"Safety is our highest value at Blue Origin, it's why we built so much redundancy into the system." "You can see how our backup safety systems kicked in today to keep our payloads safe during an off nominal situation," Blue Origin's commentator said. Three small drogue parachutes deployed to stabilize and slow the capsule about one minute after the abort began, followed by three main parachutes that lowered the spacecraft to a relatively gentle touchdown, kicking up a cloud of dust in the west Texas desert. The capsule streaked away as expected - the abort system was tested during a 2018 test flight - but the spacecraft did not appear as steady atop the motor, wobbling back and forth before the engine exhausted its load of solid propellant and burned out.įrom there, the descent to Earth appeared normal. The capsule continued upward to an altitude of more than 37,000 feet before motor burnout and a safe descent to Earth. Within a second, the New Shepard abort motor ignited, instantly pushing the capsule away from the malfunctioning booster. The early moments of the flight appeared normal as the rocket thundered away, but one minute and four seconds after liftoff, the BE-3 exhaust plume changed color slightly and an instant after that, a large burst of flame erupted from the base of the rocket. An instant after detecting "off-nominal" behavior, the New Shepard capsule's abort motor ignited to push the spacecraft away from its malfunctioning booster.
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EDT when the hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine powering the single-stage New Shepard booster roared to life, throttled up to full thrust and propelled the spacecraft skyward from Blue Origin's west Texas launch site. The FAA is responsible for protecting the public during commercial space transportation launch and reentry operations."
"This is standard practice for all mishap investigations. "Before the New Shepard vehicle can return to flight, the FAA will determine whether any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap affected public safety," the agency said in a statement. CNBC's Marty Steinberg contributed to this report.In the meantime, the New Shepard spacecraft will be grounded pending a formal accident investigation that will be overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. Yet its high profile - given the much more thrilling human element - means it has a powerful and widespread influence over the space industry, with investors often pointing to astronaut flights as driving excitement about the broader implications of the extraterrestrial marketplace. The tourism market is a nascent slice of the more than $420 billion space economy. Virgin Galactic has historically sold reservations between $200,000 and $250,000 per ticket, and more recently charged the Italian Air Force about $500,000 per ticket for a training spaceflight. Branson's company has flown four test spaceflights to date but does not expect to begin flying paying customers until 2022.īlue Origin's auction may have netted $28 million, but a seat on a suborbital spacecraft is typically much less expensive. While Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket launches vertically Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo system is released in the air and returns to Earth in a glide for a runway landing, like an aircraft.Īnd while Blue Origin launches autonomously, Virgin Galactic system is flown by two pilots. SpaceX is preparing to launch its first private mission in September, called Inspiration4, but Musk's company sends its capsules further into space on multiday flights, in what is known as orbital tourism.īlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have been developing rocket-powered spacecraft, but that is where the similarities end. The company's only direct competition in the market of launching space tourists to the edge of space is Branson's Virgin Galactic, a sector known as suborbital tourism.
It's the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future." "What we're really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. "This is a tiny little step of what Blue Origin is going to do," Bezos told CNBC's Morgan Brennan after he touched down. The launch marked Blue Origin's entrance into the market of private spaceflight, joining Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic - its direct competitor in the sector of suborbital tourism - and Elon Musk's SpaceX. The crew floated in microgravity for a couple minutes, before the capsule returned and landed under a set of parachutes to end the mission after 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
The crew capsule reached an altitude of 107 kilometers (66 miles), and the rocket hit a top speed of 2,233 mph during the launch. The capsule carrying the Blue Origin crew accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound before it reached beyond the 80 kilometer boundary (about 50 miles) the U.S.
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