Uncrewed Blue Origin capsule lands safely after New Shepard rocket fails

Blue Origin's recent NS-23 flight did not go as planned. On Monday morning, the private space company was forced to abort the uncrewed mission after one of its New Shepard rockets suffered an unspecified "booster failure". The issue arose about a minute after the flight took off from the Blue Origin launch site in West Texas at 10:26 a.m. ET. You can see the whole incident unfold in the video the company shared on Twitter.

"It looks like we encountered an anomaly with today's flight," a commentator said during the NS-23 live stream. "It was not planned and we don't have any details yet. But our crew capsule was able to successfully escape, we will follow its progress until landing. As you can see, the drugs deployed and the sector will be withdrawn afterwards."

The capsule was carrying research equipment funded by NASA. “There is no point in speculating what happened at this point. Even society doesn't know the cause,” tweeted Eric Berger, space editor at Ars Technica, adding in a separate post that if the spacecraft had been flown, the crew "would have felt a serious jolt, but would have been safe."

Blue Shepard will no longer be able to fly until Blue Origin investigates the incident and the Federal Aviation Administration approves the company's findings.

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