Fourth Time The New Shepard Spacecraft Has Been Launched, Recovered

Blue Origin on Sunday successfully launched and landed the New Shepard booster for the fourth time, and showed that the crew capsule could be safely recovered with only two of its three parachutes functioning.

The test flight was shown for the first time on a live webcast by the company.

TechCrunch online reports that the booster lifted the crew capsule into a suborbital trajectory, where it experienced four minutes of weightlessness before the booster separated and began its automated return to the launch site. It slowed to just five miles per hour and hovered for a moment before the landing gear deployed and it safely touched down.

For the test, only two of the three parachutes on the crew capsule were deployed during the recovery of the module to test the survivability of such a landing. The company said during the webcast that the capsule is designed to allow any passengers aboard to survive in the event that one of the parachutes failed to deploy. The crew capsule uses a combination of parachutes and retro rockets to slow the descent to two to three miles per hour before touching down.

The hosts of the webcast said that if anything went wrong with the experiment, the third parachute would deploy so as to preserve the capsule and the scientific data from the experiment.

The commentators said that the test seemed to go as designed, and the capsule was recovered safely.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has said that he hopes to be carrying paying passengers on suborbital flights as early as 2018.

(Image captured from Blue Origin video)

FMI: Video https://youtu.be/xYYTuZCjZcE