The test, which took place at Blue Origin’s facility near Van Horn, Texas, simulated what an engine powering New Shepard would be required to do in flight, namely thrust at 110,000 pounds for 145 seconds to boost the ship, shut down for 4.5 minutes to allow the vehicle to coast beyond the atmosphere, restart and throttle down to 25,000 pounds of thrust to make a controlled, vertical landing. Blue Origin, a startup commercial spaceflight company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, completed a full-duration burn of a liquid hydrogen-fueled engine developed for the New Shepard suborbital spaceship and planned orbital vehicles, Rob Meyerson, company president and program manager, said Dec. Here's Blue Origin's launch webcast.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. There was no property damage on the ground and no personnel were injured. The booster, meanwhile, automatically shut down the BE-3 engine and the rocket crashed back to Earth within the pre-defined launch hazard zone. It then made what appeared to be a normal parachute descent. In a fraction of a second, the New Shepard capsule's abort motor ignited with a rush of flaming exhaust, instantly pushing the spacecraft away from the malfunctioning booster. The right-side image shows Blue Origin's West Texas launch site as seen by an on-board camera. Blue Origin's webcast of the NS-23 launch last September showed a sudden change in the color and shape of the New Shepard booster's exhaust plume as the BE-3 main engine nozzle failed, triggering an in-flight abort (left). The early moments of the flight appeared normal as the rocket accelerated toward space, but one minute and four seconds after liftoff, the BE-3 exhaust plume changed color slightly and an instant after that, a large burst of flame erupted from the base of the rocket. After about three minutes of weightlessness, the capsules fall back to Earth with a parachute-assisted touchdown near the launch pad. Owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin built the New Shepard system to carry passengers and microgravity experiments on up-and-down flights to the edge of space some 65 miles up. The capsule's escape system performed as designed and the spacecraft made a successful parachute-assisted landing. Failure of the main engine's nozzle about 64 seconds after liftoff triggered an abort that destroyed the booster. The company did not say exactly when flights might resume, only that Blue Origin "expects to return to flight soon, with a re-flight of the NS-23 payloads." A Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft blasts off from the company's West Texas launch site last September, carrying a suite of microgravity payloads on what was to have been the company's 23rd sub-orbital spaceflight. The Crew Capsule and all payloads on board landed safely and will be flown again." "The resulting thrust misalignment properly triggered the Crew Capsule escape system, which functioned as designed throughout the flight. "The direct cause of the NS-23 mishap was a thermo-structural failure of the engine nozzle," Blue Origin said in a statement. Structural failure of the nozzle at the base of a rocket engine powering an un-piloted New Shepard spacecraft toward the edge of space in September of 2022 triggered a dramatic-but-safe in-flight abort, builder Blue Origin announced Friday, saying the company has identified fixes and plans to resume sub-orbital flights "soon."
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