https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/09/1...-ns-23-launch/
Blue Origin capsule escapes rocket failure on uncrewed flight over Texas
The suborbital rocket developed by Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin suffered its first launch failure Monday, when the main engine on the New Shepard booster appeared to cut out about a minute after liftoff from West Texas. The crew capsule, which carried NASA-funded experiments but no people, safely landed under parachutes after firing an abort motor to escape the stricken booster.
The unplanned in-flight abort saved the company’s reusable capsule, and the mission’s experiment payloads stowed inside. But one of Blue Origin’s two operational suborbital New Shepard boosters, which hosted its own research payloads, was lost in the launch failure.
Blue Origin’s live webcast showed the rocket lifting off from the company’s sprawling 80,000-acre launch facility north of Van Horn, Texas, around 10:26 a.m. EDT (9:26 a.m. CDT; 1426 GMT), after a nearly hour-long delay.
A single hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine powered the 60-foot-tall (18-meter) booster off the launch pad. About a minute after liftoff, as the rocket neared supersonic speed, the plume from the BE-3 engine appeared to change color and shape, then the powerplant appeared to shut down, causing the rocket to tilt off its planned trajectory at an altitude of around 28,000 feet (8,500 meters).
The solid-fueled abort motor on bottom of the crew capsule fired immediately, delivering an instant pulse of 70,000 pounds of thrust to push the craft away from the failing rocket.
The four-ton capsule spun around and tumbled after the abort motor’s brief firing, which propelled the vehicle hundreds of feet away from the New Shepard rocket. Guided by reaction control system thrusters, the capsule’s motion stabilized as it deployed three drogue parachutes and three main chutes for a relatively gentle ride back to the ground. The capsule was designed to touch down at a speed of around 3 mph (5 kilometers per hour).