WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration announced Sept. 26 it had closed the mishap investigation right into a failed launch by Blue Origin’s Recent Shepard vehicle greater than a 12 months ago, but said the vehicle isn’t yet cleared to resume flights.
The FAA said in an announcement that’s closed the investigation into the Recent Shepard payload-only suborbital mission designated NS-23 that took place in September 2022. On that flight, the fundamental engine failed a couple of minute into flight, triggering the abort motor within the vehicle’s crew capsule. That capsule, carrying payloads but no people, landed safely under parachutes, while the propulsion module crashed.
The FAA said within the statement that the proximate reason behind the mishap was “the structural failure of an engine nozzle attributable to higher than expected engine operating temperatures.” That matches with what Blue Origin itself announced in March, when its investigation concluded that changes within the design of a boundary layer cooling system for the vehicle’s BE-3PM engine caused a rise in nozzle heating, including a “hot streak” aligned with the placement of fatigue within the nozzle that led to its structural failure.
In its statement, the FAA said it identified 21 corrective actions that Blue Origin is required to finish to stop the mishap from happening again. The agency didn’t enumerate the actions but said they included a redesign of engine and nozzle components to enhance its structural performance in addition to “organizational changes.”
Closing the investigation doesn’t itself allow the corporate to resume Recent Shepard flights. The corporate must, at a minimum, exhibit to the FAA it has implemented the recommendations related to public safety before the agency will issue a modified launch license. The FAA declined to say how lots of the 21 corrective actions are linked to public safety.
Blue Origin provided no additional details about efforts to implement those corrective actions. “We’ve received the FAA’s letter and plan to fly soon,” an organization spokesperson said after the discharge of the FAA statement.
The corporate offered an analogous timeline when it released the final result of its investigation March 24. “Blue Origin expects to return to flight soon, with a re-flight of the NS-23 payloads,” the corporate said then.
Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said at a conference June 6 that the corporate was “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” with the FAA on its plans to return to flight. “Recent Shepard, from that standpoint, ought to be able to go fly inside the following few weeks,” he said then.
Recent Shepard has not flown for the reason that Sept. 12, 2022, mishap. The corporate announced Sept. 25 that Smith would step down as chief executive of the corporate in early December, to get replaced by Amazon executive Dave Limp.