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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

#381

Post by Rover222 »

steve1977 wrote: post #233
GMoromisato wrote: post #133

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin. I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm. The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an incorrec…

I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog". Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting. If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.

Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.

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

#382

Post by Rover222 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #229
hgoel wrote: post #37

Ouch, losing the rocket is unfortunate, but the damage to the launch infrastructure is going to easily mean over a year of repairs. I hope they're going to take this as an opportunity to update the infrastructure from lessons learned from the flights so far, and to be able to support some of their future ambitions (e.g. Jarvis).

It's an understandable but wrong attitude. If you don't have high profile failures like this, you aren't taking enough R&D risk. It's a fiercely ambitious industry and these launch attempts amount to what literally are moon shots. The race is on between various companies and countries as to who gets there first. Boeing is pretty much out of the race at this point. Just too busy navel gazing and lobbying. There's a bi…

Nah, failures that destroy the launch pad are just bad, any way you try to slice it.

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

#383

Post by m4rtink »

kolinko wrote: post #212
kitd wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting post. I'd never thought of it that way. Not consciously anyway. Might that make an air-launched system more reliable? Even if it's less efficient, the TCO would be lower using a winged system for the initial phases of launch.

It wouldn’t help much, sadly. Getting to orbit is about speed, not height — you need 27000 kph to get to orbit, and having an air launched platform would shave off 1k kph off it at most, perhaps 5k with some insane hypersonic engineering.

Main advantage of air launch is that you can better match your target inclination or perhaps even orbit timing - just drop the rocket at the right time in the right direction over the ocean. With a fixed launch site you always need to adjust for some difference of your point of origin versus the orbit you want to achieve.

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

#384

Post by Rover222 »

bruckie wrote: post #274
kolinko wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t help much, sadly. Getting to orbit is about speed, not height — you need 27000 kph to get to orbit, and having an air launched platform would shave off 1k kph off it at most, perhaps 5k with some insane hypersonic engineering.

It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.

You're extremely limited by the amount of mass you can even launch from a mothership aircraft.

There's no future in this idea outside of small sat, and probably not even there.

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

#385

Post by m4rtink »

swiftcoder wrote: post #194
userbinator wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and the forces involved here are genuinely new I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.

> Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages. The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5…

Arguably the first Starship launch for example (the one with concrete rain) was pretty impressive, at least on this end of the webcast! :)

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

#386

Post by m4rtink »

adev_ wrote: post #255
swiftcoder wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages. The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5…

> and reliable vertical landings We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1] > reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason) Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2]. > We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocke…

Still, you ideally just want to launch people and some complex machinery from Earth & produce about everything for in space use from local resources. That makes it possible to heavily optimize Earth to LEO craft for safety and reliability, alleviating most of these concerns.

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

#387

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mrsmrtss wrote: post #312
bob1029 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach. Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful se…

That's not how TDD works. You test the whole chain and all the components with tests and you can move from top to bottom with TDD, it's actually how you should do it.

There's a disconnect between TDD using all sorts of tests (unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, in-field, etc.) and TDD using unit tests only. Unit tests provide the least value/line of test code of all types of tests. They're important, since they can catch bugs earlier than other sorts of tests that can't be caught by a type system, but not sufficient to catch most bugs.

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

#388

Post by phkahler »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #343
watwut wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing issue was that they in fact took the risks so that they move faster and cheaper. > There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China. China seems to be focused more on pragmatic things and less on super expensive vanity projects.

They have a pretty concrete moon program. That would be one of the things they are focusing on.

I don't see China as being in a race though. They seem willing to play a long game in a lot of areas.

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

#389

Post by lunar_mycroft »

servo_sausage wrote: post #287
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).

If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one... Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.

Until recently, SpaceX only acquired new pads because they needed a completely new launch site (SLC-4 in Vandenberg) or needed to launch a vehicle that their existing pad(s) didn't support (Falcon Heavy for LC-39A, Starship for Pad A in Boca Chica/Starbase). Currently, Blue Origin's only orbital launch vehicle is New Glenn, and their Vandenberg pad is still under construction.

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

#390

Post by bell-cot »

Jackson__ wrote: post #373
MPSimmons wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored. The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative fin…

No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...

From that article -

> The “sniper” theory

> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.

- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".

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