Blue Origin’s recent flight NS-23 did not go as planned. On Monday morning, the private space company was forced to abort the unmanned mission after one of its New Shepard rockets suffered an unspecified “boost failure.” The issue arose about a minute after the flight took off from the Blue Origin launch site in West Texas at 10:26 a.m. ET. You can see the full development of the incident in the company’s video. shared on twitter.
“It appears we have experienced an anomaly with today’s flight,” a commentator said during NS-23. live broadcast. “This was not planned and we don’t have details yet. But our crew capsule was able to escape successfully, we will follow its progress until landing. As you can see, the drogues have been deployed, and the power grid will be the next to go.”
The capsule was carrying NASA-funded research equipment. “It is useless to speculate on what happened at this point. Not even the company knows the cause.” tweeted Eric Bergersenior spatial editor at Ars Technicaadding in a separate post that if the spacecraft had been manned, the crew “would have felt a serious jolt, but would have been safe.”
Blue Shepard will not be able to fly again until Blue Origin investigates the incident and the Federal Aviation Administration approves the company’s findings.
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