Six months after its New Shepard rocket failed during flight, Kent, Washington-based aerospace firm Blue Origin revealed the reasons behind the flight mishap. Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is a suborbital launch vehicle designed to fly humans and cargo to the boundary between space and Earth and can also land vertically.
However, the rocket's latest launch in September last year surprised both Blue Origin and observers when a little over a minute after liftoff, the rocket's tail section emitted a large stream of flame, and its capsule jetted off to safety. Since then, Blue Origin has been silent on the issue until today, when it explained that the New Shepard's rocket engine nozzle was damaged during flight and failed to perform nominally.
Blue Origin Explains That Changes To Rocket Engine Cooling System Led To Nozzle Failure
The New Shepard rocket is one of the smaller launch vehicles out there as it is powered by a single BE-3 rocket engine that uses hydrogen and oxygen as its fuel and oxidizer. The entire rocket is nearly 60 feet tall, or five times smaller than NASA's massive SLS rocket that lifted the Orion spacecraft to an orbit around the Moon last year. Blue Origin makes two variants of the engine - one for the New Shepard called the BE-3PM engine and one for the second stage of its New Glenn rocket called the BE-3U engine.
The primary difference between these engines is how the fuel and oxidizers are fed into the combustion chamber, where they ignite to generate thrust. For the BE-3PM engine, the firm uses the standard pump design that feeds the propellants into the chambers, with the pumps powered by a turbine run by a small amount of bleed-off gas from the combustion chamber itself. The BE-3U engine, on the other hand, is the efficient design since most of the bleed-off gas is then fed into the combustion chamber with only some powering the turbines.
In a press release, Blue Origin explained that after the accident, it formed an investigation team that operated with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with members from both NASA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). This team analyzed video feed from the launch, tests, and the failed rocket recovered from the launch site to determine that a faulty nozzle on the BE-3 engine was responsible for the mission failure.
The nozzle on a rocket engine is the bell-shaped outer part that is often the most visually prominent component. Its primary purpose is to channel the thrust into creating lift, and it is typically cooled by super-cold propellants flowing through it. For both the BE-3 engines, cold propellants flow through the nozzle, are heated up, and then power the turbines responsible for pumping fuel and oxidizer into the engine.
This cooling system was at the heart of the mishap, with Blue Origin revealing that changes made to this led to the nozzle running at a hotter temperature than its materials could tolerate. In fact, as soon as the New Shepard failure took place, Blue Origin tested the BE-3 engine, which led to "hot streaks" similar to those present on the nozzle debris recovered from the launch site.
This raises the question of what tests did Blue Origin conduct before the NS-23 launch and after it made the cooling system changes, and if it did conduct any tests, did these present findings similar to the tests conducted after the NS-23 failure?
Moving forward, the firm has made changes to the engine's combustion chamber and other parameters that have reduced the nozzle temperature and weight. Since the BE-3 is also used on the New Glenn, a rocket that Blue Origin has marketed to NASA for flying a lander that will take astronauts to the Moon, whether the problems with the BE-3U also affect the New Glenn is uncertain.
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