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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

#401

Post by harimau777 »

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…

That's easy to say if you aren't the one getting space junk dumped on you when a rocket explodes.

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

#402

Post by rdtsc »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #284
rdtsc wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything their one engine out unexpected but successful test boosts their position a bit.

After separation that turned into all engines out on the booster, so perhaps not.

I meant the engine on the Raptor. But yeah good point about the booster. However that's nowhere near as large of a set back as this explosion

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

#403

Post by Rebelgecko »

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…

>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal".

SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

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

#404

Post by kjkjadksj »

hparadiz wrote: post #96
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the winners will merely be those The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.

The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.

I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.

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

#405

Post by kjkjadksj »

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.

How big a trebuchet would be needed to chuck a cubesat directly into LEO?

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

#406

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by Yizahi »

Hypothetical scenario - if the entire New Glenn rocket exploded up to highest point in under 4 seconds and if there was a passenger capsule on top with a SLS/Saturn size escape rocket, would it manage to escape in those 2-3 seconds? Would humans survive acceleration?

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

#408

Post by admissionsguy »

glimshe wrote: post #310
christophilus wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of my younger self when I encountered inexplicable behavior in my own software, “I think I found a bug in Firefox!” … “Oh, nope. I forgot to add an event handler.”

The modern version of "It must be a compiler bug!"

The modern version is "LLMs produce bad code"

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

#409

Post by krunck »

teraflop wrote: post #399
100ms wrote: post #304

The video angle published by the BBC is better, it appears to show one side of the rocket disintegrating and sliding down non-explosively before the large explosion really kicked in. Would hate for this all to be described by a few missing bolts https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cvgz0pdg32mo edit: the failure appears to start at the bottom, this seems to have damaged the structure enough to cause the sliding to start…

That clip is fairly low-res (at least for me). Here's the higher-quality source from Spaceflight Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc

The fish loved it: 0:29

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

#410

Post by MarkusQ »

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…

>> and reliable vertical landings

> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago

One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.

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