Bezos rocket crashes after liftoff, only experiments aboard

[groundloop]

Source: ABC News

A rocket crashed back to Earth shortly after liftoff Monday in the first launch accident for Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, but the capsule carrying experiments managed to parachute to safety.

No one was aboard the Blue Origin flight, which used the same kind of rocket as the one that sends paying customers to the edge of space. The rockets are now grounded pending the outcome of an investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The New Shepard rocket was barely a minute into its flight from West Texas when bright yellow flames shot out from around the single engine at the bottom. The capsule’s emergency launch abort system immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor.

The rocket came crashing down, with no injuries or damage reported, said the FAA, which is in charge of public safety during commercial space launches and landings.

Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/bezos-rocket-fails-liftoff-experiments-aboard-89756220

[Scrivener7]

1. womp womp.

[johnnyplankton]

2. I can think of one passenger I wish was aboard...

[Warpy]

11. Yeah, except the chutes all deployed

and the retro rockets fired and the landing wasn't a hard one.

I just hope the payload was OK. Scientific gear isn't heap or off the shelf.

[GreenWave]

3. The flawlessness of the Free Market once again...

[OnlinePoker]

9. It will be a while before it gets human rated again.

Fly a rocket with one engine like Blue Origin, there's no recovery from an engine abort. Fly 9 like SpaceX's Falcon and you can lose an engine and still complete the mission.

[jmowreader]

14. However...

SpaceX has lost a LOT of rockets in the time they've existed. I suspect the official SpaceX Development Program(tm) requires blowing up the first three rockets of any model that they make and evaluating the explosions.

[OnlinePoker]

15. Surprisingly, only 5. Three of those Falcon 1s (one engine).

They've had 146 successful flights in a row with Falcon 9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_SpaceX_launches

[Recursion]

13. NASA also had rockets blow up. Sometimes with people in them. (nt)

[lapfog_1]

16. To be fair... NASA was doing a lot of research for most of the failures.

the commercial launch operations have a lot of that research to draw upon.

In addition, the space shuttle program that lost 2 of the 5 built for flight ( one of which had a co-worker of mine on board ) was initially never intended to fly more than a few missions. The space shuttle was initially a technology demonstration platform (think of all the innovations compared to earlier apollo missions... a flying "brick" with heat tiles, gliding to a landing on a airstrip but entering the atmosphere at mach 18, able to haul large cargos to space, fly by computer, etc).

The people that designed the shuttle wanted to build 1 or 2 and then take the lessons learned and built a real "space plane", at least that is what I heard from the people that worked at NASA before me.

As a side note... I used to go to the "Vanguard" conference room to talk about various projects, which I always thought was a bit ironic.

[JI7]

4. Does he pay for the investigation ?

[BumRushDaShow]

5. "the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor"

I took a look at the video of it about an hour ago and that capsule had 2 sets of parachutes deploy, where the final larger main ones oddly didn't allow the capsule to gently hit the ground, but ended up having it smash to the ground. The capsule still looked intact but I don't know about whatever was inside.

[Owl]

7. Sure looked to land hard.

[GregariousGroundhog]

8. That's actually normal

The parachutes remove most of the horizontal velocity, but the spacecraft still fires retrorockets a fraction of a second before landing and has shock dampeners on the seats to absorb some of the jolt from landing.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. I watched when they landed "normally"

with passengers (the flight with Shatner) and it didn't land hard like that. I know it kicks up dust landing but that looked to slam. This was screenshot of the passenger landing -



I think in that passengers instance, they said the chutes would slow it to something like 25 mph before ground contact (or along those lines). It obviously wasn't a complete free-fall drop but it seemed like a timing issue of the chutes and the altitude. I think it had reached about 28,000 ft before the booster failed and fell away from the capsule (which fired its own jets and then eventually deployed its initial chutes, falling for awhile with those, then deploying the main chutes).

[Alexander Of Assyria]

6. Rocket Science is hard. The scape mechanism functioned well it seems.

[LudwigPastorius]

12. "Jeff Bezos reportedly apologized to space, saying, 'This has never happened to me before.'

"Space replied, 'That's OK. It happens to all guys sometimes.'"

[Martin68]

17. The good news is that the capsule escape system worked perfectly and had a soft landing.