It's Embarrassing! Something Weird just Happened Blue Origin Rocket Launch...

After a week of grappling with avionics issues that thwarted the January 28th launch attempt, Blue Origin did not waste our time anymore. On January 4th, Jeff Bezos' rocket company successfully launched their reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft for the 29th time. They also shared a video recap of the flight from liftoff to landing on X, but ironically they chose to omit a critical detail. A main parachute on the crew capsule encountered difficulties during landing. In fact, the problem with parachutes is nothing new in space travel, but the big elephant in the room here is Blue Origin's decision to hide this issue which inadvertently exposed a significant flaw in their technology. Stay tuned as we uncover all the details in today's episode. Anyway, our next goal is 100,000, and we need your support to get there. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do. We appreciate your help. Thank you. The February 4th launch kicked off Blue Origin's uncrewed NS-29 mission, aimed to mimic lunar gravity conditions for two minutes, by spinning New Shepard's capsule at a rate of 11 revolutions per minute, which the capsule achieved by firing its reaction control thrusters. For this flight, we enhanced our capabilities by spinning the capsule 22 times faster than usual. It took us just over 20 seconds to reach full spin and begin providing our customers a simulated lunar gravity environment for over two minutes before we slowed it down for re-entry. Blue Origin's CEO, Dave Limp, wrote on X, New Shepard's two stages including a booster and a capsule, separated on time a little over 2.5 minutes after liftoff. The booster came back to Earth for a vertical touchdown on a landing pad a little over 7 minutes later, and the capsule followed suit with a parachute-aided touchdown in the dusty West Texas desert around 10 minutes after launch. Those are recorded in the video of the launch published by the company, but some viewers questioned why the video did not share any footage of the capsule rotating, despite this being the main goal of the launch. Additionally, sources also revealed a significant failure of one of the three main parachutes on the New Shepard crew capsule. Specifically, during landing, a parachute was a bit slow to inflate, but finally realized and worked, helping the capsule to have a soft touchdown. Ironically, this view was also cut in the video. Although that problem didn't affect the landing phase, and during the company's live stream of the flight, launch commentators stressed that the capsule was designed to land safely with less than three of its parachutes. It would be odd if Blue Origin didn't mention anything surrounding that setback. This is in contrast to SpaceX's open attitude for failure. Perhaps, so far, parachutes remain a dead end for Blue Origin. They used to encounter issues with parachutes in New Shepard's NS-25 mission on May 19, 2024, when one of the parachutes on the New Shepard capsule did not open during landing. This malfunction occurred due to a tape that controls the parachute's inflation not being cut. Despite this, the capsule managed a safe landing with only two parachutes deployed. Blue Origin didn't make the problem public, but informed NASA of the anomaly, given the relevance of similar components in other spacecraft like Boeing's Starliner. To be fair, it's not just the Washington-based company that's having parachute issues, but other space companies like Boeing and even SpaceX. During a 2019 pad abort test of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, only two of the three main parachutes deployed due to a failure in the connection between the pilot chute and one of the main chutes. Or during the Crew-2 mission on November 8, 2021, one of the four main parachutes on the SpaceX Dragon capsule named Endeavour did not open as scheduled, lagging approximately 75 seconds behind the others. A similar issue occurred during the CRS-24 mission on January 24, 2022, where a parachute opened about 63 seconds late. Despite these delays, both missions successfully splashed down without incident. So, what makes the difference here? Unlike Boeing and BO, SpaceX quickly worked with NASA to resolve the issue after discovering it. They have now made great strides in perfecting the parachute system, as evidenced by the recent smooth landings of the Dragon spacecraft. While parachute technology has reached a high level of maturity for terrestrial applications, its use in space missions presents unique challenges stemming from several unique conditions and requirements that are significantly different from those encountered in terrestrial applications. First, extreme entry conditions. Spacecraft enter planetary atmospheres at hypersonic speeds, up to 20,000 miles per hour for Mars landings, which is far beyond the speeds experienced by parachutes on Earth. This requires parachutes to be designed for supersonic deployment, which can lead to issues like high dynamic pressure causing stress on the parachute material or failure during inflation. Atmospheric entry generates intense heat, and while the spacecraft's heat shield protects it, the parachute deployment must occur after the peak heating phase, but still under conditions where temperatures might be too high for typical parachute materials. Second, its unique atmospheric environments. On Mars, for example, the atmosphere is much thinner, which means less drag for deceleration. Parachutes must be oversized compared to what would be used on Earth, or alternative deceleration methods like retro propulsion must be employed. Different planets have different gases, pressures, and temperature profiles, which affect parachute performance. For instance, methane in Titan's atmosphere behaves differently from nitrogen and oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, requiring tailored designs. The third one is deployment challenges. Parachutes must be packed into very confined spaces for launch, but need to deploy reliably