excessive fuel delivery failure probable IMO. The direction and source of explosion seemed localized at first.
Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
191–200 of 588 posts
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#192Earlier 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?
Not this one. An old one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708
The Chinese government say very few were killed. But personally, my position is that the guys who routinely publish their embarrassing-seeming failures are quite believable (the US publishes that their planes fall off their carriers) and those who say they're perfect are probably lying. So I don't believe their numbers.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
> a plausible sounding but incorrect answer
That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first.
It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself; It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. I will let John Young explain it his…
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, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#195Does 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
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.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#196I will remember this when someone tells me how my little fireworks once a year is bad for environment.
You need to understand that this money is well spent, rather than going to feeding starving children or buying medicine to help solve the Ebola crisis in Africa, this is actually "better for mankind".
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair the last Starship to blowup on launchpad/ground was less than a year ago. It is a set back but it appears nobody has avoided this issue yet. https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/spacexs-...
That was on a test stand, NOT a launchpad. Vastly different destroying each of those.
I will give you that. Better to blow up in a test rather than ready for launch.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself; It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. I will let John Young explain it his…
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.
Our species is pretty young, around ~2 million years old, give or take a few million / hundred thousand years depending on whom you're talking to.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
> a plausible sounding but incorrect answer That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes? If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first. It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
>That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis.
>Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#200There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?
Space elevators!