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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

#201

Post by HerbManic »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #77
HerbManic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very fair point. While I have no skin in the game, it is fascinating to see if the Us with Artemus or China with Chang'e will be the first to make it back to the Moon manned. At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from. Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship.…

> 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.

I will give you that. I will be more than happy to see both reach there in mutual success. I do fear the blow back of the more tribalistic folks that will see it as a threat rather than success.

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

#202

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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.

There are some companies working on that and / or there have been some experiments with it, but there's two factors there; the one is of course how much weight an aircraft can carry. The other one is the altitude and / or angle; a big plane goes to about 10 kilometers (maybe more, idk), but that's a 'flat' flight, ideally you launch while angled upwards and that's a bit more involved.

But that's how a lot of the X projects were / are done.

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

#203

Post by jeffrallen »

wahern wrote: post #178
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…

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigor…

Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.

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

#205

Post by LtWorf »

stringfood wrote: post #148
areoform wrote: post #138

Earlier 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…

why did you preface this with how many times you've made your point to deaf ears in the past? Am I supposed to follow your opinions across the site?

Did you know that we are a primitive species though? (up to anyone to guess what that means)

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

#206

Post by domlebo70 »

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…

Yeah, but at the end of the day you can't be sure right? That doubt would eat away at me

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

#207

Post by locknitpicker »

wahern wrote: post #178
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…

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigor…

> Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.

For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?

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

#208

Post by trhway »

It looks to me like the initial explosion was at the upper part of the rocket. Reminded the Starship explosion https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1935548909805601020 where on 0.25 speed also visible what the start of the catastrophe was at the upper part.

Interesting that just 2 days ago NASA picked Blue Origin instead of SpaceX for this year Moon flights.

On a sidenote, one can wonder how much, giving coming SpaceX IPO, it costs for Bezos to hire a Starship engineer :)

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

#210

Post by HerbManic »

xeonmc wrote: post #118
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

aerospace is operating at the absolute limit of what can be asked of known materials science

Exactly this. It is relatively easy to make something mechanical more safe provided you have have a significant material buffer. Rocket abhors additional material weight so everything has to run with a limited buffer space for safety.
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