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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

#321

Post by ted_bunny »

Paracompact wrote: post #247
malux85 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans crash millions of cars a year, and you're worried about one dog driver running over four measly people?

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

#322

Post by aubanel »

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…

"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security."

for those who wondered like me!

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

#323

Post by pwillia7 »

xethos wrote: post #248
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

Relevant WKUK sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpC_hO15IoA

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

#324

Post by wongarsu »

userbinator wrote: post #164
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…

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.

We went to the moon in the late 60s as a massively expensive cold-war propaganda campaign, after the Soviet Union humiliating America for years when it came to firsts in space. It was a question of honor and showing that capitalism is better than communism.

Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two

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

#325

Post by dboreham »

mrsmrtss wrote: post #312
bob1029 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach. Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful se…

That's not how TDD works. You test the whole chain and all the components with tests and you can move from top to bottom with TDD, it's actually how you should do it.

It is however how most software testing is done.

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

#327

Post by smoghat »

coarise wrote: post #279
xethos wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

>feels very Elon why

Well, because it is very Elon. In Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger recounts how Elon was the only person on the planet who believed his sniper theory.

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

#328

Post by qsi »

mongol wrote: post #277
jillesvangurp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an understandable but wrong attitude. If you don't have high profile failures like this, you aren't taking enough R&D risk. It's a fiercely ambitious industry and these launch attempts amount to what literally are moon shots. The race is on between various companies and countries as to who gets there first. Boeing is pretty much out of the race at this point. Just too busy navel gazing and lobbying. There's a bi…

What were the high profile failures in the Apollo program that proves your point?

Apollo 1. Three astronauts died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

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

#329

Post by notahacker »

bruckie wrote: post #274
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.

It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.

You've just got the problem of building a fixed wing aircraft which can carry your rocket full of explosive propellant, successfully release it pointing in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way....

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

#330

Post by notahacker »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #283
adev_ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and reliable vertical landings We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1] > reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason) Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2]. > We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocke…

If I had a few hundred billion lying around, I'd be spending a couple of billion a year on grants for new physics research. Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.

This is fair but I'm not sure the low hanging fruit is going to be developing technology that can reach earth escape velocity without being extremely sensitive to how well built and prepared the system applying the enormous amount force required is. Even the hypothetical stuff like Spin Launch and space elevators is going to have catastrophic failure modes....
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