Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket crashes minutes after lift-off
New Delhi: An uncrewed Blue Origin rocket crashed minutes after lifting off from West Texas. The Jeff Bezos-owned space travel company was carrying payloads before crashing on the earth’s surface.
The first launch accident resulted in the rocket breaking apart as the capsule carrying experiments floated safely back to earth through a parachute.
The rocket was part of the 23rd Mission for the New Shepard rocket program, which is named after the first American in space.
The New Shepard rocket was barely a minute into its flight from West Texas when bright yellow flames shot from around the single engine at the bottom.
Meanwhile, emergency launch abort system of the capsule immediately kicked in, lifting the craft off the top. Several minutes later, the capsule parachuted onto the remote desert floor.
The crash reportedly happened at the point when the rocket reached the maximum amount of pressure, known as max-q. Rockets usually land upright on the desert floor and are recycled for future flights.
As per reports, the Blue Origin flight used the same rocket that is used to send paying customers to the edge of space. However, no one was aboard the vehicle.
Thirty-six experiments were on board to be exposed to a few minutes of weightlessness, with half the experiments sponsored by NASA, and mostly from students.
However, Blue Origin’s launch commentary reportedly went silent when the capsule catapulted off the rocket before announcing, “It appears we’ve experienced an anomaly with today’s flight. This wasn’t planned.”
“Booster failure on today’s uncrewed flight. Escape system performed as designed,” the Washington-based company tweeted.
The mishap occurred as the rocket was travelling nearly 1,126 km/h at an altitude of about 8,500 metres and the capsule had reached a maximum altitude of more than 11,300 metres before returning to the planet.
The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the New Shepard suborbital rockets, thereby delaying the investigation. “The rockets are now grounded pending the outcome of an investigation,” the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.
The FAA is in charge of public safety during commercial space launches and landings and said in an official statement, “The rocket came crashing down, with no injuries or damage reported.”
(Avya Mathur)
