‘We’ve experienced an anomaly’: Bezos’s latest Blue Origin launch fails

An uncrewed rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, failed shortly after launch in Texas on Monday.

The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket that is similar to the one Blue Origin has used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, occurred just as the vehicle was reaching its maximum dynamic pressure.

The crew capsule was thrown away from the booster and parachuted back to Earth. It is thought that the booster was destroyed.

The crew capsule was able to escape successfully, despite the fact that the flight appeared to be an odd one, according to the senior director of emerging space markets at Blue Origin.

The backup safety systems kicked in today to keep us safe. Blue Origin values safety the most. We built a lot of redundant into the system.

There was no astronauts on the mission, according to the company. The system worked as it was designed.

The experts believed the malfunction was caused by a failure of the propulsion system.

Blue Origin said that the mission was carrying "36 payloads from academia, research institutions and students across the globe"

Two more experiments attached to the exterior of the booster were destroyed, according to the company.

This was the fourth flight of the New Shepard program this year and the first dedicated flight in over a year.

Blue Origin has taken 31 people to space on New Shepard, most recently last month. Bezos and Shatner were the previous passengers.

Although today's flight employed a different booster and capsule than those carrying humans, Blue Origin's schedule is likely to face delays as engineers try to identify and correct the malfunction.

The New Glenn project is scheduled for a first test flight next year and is part of Blue Origin's larger plans.

Two separate attempts to launch the first test flight of its Artemis 1 rocket have been called off because of technical problems in the last few weeks.