Blue Origin units date for subsequent New Shepard flight after finishing parachute investigation

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has scheduled its subsequent New Shepard suborbital mission for Aug. 29 after finishing an investigation right into a parachute that failed to totally open on the car’s earlier flight.

Blue Origin introduced Aug. 23 that it has scheduled the following New Shepard launch, NS-26, for no sooner than Aug. 29. Liftoff of the car from the corporate’s West Texas launch web site is scheduled for 9 a.m. Japanese.

The flight would be the first for New Shepard because the NS-25 mission Might 19. Whereas that mission was a hit, one of many three parachutes deployed by the crew capsule throughout its descent failed to totally open. The corporate famous on the time that the capsule is designed to land with solely two parachutes.

“We recognized the direct trigger for the difficulty noticed on NS-25 and carried out corrective actions which can be in place for our subsequent flight,” Blue Origin mentioned in an announcement to SpaceNews Aug. 23. “Our investigation confirmed the parachutes themselves have been nominal and packed appropriately. We centered on the dis-reefing system that transitions the parachutes from the reefed to disreefed state that didn’t operate as designed on one of many three parachutes on NS-25.”

Blue Origin didn’t elaborate with the particular challenge with the dis-reefing system, which controls the opening of the parachutes, or the corrective actions it took. The corporate said that the capsule might safely land with only a single parachute “and has further security options and redundancies through our tender touchdown system and crew seat design.” 

After the parachute incident, Blue Origin briefed NASA as a result of its parachutes use elements just like these on business crew autos, like Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner that, on the time, was being ready for launch on the Crew Flight Check (CFT) mission.

At a Might 31 briefing about CFT, Steve Stich, NASA business crew program supervisor, mentioned that on the New Shepard flight, a line constraining the opening of the parachute was not reduce as designed, thus conserving it from opening additional. He mentioned that whereas Starliner’s parachutes use the same cutter, that they had not seen any issues with it throughout testing.

NS-26 would be the second crewed flight of New Shepard after a hiatus of greater than a yr and a half brought on by an engine failure on a payload-only New Shepard flight in September 2022. New Shepard flew one other payload-only flight in December 2023 earlier than resuming crewed flights with NS-25 in Might.

The corporate introduced the six-person crew for NS-26 a month in the past. Among the many six is Rob Ferl, a College of Florida professor and advocate of business suborbital analysis who’s conducting NASA-funded experiments on the flight.

One other individual flying on NS-26 is Karsen Kitchen, a 21-year-old scholar on the College of North Carolina and daughter of earlier New Shepard flyer Jim Kitchen. Blue Origin mentioned she would be the youngest lady to cross the Kármán Line, the 100-kilometer altitude usually used because the definition of area.

Nonetheless, she won’t essentially be the youngest lady to go to area: 18-year-old Anastatia Mayers flew on Virgin Galactic’s Galactic 02 suborbital flight in August 2023. That flight reached a peak altitude of 88.5 kilometers, in need of the Kármán Line however above the 50-mile (80.5-kilometer) mark utilized by the corporate as its demarcation of area, one additionally utilized by U.S. authorities businesses.

Others on NS-26 embrace Nicolina Elrick, a philanthropist and entrepreneur; Eugene Grin, who works in actual property and finance; heart specialist and Vanderbilt College affiliate professor Eiman Jahangir, whose flight was sponsored by cryptocurrency group MoonDAO; and Ephraim Rabin, an American-Israeli businessman and philanthropist.

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