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More than a year after the New Shepard rocket suffered engine failure during a flight without people on board, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said Tuesday that it would resume flight as early as next week.
The company said it will conduct a suborbital test flight to the edge of space without humans on board as soon as next Monday. The company said it could then resume flights with passengers. Next week’s flight will carry 33 scientific payloads, the company said in a post on X. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In September 2022, the rocket suffered a failure about a minute after its departure from the company’s private facility in West Texas. Bright flames shot from the vehicle’s single BE-3 engine and the emergency abort system activated, ejecting the capsule.
The spacecraft is designed to carry up to six people to an altitude of more than 60 miles, where they can experience a few minutes of weightlessness and view Earth from the air.
In March, Blue Origin said in a statement that it had accurately identified the problem of its failure last year, saying an engine nozzle “experienced temperatures that exceeded the expected and analyzed values of the nozzle material.”
The company said at the time that it was working on design changes and that it would return to flying operations “soon.” The investigation into the mishap was led by Blue Origin and monitored by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The capsule and the 36 payloads it carried landed safely under parachutes and were ready to fly again, Blue Origin said. The rocket booster, which under normal circumstances falls back to Earth and touches down gently on a landing pad so it can be reused, crashed and was totaled. The company was able to recover all of the rocket’s debris within the designated danger area, it said.
Bezos flew on New Shepard’s first human flight in 2021. The vehicle had since flown five more missions with people on board, including one with Star Trek actor William Shatner and another with television commentator Michael Strahan.
While Blue Origin remained grounded, Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, has routinely flown passengers to the edge of space and back.
Blue Origin also continues to work on its much larger and more powerful New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit and, the company hopes, would enable Blue Origin to compete for government and commercial contracts. The company has already signed contracts to launch the satellites that Amazon plans to use in its Kuiper systems to transmit the Internet to ground stations. (Bezos also founded Amazon; the Post’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)
However, New Glenn’s development was repeatedly delayed. Recently, Amazon announced that it had purchased three launches from SpaceX, Blue Origin’s rival. The company is facing a deadline to put a large portion of its satellite constellation into orbit.
Originally posted 2023-12-12 19:42:17.