Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Says High Engine Nozzle Temperature Led To Rocket Failure

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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.

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