Blue Origin’s Shepard rocket explodes shortly after launch

The aerospace company Blue Origin suffered a severe setback yesterday. The launch of a New Shepard rocket failed. That at least gave the company the chance to experience the effectiveness of the rescue mechanisms in practice.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ company has been slowly making its way into space. Various competitors made faster progress in this way, but also had to invest more due to failures. Complete catastrophes like exploding launchers have not been part of the events in Blue Origin history so far. This has changed now. After a preparatory phase, the New Shepard rocket took off from its launch site in Texas without any abnormalities.

After a flight time of one minute, the so-called MaxG range was reached. This is where the increasing speed and the still relatively dense atmosphere come together in such a way that the highest loads occur – later it becomes quieter despite the higher speed due to the decreasing air pressure. Blue Origin: The New Shepard encounters problems shortly after launch

Unmanned

At that moment, a problem occurred with the launcher, which led to an explosion. At the same time, the automatic rescue systems were activated and the capsule housing the payload and crew were thrown away by the rocket. She then fell back to earth, slowed down by parachutes. The error also occurred here at a rather fortunate time. Because this time it was an unmanned flight.

On board, the New Shepard were various scientific experiments instead of prominent travelers who wanted to take a short trip into space. Due to the incident, no further flights will take place in the near future. Instead, there will be investigative work to get to the bottom of the bug that caused the launcher to explode.