Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has launched an investigation following an incident during its first crewed flight in two years when one of the parachutes on the New Shepard capsule failed to fully inflate.
Companies The new Shepard rocket launched on May 19 carrying a crew of six into suborbital space. The NS-25 mission saw the crew capsule land to complete the flight, but only two of its three parachutes were fully inflated, SpaceNews reported. Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, recently revealed the problem during a briefing on the upcoming crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner. Blue Origin did not publicize the problem with its parachute, but instead informed NASA officials of the anomaly because vehicles such as the Boeing Starliner use similar components.
New Shepard uses three parachutes to slow the crew cabin on its way back to Earth, although it can only land with 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 first stage when the cord controlling its inflation was not cut as intended, according to Stich.
“It’s a small group of people who work on these parachutes,” Stich said, according to SpaceNews. “They’ve been great about sharing data with us. They don’t have an underlying cause yet and we’re continuing to monitor them.”
Bezos’ private space venture has resumed its space tourism program with the NS-25 mission, nearly two years after its rocket grounded. In September 2022, an the unmanned New Shepard flight ended in flames about a minute after the start. The rocket’s booster exploded mid-flight and its capsule left the ship while traveling at roughly 700 miles per hour (1,130 kilometers per hour) and 29,000 feet (8,840 meters) above the ground.
Blue Origin identified “engine nozzle thermostructural failure” as the reason for the failed launch of the rocket. At the time, New Shepard was carrying 36 payloads, more than half of which belonged to NASA, but there was no crew aboard the capsule. The company resumed its space tourism operations with its seventh human spaceflight on May 19, marking a comeback after a previous launch failure. We do not yet know the severity of the parachute issue or whether it will cause further delays. While we’re no parachute experts, it’s fair to say it’s a concern; if one parachute fails to deploy, this could indicate the possibility of multiple failures during descent.
In addition, engineers in Boeing’s Starliner program revealed their own parachute problem that delayed the crewed capsule’s first flight. A few weeks before the scheduled launch on July 21, 2023, the Starliner teams discovered that the fabric parts of the parachutes had lower failure load limit than expected. This meant that if one parachute failed, the other two would not be able to slow the Starliner down enough for a safe landing in New Mexico. In March 2024 Boeing announced that it has resolved the safety issue.
The problem with 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, if we’ve come up with parachutes, we still can’t model the inflation of a parachute,” Stich said, according to SpaceNews. “Looks like it should be easy. It’s still a little difficult.”
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