I’ll note that when I watched this live on the web I didn’t see the retrorocket fire, and I was concerned the landing was too fast. At 2:10 the crew capsule parachutes deploy, and then touchdown is at 2:53. That “took out most of the velocity,” and then a crushable bumper ring absorbed the rest of it for a safe landing.īlue Origin put together some pretty cool video of the flight:Īt 1:50 you can see the rocket itself landing perfectly, right back on the launch pad. In an email sent out to a mailing list, Bezos reports that the capsule (which was uncrewed) descended at about 37 kilometers per hour using only the two ‘chutes before firing its retrorocket to slow its speed just before touching down. The whole flight lasts just a few minutes.įor this flight, which was on June 19, one of the main goals was to deploy the crew capsule with only two parachutes, to see if it can still land safely in the event of a single parachute failure. The rocket is suborbital, which means that it essentially goes straight up, deploys (ejects) the crew capsule, then lands back down vertically using its engine while the crew capsule comes back down via parachute. This was the fourth flight of the company’s New Shepard rocket-literally, it’s the same rocket that had been launched and then landed vertically three times in the past. Some good news from Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos, the CEO of the rocket company, reports that the last test flight, where one of the three crew capsule parachutes was intentionally undeployed, was a success.
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