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Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

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Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#181

Post by atmavatar »

userbinator wrote: post #113

Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg

> Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw?

Not really. Rocketry is hard.

You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.

Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#182

Post by AceyMan »

arjie wrote: post #167
oconnor663 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vehicle is designed to hold all that fuel, plus whatever payload it carries on top, but it's not designed to have heavy loads attached to it in any other way. Rockets are so intensely optimized for weight that sometimes they're barely strong enough to stand upright if you fuel them the wrong way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkdz63agHY .

That's a great video! Thank you for sharing it. A rocket is more like a soda can than a building but it's hard to relate when you see such a massive object!

It's been said that the most amazing engineering of the whole Shuttle program was the external fuel tank (and there is one with the static display of Endeavour here at the California Science Center in LA).

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#183

Post by arjie »

oconnor663 wrote: post #179
arjie wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great video! Thank you for sharing it. A rocket is more like a soda can than a building but it's hard to relate when you see such a massive object!

You can see a similar effect after the explosion at the end of last week's Starship test flight. If you look at where the flames are coming out after the first fireball clears, it kind of pancakes under its own weight there: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zi2SU98BAD8?t=5735s

Oh huh. You really can. I didn't pick up on that the first few hundred times I watched it. That's really cool. It kind of splats down into a 2-d rectangle.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#184

Post by roer »

userbinator wrote: post #113

Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg

The mass produced rockets explode very infrequently

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#185

Post by kqr »

AustinDev wrote: post #166
perlgeek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say on a scale of bad 1-10, 9 and 10 are reserved for incidents that cause loss of human life. YMMV.

Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal. Why would anyone be that close? There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.

I can think of a few reasons:

- Test commences prematurely when people are still around

- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back

- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are

These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#186

Post by catlikesshrimp »

generuso wrote: post #116
xoa wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sedov-Taylor-Rayleigh blast equation, though this video isn't high enough frame rate to more than ballpark it I think. Tower is ~180m high, so 0.2 sec would be a bit over 1 kiloton instead? But definitely not remotely 13 kt. Still serious of course, when SpaceX suffered launch complex damage during some of its incidents it took a solid 6-12 months to fix. Everyone can be glad though that no hypergolics are involved a…

You are talking about the energy of the blast. In my comment I was talking about the heat output. From the followup comments it seems I have not made it sufficiently clear. The energy of the detonation wave in rocket explosions is typically 1-2% of the energy in the fuel, at least that is the ballpark of what people use for estimating the effects of mishaps. We also do not know if the tanks were fully filled -- it th…

About the couple of times you have said "fully filled", is that a specific industry or engineering slang or term?

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#187

Post by 866-RON-0-FEZ »

mrcwinn wrote: post #150
866-RON-0-FEZ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the Long March destroying an entire rural village which was covered up by the CCP.

That rocket appears to have crashed into an open plain. It was a village?

I'm referring to a different Chinese launch failure in 1996.

There is some VHS footage on YouTube surreptitiously shot by Americans on-site supporting the payload which became a guerrilla documentary.

The village was annihilated but the official number from the CCP was 6 dead.

6.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#188

Post by tmtvl »

AustinDev wrote: post #166
perlgeek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say on a scale of bad 1-10, 9 and 10 are reserved for incidents that cause loss of human life. YMMV.

Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal. Why would anyone be that close? There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.

No one should ever be that close, but it's a worst case scenario within the realm of possibility (people do get themselves into danger sometimes, for example by wandering onto a railroad track when there's a train approaching). I don't think it's unreasonable to reserve the 10 on the 1-10 scale for 'loss of human life'.

Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

#189

Post by petesergeant »

atmavatar wrote: post #181
userbinator wrote: post #113

Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg

> Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Not really. Rocketry is hard . You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while a…

This feels like more a matter of scale than anything else? We’re able as a species to do some absolutely insane wizard shit elsewhere (chip fab?), we just haven’t launched enough rockets yet to get there.
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