Blue Origin’s recent NS-23 flight did not go to plan. On Monday morning, the private space company was forced to abort the unmanned mission after one of its New Shepard rockets suffered an unspecified “booster failure.” The problem occurred about a minute after the flight departed from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site at 10:26 a.m. ET. You can see the entire incident in the company’s video shared on Twitter.
“It appears we experienced an anomaly in today’s flight,” said a commenter during the NS-23 livestream. “It was unplanned and we don’t have any details yet. But our crew pod managed to escape successfully, we will follow its progress until landing. As you can see the drogues are deployed and next the nets will be shut down.”
The capsule carried research equipment funded by NASA. “It’s useless to speculate at this point as to what happened. Not even the company knows the cause.” Eric Berger tweetedsenior space editor at Ars Technica, adding in a separate post that had the spacecraft been manned, the crew “would have felt a serious jolt but would have been safe.”
Blue Shepard will not be able to fly again until Blue Origin investigates the incident and the Federal Aviation Administration approves the company’s findings.
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team independently from our parent company. Some of our stories contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may receive an affiliate commission. All prices are correct at time of publication.