Thankfully, no crew were onboard for what would have been a terrifying ride.
If they had been, Blue Origin points out, they will have safely landed back on Earth thanks to a successful deployment of New Shepard's escape system. It would have been a terrifying ride though, and Blue Origin's first launch failure since going operational is a stark reminder that spaceflight is risky business — irrespective of space tourism firms highlighting their offerings as leisurely rides into suborbital space.
Blue Origin didn't explain what the anomaly was during their webcast of the launch, though Erika Wagner, senior director for Emerging Space Markets for the company and the webcast commentator pointed out that "safety is our highest value at Blue Origin. It's why we built so much redundancy into the system."
In its post-mission update, Blue Origin wrote “during today’s flight, the capsule escape system successfully separated the capsule from the booster. The booster impacted the ground. There are no reported injuries; all personnel have been accounted for.”The NS-23 mission was carrying 36 payloads — more than half of which belong to NASA — to altitudes higher than 60 miles . These payloads were housed inside the capsule, which performed a soft landing thanks to its parachute system.
Notably, Blue Origin has conducted six human spaceflights, with the first taking place on July 20, 2021, and carryinginto suborbital space. Blue Origin had plans for three more human spaceflights this year, though those will likely now be put on hold for some time as the company assesses the anomaly that caused this week's incident.
Blue Origin's Booster 3, which launched the NS-23 mission, was the company's oldest operational rocket, having first flown in 2017. Its Booster 4, which it uses exclusively for human launches, has a few modifications to qualify it as a human-rated rocket. Watch the full mission and incident — starting at around the one hour and 20 minute-mark — in the video below.