Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has launched an investigation following an incident during the first manned flight in two years in which one of the New Shepard capsule’s parachutes failed to fully inflate.
The companies New Shepard rocket launched May 19 taking a crew of six to suborbital space. During the NS-25 mission, the crew capsule landed to complete the flight, but only two of the three parachutes were fully inflated, SpaceNews says reported. Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, recently revealed the problem during a briefing on the upcoming crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner. Blue Origin had not publicly disclosed the issue with its parachute, but instead informed NASA officials of the anomaly, since vehicles such as Boeing’s Starliner use similar components.
New Shepard uses three parachutes to slow the crew capsule as it returns to Earth, although it can land with only one fully deployed parachute. The parachutes are designed to open in three stages, but during the NS-25 mission, one of the three parachutes failed in the very first stage when a line controlling inflation was not cut as intended, Stich said.
“It’s a small group of people working on these parachutes,” Stich told SpaceNews. “They were great about sharing data with us. They don’t really have a real cause yet, and we’ll continue to monitor them.”
Bezos’ private space company resumed its space tourism program with the NS-25 mission after the rocket was grounded for nearly two years. In September 2022, a New Shepard’s unmanned flight ended in flames about one minute after takeoff. The rocket’s booster exploded mid-flight and the capsule left the ship while traveling at about 700 miles per hour (1,130 kilometers per hour) and 29,000 feet (8,840 meters) above the ground.
Blue Origin identified a “thermostructural failure of the engine nozzle” as the reason behind the failed rocket launch. At the time, New Shepard carried 36 payloads, more than half of which belonged to NASA, but there was no crew aboard the capsule. The company resumed its space tourism activities with its seventh human spaceflight on May 19, marking a comeback after the previous launch failure. We don’t yet know the severity of the parachute problem and whether it will cause further delays. While we’re not parachute experts, it’s fair to say this is concerning; Failure to deploy one parachute could indicate the possibility of multiple failures during descent.
As an aside, engineers on the Boeing Starliner program discovered their own parachute problem, a problem that delayed the capsule’s first crewed flight. A few weeks before the planned launch on July 21, 2023, Starliner teams discovered that the fabric parts of the parachutes had a lower failure load limit than expected. This meant that if one parachute failed, the remaining two would not be able to slow the Starliner vehicle enough for a safe landing in New Mexico. In March 2024, Boeing announced that it had resolved the safety problem.
The problem with the parachutes stems from the difficulty of accurately simulating the environment in which they are deployed. “Even today, with all the technology we have and everything else, as far as we’ve come with parachutes, we still can’t model the inflation of a parachute,” Stich said, according to SpaceNews. “It seems like it should be easy. It’s still a bit difficult.”
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