blue origin
More than six months after the failure of the New Shepard rocket, Blue Origin Posted an overview of the findings made by the accident investigation team.
For a private company flying a private launch system, this NS-23 mission analysis is pretty detailed. Essentially, the rocket’s main engine nozzle maintained a higher than expected temperature, leading to the rocket’s detonation.
The accident occurred 1 minute and 4 seconds after the research flight launched on September 12, 2022. The emergency escape system worked as intended, rapidly pulling the spacecraft away from the collapsing rocket. Had the crew been on board this flight, they would have experienced considerable impact and high gravity before they landed safely in the western Texas desert.
Blue Origin led the investigation with support from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators had a wealth of data to dig into, both from in-flight telemetry and from hardware recovered from the West Texas desert.
With this information, the accident team noticed a “hot streak” in the nozzle and determined it was operating at a higher than designed temperature. Although the abstract doesn’t say so explicitly, it appears that at some point during this booster’s flight campaign, a design change was made that allowed these higher temperatures to exist.
“Blue Origin has implemented corrective actions such as combustion chamber design changes and operating parameters that have reduced bulk and hot streak temperatures in the engine nozzle,” the company said.
The company has said it intends to return to flying unmanned “soon” to give the three dozen payloads it had flown on the NS-23 mission another shot in zero gravity. said it plans to resume crewed flights on its suborbital spacecraft in late 2023.
The abstract omits some important information. For example, the company doesn’t say exactly what forces the spacecraft experienced during its emergency evacuation, other than to say that the humans on board would have survived the experience.
Additionally, it is not clear which rocket will be used to launch the return-to-flight mission. The company’s first New His Shepard rocket, Booster 1, was lost during a flight in April 2015. Booster 2 was retired in October 2016 after successfully testing its launch escape system on its fifth and final flight. Booster 3, which launched his NS-23 mission in September, was the company’s oldest operational rocket, debuting in December 2017.
The company uses its newest rocket, Booster 4, exclusively for manned launches. With some modifications from Booster 3, it qualifies as a human-rated rocket. A spokesperson for the company told Ars it was unable to provide information about upcoming flights beyond what is in the summary.
