KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – A parachute failed to fully inflate during Blue Origin New Shepard’s final suborbital flight because a line controlling its deployment was not cut as planned.
One of the three New Shepard crew capsule parachutes failed to fully inflate during the capsule’s descent during the NS-25 mission on May 19. The other two parachutes operated normally and the capsule landed without incident.
During a May 31 briefing on the upcoming crewed test flight of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, NASA officials said they had been briefed by Blue Origin about the parachute problem, since parachutes on other vehicles, such as Starliner, use similar components.
Steve Stich, program manager for commercial crews at NASA, said the parachutes are designed to open in stages, known as reefing, to limit the stress on the parachutes. “In this case, one of the parachutes was stuck in what I would call the first phase of the reefing process,” he said, limiting the opening of the parachute.
This is controlled by a strap or line at the neck of the parachute. “What was seen was that for some reason the cutters did not intersect that line,” he said. The parachutes on Starliner use a similar cutter, but Stich said tests have shown no evidence of problems with the parachutes used on Starliner. That formed the “reason” for continuing with the launch of the Starliner.
He praised Blue Origin for sharing information on the parachute issue. “It’s a small group of people working on these parachutes,” he said, including people at Blue Origin, Boeing, NASA and SpaceX. “They were great about sharing data with us. They don’t really have a real cause yet, and we’ll continue to monitor them.”
However, Blue Origin has provided little information to the public about the parachute issue and the investigation, and did not mention it in its press release about the mission.
“Our New Shepard system uses three parachutes and is designed to land safely with only one deployed,” a company spokesperson told SpaceNews on May 31. “We are conducting thorough post-flight assessments of each flight system, and that analysis continues. We continue to share data and analysis from our parachute deployments with our parachute supplier, NASA, and launch providers.”
Parachutes have caused problems for several manned vehicles that use them. Starliner’s crewed test flight was partially postponed from last year to replace parachute components, called “soft links,” that did not provide sufficient safety margins. SpaceX has faced its own challenges developing parachutes for the Crew Dragon spacecraft, recently noting that one of the four parachutes opened more slowly than the others during deployment but still fully inflated.
The problems with parachutes illustrate the challenges inherent in their design, despite decades of experience using them in space travel. “It’s the only system you need to assemble itself in flight,” said Jim McMichael, senior technical integration manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, during an interview before an earlier Starliner launch attempt.
Parachute deployment takes place in a “chaotic environment” influenced by factors such as the wake the spacecraft creates behind it in the atmosphere as it descends. “Even today, with all the technology we have and everything else, as far as we’ve come with parachutes, we still can’t model how to inflate a parachute,” he said. However, once it starts to blow up, models can accurately predict the load on the system.
“It seems like it should be easy,” he concluded. “It’s still a little difficult.”