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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

#211

Post by locknitpicker »

bombcar wrote: post #111
frakkingcylons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric Berger of Ars Technica: > I'm hearing that it is possible that Blue Origin decides to go directly to the larger 9x4 variant of New Glenn after this failure. Obviously no decisions like that will be made without more data review. https://xcancel.com/SciGuySpace/status/2060190522539401631#m

I know it's not, but darned if that doesn't sound like "it exploded real big, so build a bigger one!"

> I know it's not, but darned if that doesn't sound like "it exploded real big, so build a bigger one!"

To me it sounds like "alright, it's silly to waste time and energy on duplicate effort. Let's focus on getting this one right instead."

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

#212

Post by kolinko »

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.

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.

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

#213

Post by krisoft »

AustinDev wrote: post #166
perlgeek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say on a scale of bad 1-10, 9 and 10 are reserved for incidents that cause loss of human life. YMMV.

Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal. Why would anyone be that close? There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.

> Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal.

True. And yet it is not without precedent.

Scaled Composites had an explosion while performing a cold flow test of SpaceShipTwo’s engine which killed 3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-27-me-explo...

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

#214

Post by tonyhart7 »

petesergeant wrote: post #189
atmavatar wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Not really. Rocketry is hard . You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while a…

This feels like more a matter of scale than anything else? We’re able as a species to do some absolutely insane wizard shit elsewhere (chip fab?), we just haven’t launched enough rockets yet to get there.

the differences is rocket failure is blow up while chip design is salvageable

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

#215

Post by WalterBright »

Buttons840 wrote: post #175
mandevil wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In September 2016 almost exactly the same thing happened to a Falcon 9 at the Cape, also on a static fire. New Glenn is bigger, so bigger bang, but pretty much exactly the same thing. Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is…

How do they determine the cause of failure in a things like this?

Lots and lots of telemetry.

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

#216

Post by tsimionescu »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51
hgoel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Blue Moon is one of the two lander contractors. But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust. That isn't my impression of NASA/government opinion. Starship HLS is seen as the eventual option, as is obvious from the testing campaign. It'll get there eventually and offer unprecedented capability, but it's very clearly several years out. Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having…

> Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.) > the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since eve…

> I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction.

The plans for Artemis are public, and they don't include any robotic construction before a manned landing.

Neveemind that the idea of a moon base is fanciful, I think it's very unlikely to happen in anything resembling current world climate.

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

#217

Post by lunar_mycroft »

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…

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).

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

#218

Post by Markoff »

bamboozled wrote: post #196
Markoff wrote: post #84

I 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".

and wait till you see US national defense budget :-))

imagine if they stopped financing it for one year and used all those finances to finance for instance cancer research

or maybe for starters they could just stop supporting genocidal regimes killing thousands of children, that would be pretty cheap

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

#219

Post by areoform »

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?

It used to be a thing that people did when repeating a comment. I've used HN for a very long time.

It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.

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

#220

Post by tonyhart7 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #175
mandevil wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In September 2016 almost exactly the same thing happened to a Falcon 9 at the Cape, also on a static fire. New Glenn is bigger, so bigger bang, but pretty much exactly the same thing. Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is…

How do they determine the cause of failure in a things like this?

a lot of sensor
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