Mission successful: Blue Origin rocket tests emergency capsule separation

This dual screen view from a Blue Origin webcast shows the company’s New Shepard crew capsule rocketing away from its booster (which is visible in the inset at lower right) during an in-flight abort test over West Texas on October 5, 2016.

Being able to safely evacuate passengers is considered fairly crucial before the Jeff Bezos-led company begins sending humans into space next year. This was the first inflight test of the emergency escape system for the New Shepard system.

Writing on his blog before the launch, Jeff Bezos called the flight “our toughest test yet” and said that if the booster survived the ordeal, they would reward it with a retirement party.

This crew escape system is different from what has come before, on Mercury, Apollo, and Soyuz.

A Blue Origin booster stage touches down in a West Texas desert, in a successful test of a reusable escape motor. The escape towers, meanwhile, have to be jettisoned before re-entry. That launch pad has not seen a launch since 1964. Despite an additional 35-minute delay, the test flight went perfectly.

But Wednesday test was the first carried out from a climbing rocket under actual flight conditions. Separation systems will cut the capsule from the booster.

The booster, rather than disintegrating from in-flight pressures and the launch abort, righted itself and continued its flight to space. The system is created to propel humans to safety should anything go wrong with the blazing tube of fire they’re strapped to on their trip into orbit. Once there, the capsule separates from the booster and the two eventually fall back to earth; the capsule touches down with the help of parachutes while the booster reignites its engine and lands upright on solid ground.

Now he wants his space firm to launch a critical safety test of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. But it’s likely to be a different story for the booster.

The capsule was rocketed from the booster in this intentionally-induced abort and landed under its three parachutes a few minutes later. The booster will likely be smashed with seventy thousand pounds of off-axis force.

Blue Origin has launched and landed successfully its New Shepard spaceflight suborbital system four times in the last seven months.

New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and New Glenn after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. The test launch will be shown live on webcast by Blue Origin at 10:45 am ET. Company officials acknowledged before the fifth flight that the rocket could be lost as a result of the capsule escape system test.

The rocket Blue Origin intends to launch Wednesday has flown four times before, dating back to its maiden launch on November 23, 2015, but this mission will be its last.

The New Shepard is, in fact, a reusable set of a rocket and a capsule. The launch abort system of the New Shepard are created to fire in an instant.

New Shepard proved again that is reliable construction even in emergency situations.