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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

#441

Post by superxpro12 »

hgoel wrote: post #267
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…

High profile failures that take out launch infrastructure are undesirable because the cost to that is much much higher than just losing the rocket. It means having all of your R&D and production pipelines stalled for at least months, usually years, while the rest of that fiercely ambitious industry races ahead. This was routine pre-launch testing, not a launch attempt.

My understanding is that a static fire test is not much different than a launch attempt? The tanks are fully loaded. The engines are throttling up to full.

In terms of application its the same amount of energy going into the rocket in either case.

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

#442

Post by NetMageSCW »

lukeschlather wrote: post #436
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…

Really the least risky thing right now would probably be if BO retooled their lander to fly on a Falcon Heavy. If asked, SpaceX could probably launch 4 Falcon Heavies to orbit before Blue Origin could launch as many New Glenns. I really don't think there's anything particularly derisked about NG + Blue Moon 2 compared to Starship HLS.

The issue is that Blue Moon is designed to have its hydrogen fuel topped off by the second stage of New Glenn, which isn’t possible on Falcon or Starship.

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

#443

Post by perilunar »

GolfPopper wrote: post #331
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #42

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

Nukes.[1] Lasers. [2] (Doesn't work, yet.) Balloons.[3] (Floating megastructures in the upper atmosphere is hard.) Giant cannon. [4] (Downside - huge g-forces on payload.) Extra fun with angular momentum.[5] (Even higher g-forces.) Exotic materials[6], with novel failure modes.[7] Humanity has not been idle when it comes to imagining alternate ways to get to orbit. But so far, the only one that works in practice is r…

Big magnets. [8]

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

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

#444

Post by NetMageSCW »

imtringued wrote: post #276
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blue origin was _just_ selected to be the first moon lander mission Just a rover [1]. Blue Moon is one of the two lander contractors. But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust. Does Blue Origin not have another pad? (Did they blow up a pad or a test stand?) [1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-blue-origin-t...

Blue Origin's lunar architecture is designed for a maximum of twelve moon landings per year for the Blue Moon Mk2 without using Orion and the same $4 billion budget per Orion+SLS flight. SpaceX's architecture requires a second cislunar starship for the return trip. That will mean at most four moon landings per year and even that is optimistic. The large size of Starship makes return trips and lunar refueling really u…

Blue Origin is years away from New Glenn launching once a month. SpaceX will be doing that with Starship far sooner than BO.

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

#445

Post by NetMageSCW »

ceejayoz wrote: post #429
Yizahi wrote: post #407

Hypothetical scenario - if the entire New Glenn rocket exploded up to highest point in under 4 seconds and if there was a passenger capsule on top with a SLS/Saturn size escape rocket, would it manage to escape in those 2-3 seconds? Would humans survive acceleration?

Neither Starship nor New Glenn has such a system, nor plans to add one.

Starship itself could potentially hot launch from the booster in the ground to get away. Hopefully the latching system is controlled by the Starship side.

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

#446

Post by shagmin »

christophilus wrote: post #305
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

It reminds me of my younger self when I encountered inexplicable behavior in my own software, “I think I found a bug in Firefox!” … “Oh, nope. I forgot to add an event handler.”

Reminds me of something that made me cringe that I heard from an architect at a medium sized IT shop, "even Google couldn't handle our scale".

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

#447

Post by hparadiz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #435
hparadiz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.

> landing strip Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?

You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.

Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.

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

#448

Post by mr_toad »

Jackson__ wrote: post #373
MPSimmons wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at SpaceX at the time, and I cannot speak for the company, but I can tell you that approximately nobody inside SpaceX took the idea of a sniper seriously. There was a lot of internet talk about it, and it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored. The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative fin…

No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...

Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.

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

#449

Post by NetMageSCW »

_moof wrote: post #45
generuso wrote: post #21

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methane is 55 MJ/kg. TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. In terms of heat output (not blast or other effects) this would have been equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat…

> TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. It isn't this simple for liquid oxygen and methane mixtures, and there's a great deal of disagreement between industry and regulators over what the right percentage of TNT equivalence is. Naturally, industry thinks the percentage is low, and regulators are skeptical, so there's a government-run test campaign going on as we speak to collect data for proper modeling.

A test campaign that’s about to get a large amount of real world data.

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

#450

Post by NetMageSCW »

pantalaimon wrote: post #38
generuso wrote: post #21

It is not clear what "full duration static fire" means, but if the stage was fully fueled, the fuel tank would have contained 1000 tons of methane. The heat of combustion of methane is 55 MJ/kg. TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg. In terms of heat output (not blast or other effects) this would have been equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat…

The methane is not mixed with oxygen when it's still in the rocket tank, so it can't all explode - most of it will just burn off. It's still a big boom, but not anywhere close to what world occur with optional mixing.

The side of the rocket failing appears to have allowed a lot of that mixing to occur after the initial fire.
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