Noobenheim News for Nerds 
Blue Origin has had its fourth launch and landing go off without a hitch. Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington, is the private spaceflight company of Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame. This launch was designed to test a failed parachute deployment on the crew capsule, which was carried up by their New Shepard rocket.
The crew capsule usually deploys three parachutes, and shortly before touchdown it fires retrorockets to soften the landing as much as possible. In this test, one of the three parachutes was rigged to fail upon deployment to ensure the remaining two parachutes could still land the capsule safely. Such a failure would be rare in practice – however, it is possible. Indeed, we’ve seen it happen back in 1971 when one of the three parachutes on the Apollo 15 capsule failed to deploy, which may have served as the inspiration for this test.
This time, unlike prior test flights (and perhaps taking a hint from SpaceX), they had a live webcast. In case you missed it, click here to watch it again.