after potentially years in space. The shock from sudden deceleration from space vacuum to atmosphere can cause deployment issues like tangling or tearing. Parachutes often need to open while the spacecraft is still traveling at supersonic speeds, which can lead to shock waves interacting with the parachute, potentially damaging it or causing it to open unevenly. Fourth is variability in landing conditions. Even on Mars, unpredictable winds or atmospheric disturbances can affect parachute stability and the spacecraft's trajectory, making precise landings challenging. The landing site might have rough or varied terrain, where the parachute's control over descent might not be sufficient to ensure a safe landing, necessitating additional technologies like sky cranes or airbags. The next one is reliability and redundancy. Since the parachute is often a critical component in the landing sequence, failure can be catastrophic. Therefore, systems must be incredibly robust, often including redundancy, multiple parachutes, or backup systems, which adds complexity and weight. Earth-based testing can only simulate conditions so far. The real environment in space or on another planet might behave differently, leading to unexpected outcomes. The sixth is material and design constraints. Every component on a spacecraft must be as light as possible, yet parachutes need to be strong enough to withstand the forces of deployment and descent. This requires advanced materials and designs that can balance strength, weight, and durability. Parachutes might be stored for years before use, requiring materials that do not degrade significantly over time and space conditions, exposure to radiation, vacuum, etc. Last but not least, the parachute system should have smooth integration with other systems. The parachute deployment must be perfectly timed with other landing systems like heat shields, retrorockets, or landing legs. Any mismatch can lead to failure. The parachute system often works in concert with automated flight control systems that must adjust for real-time conditions, adding another layer of complexity. Hopefully, Blue Origin will find the best solution to handle the issues regarding the parachute, or they can move on to propulsive landing. Anyway, in the NS-29 mission, Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule reached a new record, creating Lunar Gravity Forces, a first for a New Shepard mission. This twist was implemented to serve the mission's 30 research payloads, 29 of which tested lunar-related technologies. Those technologies can be grouped into six main categories, the company wrote. In-situ resource utilization, dust mitigation, advanced habitation systems, sensors and instrumentation, small spacecraft technologies, and entry, descent, and landing. More than half of NS-29's payloads were supported by NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, according to Blue Origin. Data about the lunar environment is important to the space agency, which is working to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon via its Artemis program. One of the NASA experiments that went up in this flight, known as the Electrostatic Dust Lofting Project, investigated how moon dust gets electrically charged and lifted up when exposed to ultraviolet light. Insights from this study will help future lunar missions address dust problems. Another one, called the Lunar G Combustion Investigation, studied how materials catch fire in the moon's gravity compared to Earth's. The findings will help NASA and its partners create safer living and working habitats for people on the moon. Four of the payloads are from Honeybee Robotics, a division within Blue Origin's in-space systems business. Honeybee's experiments will test technologies focused on penetrating, excavating, and processing lunar regolith. Blue Origin added on the mission description, this mission will fly our dedicated payloads capsule paired with our recently debuted booster, demonstrating the compatibility between the boosters and capsules in our fleet and increasing launch availability for our customers. We now have three capsules and two boosters in service to better address sales demand for payloads and astronauts. The mission will also carry thousands of postcards on behalf of Club for the Future, Blue Origin's steam-focused non-profit, whose mission is to inspire and mobilize future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. The organization has engaged more than 44 million people globally since its founding in 2019. Additionally, there is Fluidic Operations in Reduced Gravity Experiment, FORGE, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. FORGE will test how to manage liquids and gases in space. This technology is critical for instruments that may monitor water quality for astronauts or search for evidence of life on ocean worlds in our solar system. Another one called Film Evaporation, MM's, Tunable Array Micropropulsion System, Purdue University. FEMTA is a water-based micropropulsion system in development by researchers at Purdue. This small thruster helps precisely control the direction and positioning of small satellites. The experiments are measuring how well FEMTA and its passive propellant delivery system work in the low-gravity environment of space. The experiment was flown on the New Shepard booster. New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel into space. Similarly, Blue Origin's New Glenn orbital rocket, which had its inaugural launch in January, honors John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The New Shepard vehicle had its first uncrewed flight in April 2015, with its initial crewed launch taking place on July 20, 2021, coinciding with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. This historic NS-16 flight included Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Damon. Out of New Shepard's 29 flights so far, nine have been crewed missions. The latest space tourism flight occurred on November 22, featuring the space gal, Emily Calandrelli, along with five other passengers.