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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

#241

Post by laughing_man »

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!"

It makes some sense. If they're not going to be able to launch for a year because the pad is being rebuilt anyway, projects that were going to take a year may as well go to the front burner.

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

#242

Post by tsukikage »

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.

Flagship chip yields are generally less than 50%. Over half the chips coming out are dead on arrival, and never leave the fab. Imagine if rockets had that sort of failure rate.

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

#243

Post by contactlight11 »

baq wrote: post #161

On the scale of bad 1-10 where 10 is the absolutely worst case this is a 12 easily . (Elon’s strategy of blowing up smaller versions of their rockets more or less deliberately doesn’t sound so insane in the light of this.)

SpaceX had a very similar failure during a static fire test in 2016 that destroyed the rocket, payload, and a few key parts of SLC-40 that took them over a year to repair and return to service (September 2016 -> December 2017). The concrete flume trenches were literally melted.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/01/spacex-rocket-and-isra...

That was a full size rocket on a real mission with the $200M payload on board during the static fire, which is ostensibly worse. The payload was not integrated yet in Blue Origin’s case.

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

#244

Post by wolvoleo »

pennomi wrote: post #177
pfdietz wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the safety factors in Falcon 9 are 1.4. NASA credited SpaceX with using safety factors larger than normal for aerospace.

Surely reusability requires higher margins than ever needed before.

It's an entirely different kind of flying, altogether. And stop calling me Shirley.

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

#245

Post by red75prime »

malux85 wrote: post #234
red75prime wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer "Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.

I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.

So, your message is "Unspecified AI models with or without additional training aren't ready to do aerospace fault analysis and they can lead experienced engineers astray." OK, it might or mightn't be true depending on the free parameters in your statement.

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

#246

Post by lefra »

kqr wrote: post #176
Polizeiposaune wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weight of the propellant helps hold the rocket on the pad during the test fire, reducing how much force the hold-downs need to exert to keep the rocket on the pad, and stressing the rocket's structure in the same way it will be stressed at launch. Test fires with a near-empty rocket would put considerably more force on the pad's hold-downs and the corresponding parts of the rocket's structure. Blue also had a fue…

Right. The forces these things produce are massive. I only know the specifics for the Space Shuttle, but when it is at full liftoff thrust (liquid and solid boosters) there's just no way to keep it leashed to Earth. It's going up whether you want to or not.

The space shuttle stack has a net thrust (thrust minus weight) of about 9 MN at lauch [1]. High carbon steel has a yield strength of 700 MPa [2]. So you need a piece of steel with a cross section of 0.013 square meter to hold it down. That's a rod 6.5 cm / 2.5 inches in diameter. Hardly impossible. Your nearest road suspension bridge probably has cables bigger than this.

If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].

The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

[2] https://www.unionfab.com/blog/2024/03/yield-strength-of-stee...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

[4] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xab20qa

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

#247

Post by Paracompact »

malux85 wrote: post #234
red75prime wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer "Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.

I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.

The knee-jerk reaction to pointing out any failure modes of AI with, "but meatbags bad!" is a tiring strawman to deal with. It immediately turns the discussion into something else.

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

#248

Post by xethos »

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…

> They even requested access to a ULA building to see if a sniper could have taken a shot at the rocket.

> It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner

I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon

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

#249

Post by teravor »

malux85 wrote: post #180
block_dagger wrote: post #172

Earlier 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

if an LLM is capable enough to be used this way it would be used to generate scenarios for the people who would otherwise have to be the ones to generate them. those people would then evaluate the scnearios. those people would then be in a position to decide if the LLM saves them time.

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

#250

Post by awongh »

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.

That’s what Virgin Galactic was.
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