The good news is that Blue Origin’s escape functionworked great and the nozzle problem was fixed. But this wasn’t the onlyissue the company had to deal with; it also found out that their tests didn’t reflectthe real-world conditions of flight.
The parachute deployment successfully avoided any potential injury or death to anyone on the ground, but the rocket itself still crashed into a nearby field. The cause of the failure is still under investigation, but it seems that something went wrong during takeoff, possibly caused by an issue with one of the spacecraft’s subsystems.
The investigators had to reassemble the rocket to figure out what happened. After doing so, they were able to find that one of the Engine’s tubes was slightly off-center, causing the engine to fail and send the rocket crashing down.
Forensic evaluation of the recovered nozzle fragments also showed clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures. The fatigue location on the flight nozzle is aligned with a persistent hot streak identified during the investigation.
During the investigation it was determined that there was evidence of increased operating temperatures, likely caused by a microinstability in the material causing thermal damage and hot streaks. This microinstability may have been caused by harsh vibration and acoustic environment experienced during cruise. The flight nozzle fatigue location is consistent with this type of failure and suggests that the stresses put on the material were too high for it to withstand.
It seems that the boundary layer cooling system on the Blue Origin engine was not up to the task – causing higher-than-normal temperatures and a persistent hot streak. This ultimately led to an unexpected escape of gas from the engine, triggering a shutdown.
When Jeff Bezos and his team at Blue Origin came across the engine nozzle, they knew it was something special. After some research, the team determined that this particular piece of machinery was from one of the company’s first launches: Amazon Web Services 1.0. The fact that this part of Blue Origin’s history still
Blue Origin is a private spaceflight company owned and operated by Amazon.com, Inc. Blue Origin manufactures and launches rockets to provide low cost access to space for both government and commercial customers. Prior to the launch of their New Glenn rocket in 2017, the company’s record-breaking launches were helmed by the Blue Moon 1E rocket which successfully placed three satellites into orbit in late 2016.
The cause of these hot streaks is not entirely clear, but Blue Origin asserts that they made a design change coinciding with these successes which allowed their rockets to stay in alignment longer without experiencing catastrophic failures or prematurely retiring from flight as had been
The Blue Origin investigation report has been submitted to the Federal Aviation Authority and it details the complex process that has been put in place to ensure that their flight can resume as soon as possible. The timeline for evaluation is up to them, but it looks like everything is proceeding according to plan and they could be back in the air soon.
While Tesla and SpaceX continue to face setbacks during their respective efforts to launch payloads into space, the company for its part, has reiterated that it expects to fly again soon. This is in spite of September’s interruption of some payloads’ trips when a Falcon 9 rocket failed shortly after takeoff. The company says that it intends to resume flights with new payloads as soon as possible. Whilst this marks a step back for Tesla and SpaceX, one can’t help but see the resilience in these companies while they try and correct their mistakes.
