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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

#421

Post by [deleted] »

gjrq wrote: post #39
generuso wrote: post #21

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methane is 55 MJ/kg. TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. In terms of heat output (not blast or other effects) this would have been equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat…

Counting frames on YouTube, I get about 0.3s for the blast front to reach the top of the 600ft towers. That gives an estimate of around 600 tons TNT so definitely nowhere near all the fuel exploding.

[deleted]

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

#422

Post by genxy »

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!"

Compiler bugs are not as rare as they are quipped to be on forums. I mean, more rare for the quippers due to allocation of time.

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

#423

Post by chasd00 »

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…

> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.

The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s

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

#424

Post by kjkjadksj »

godshatter wrote: post #415
kjkjadksj wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.

Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.

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

#425

Post by oconnor663 »

kitd wrote: post #195
oconnor663 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120503175355/https://www.nasa.... > The percent propellant has huge implications on the ease of fabrication and robustness in achieving the engineering design (and cost). If a vehicle is less than 10% propellant, it is typically made from billets of steel. Changes to its structure are readily done without engineering analysis; you simple weld on another hunk of steel to reinforce the fra…

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.

Several air launch systems have been tried, with limited but non-zero commercial success. The altitude and speed you get from the plane is very small compared to the total work the rocket needs to do, so the benefit in terms of "the rocket can be smaller" is minimal. The main benefit in practice has been launching from ~wherever you like, since regular fixed launch sites usually have strict limits about the direction you have to fly to avoid people. But the economics of reusability are pushing rockets to get bigger, and no air launch system can fly anything nearly as big as a Falcon 9, much less a Starship + Super Heavy. Other scattered problems:

- Hanging under-wing is a totally different set of forces than standing vertically, especially for a big rocket with thin walls. You're more like a bridge than a tower, or rather like a bridge one moment and then a tower the next. You need reinforcement for that, which makes the vehicle heavier.

- Modern reusable rockets do quick "load and go" filling to keep their propellant as cold and dense as possible. You can't do that if you need to fuel on the ground and then hang off an airplane for ~an hour while it climbs.

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

#426

Post by GMoromisato »

steve1977 wrote: post #412
Rover222 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.

What would you say is Jeff Bezos' motivation behind it?

Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.

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

#427

Post by 00N8 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #405
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.

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

100 or 200 km tall at point of release ought to do it.

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

#428

Post by chasd00 »

elzbardico wrote: post #168
domlebo70 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?

I'd bet lots of telemetry, comprehensive design and change documentation, along with engineers tacit knowledge. Something like: telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any…

Engineering cameras all over the bottom of the pad will probably be what they use. I'm sure they have high speed cameras looking directly up at the bottom of the engines like SpaceX has. They'll watch frame by frame and then confirm with sensor data or the other way around. Maybe a manufacturing defect caused a turbopump housing to rupture? The energy densities are so crazy in rocket engines that would probably be like 3 sticks of TNT going off. The propulsion engineers are intimately familiar with the engines they probably already have a good idea.

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

#429

Post by ceejayoz »

Yizahi wrote: post #407

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?

Neither Starship nor New Glenn has such a system, nor plans to add one.

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

#430

Post by godshatter »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #424
godshatter wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.

Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.

I kind of have a soft spot for the human race, I think it's worth the extra effort to try, at least.
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