In September 2022, the rocket suffered a failure about a minute into its flight from the company’s private facility in West Texas. Bright flames burst from the vehicle’s single BE-3 engine, and its emergency abort system kicked in, jettisoning the capsule away.
The spacecraft is designed to carry as many as six people to an altitude of more than 60 miles, where they experience a few minutes of weightlessness and view Earth from above the atmosphere.
In March, Blue Origin said in a statement that it had pinpointed 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 flight “soon.” The investigation into the mishap was led by Blue Origin and overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The capsule and the 36 payloads it was carrying landed safely under parachutes and can fly again, Blue Origin has said. The rocket booster, which under normal circumstances falls back to Earth and touches down softly on a landing pad so that it can be reused, crashed and was a total loss. The company was able to recover all the debris from the rocket within the designated hazard area, it said.
Bezos flew on New Shepard’s first flight with people in 2021. The vehicle had since flown five other missions with people on board, including one with Star Trek actor William Shatner and another with television commentator Michael Strahan.
While Blue Origin was grounded, Virgin Galactic, the space tourism venture founded by Richard Branson, has been routinely flying passengers to the edge of space and back.
Blue Origin also continues to work on its much larger and more powerful rocket New Glenn, which would be capable of reaching orbit and, the company hopes, allow Blue Origin to compete for government and commercial business. It already has contracts to launch the satellites Amazon intends to use in its Kuiper Systems, which would beam the Internet to ground stations. (Bezos also founded Amazon; The Post’s interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon’s board.)
The development of New Glenn has been repeatedly delayed, however. Recently, Amazon, which is facing a deadline to get a large portion of its satellite constellation into orbit, announced that it has purchased three launches from Blue Origin’s rival SpaceX.
