only company to commercially offer the possibility of going to rub shoulders with the frontier of space. Three additional manned flights were planned (at least) before the end of the year.
The only other competitor in that market is Virgin Galactic (its ticket office is open), but Richard Branson’s California-based company hasn’t flown its rocket plane since last July, and isn’t planning a suborbital flight until at least end of the year. Ironically, the activation of the emergency evacuation system on New Shepard could even penalize the Virgin plane… The latter is not actually equipped with any equivalent device: if the engine or the device disintegrates like this happened yesterday, disaster is guaranteed.
Source : space news
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