KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – The parachute failed to fully inflate on Blue Origin New Shepard’s final suborbital flight because the line controlling its expansion did not break as planned.
One of the three parachutes on the New Shepard crew capsule did not fully inflate during the capsule’s descent on the NS-25 mission on May 19. The other two parachutes operated normally and the capsule landed without incident.
During a May 31 briefing on the upcoming manned test flight of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, NASA officials said they were informed by Blue Origin of the parachute issue because the parachutes on other vehicles such as the Starliner use similar components.
Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the parachutes are designed to open in stages called reefing to reduce the load on the parachutes. “In this case, one of the parachutes got stuck in what I would call the first stage” of the reefing process, he said, limiting the opening of the parachute.
This is controlled by a strap or cord on the neck of the parachute. “You could see the cutters didn’t cut that line for some reason,” he said. The parachutes on the Starliner use a similar cutter, but Stich said testing has not shown any problems with the parachutes used on the Starliner. This provided the “flight justification” for the Starliner’s continued launch.
He praised Blue Origin for sharing information about the parachute issue. “It’s a small group of people working on these parachutes,” he said, including people from Blue Origin, Boeing, NASA and SpaceX. “They’ve been great about sharing data with us. They don’t have an underlying cause yet and we’re continuing to monitor them.”
However, Blue Origin has provided little information to the public about the parachute issue and the investigation, failing to mention it in its mission statement.
“Our New Shepard system uses three parachutes and is designed to land safely with only one deployed,” a company spokesperson told SpaceNews on May 31. “We conduct thorough post-flight inspections of each flight system and this analysis is ongoing. We continue to share data and analysis of our parachute deployments with our parachute supplier, NASA and launch providers.”
The parachutes have caused problems for several crewed vehicles using them. The Starliner’s crewed test flight from last year was delayed in part to replace parachute components called “softlinks” that lacked sufficient safety margins. SpaceX has faced its own challenges developing parachutes for the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and recently noticed that one of the four parachutes was slower to open than the others during deployment, but fully inflated.
The problems with the parachutes illustrate the challenges of designing them despite decades of experience using them in spaceflight. “It’s the only system you require to assemble in flight,” Jim McMichael, senior manager of technical integration in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said during an interview before the Starliner’s earlier launch attempt.
Parachute deployment takes place in a “chaotic environment” influenced by factors such as the wake the spacecraft creates in the atmosphere during descent. “Even today, with all the technology we have and everything else, if we’ve come up with parachutes, we still can’t model an inflatable parachute,” he said. However, once it starts to inflate, the models can accurately predict the load on the system.
“Looks like it should be easy,” he concluded. “It’s still a little hard.