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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

#501

Post by giancarlostoro »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #496
giancarlostoro wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was one of hundreds of avenues that were explored, and ruled out basically as soon as it was explored. Sounds like me during a troubleshooting call trying to think of the wildest crap possible based on current available information, even if I sound crazy, sometimes my crazy question hits the nail. Never shun someone for trying to think of any crazy thing, sometimes they hit the nail on the head.

Sure, but give a group too long a leash and they will overindex on a tarpit idea. The reason why conspiracy theories are notorious is not because conspiracies don't exist, it's because they are non-falsifiable, fun to speculate about, and easy to understand so everyone can participate. Viral, in other words. Good leaders should steer away from tarpits (and privately ensure that they were scouted, just in case).

Of course, and I hold back the wilder theories ;) I usually let it rummage through my brain a bit first. I have a "hint" of ADD so my brain can jump all over, but I can get hyper focused on an outage, especially when trying to figure it out involves a bit of brain storming sometimes, and following a methodology to look under every rock.

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

#502

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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.”

The funny thing is that I was so sensitized to this behavior that when I actually found a hardware bug in a chip, it took me forever to convince myself that the problem wasn't actually my code.

Finally contacted the manufacturer's rep, expecting to be called an idiot, only to find out that "yeah, we know about that bug. It's going to be fixed in the next revision."

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

#503

Post by hgoel »

superxpro12 wrote: post #441
hgoel wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I was trying to imply is that it wasn't R&D. That it was routine testing, verifying that your machine is working fine.

Static fires put more stress on the rocket than an actual launch because the rocket is stuck on the ground, receiving all the shockwaves. They also cause more damage to the launch infrastructure.

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

#504

Post by chainingsolid »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #405
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.

How big a trebuchet would be needed to chuck a cubesat directly into LEO?

cubesat + small rocket. Orbital mechanics require a burn at a later time in the orbit, to avoid coming back to say hello again to Mr. Trebuchet (Ignoring Earth's rotation)

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

#505

Post by bell-cot »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #494
bell-cot wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that article - > The “sniper” theory > The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer o…

There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.

(Assuming you are referring to last night's incident, not the 2016 one.)

No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.

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

#506

Post by hgoel »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #424
godshatter wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.

Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.

We use technology to do many things we are not biologically capable of. If we can use technology to remotely explore inhospitable environments, we can also use technology to wrap ourselves in a hospitable environment.

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

#507

Post by standardly »

hparadiz wrote: post #418
philipwhiuk wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Moon is frankly a totally different environment. Lunar dust is notorious. Also the ISS suits themselves are being replaced, by Axiom, because they are failing in near-fatal ways periodically.

Been thinking about this quite a bit. I think every lunar airlock will end up with a wash station and will end up using basic water sprays to get the job done. Soil compactors can be used outside to compact the dust and prevent it from being an issue during moon walks as well. I think once a moon base is established most moon walks will be on-base where dust would have been dealt with in the first few years and then…

We can turn the regolith into Lunarcrete too. It's moon concrete. Mars with nice sidewalks.

https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/118526

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

#508

Post by hgoel »

ceejayoz wrote: post #488
mr_toad wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If New Glenn ever launched people they’d build the escape system into the crew module, much as SpaceX does with Crew Dragon.

Maybe; SpaceX isn't taking that approach for Starship thus far.

SpaceX doesn't have the vehicle at a point that they can worry about the details of the crew compartment beyond concept renders and operations planning. As it stands they don't even have a plan for carrying large non-starlink payloads yet.

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

#509

Post by hparadiz »

standardly wrote: post #507
hparadiz wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been thinking about this quite a bit. I think every lunar airlock will end up with a wash station and will end up using basic water sprays to get the job done. Soil compactors can be used outside to compact the dust and prevent it from being an issue during moon walks as well. I think once a moon base is established most moon walks will be on-base where dust would have been dealt with in the first few years and then…

We can turn the regolith into Lunarcrete too. It's moon concrete. Mars with nice sidewalks. https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/118526

Yup. That gets us to the stone age on the moon. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping the moon's industrial capacity straight to the industrial age. We need not only concrete production but also steel, water, etc. The faster we bootstrap all this stuff the faster the moon will feel like any other place you can go. I think there's gonna be hardware stores on the moon within the century.

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

#510

Post by BurningFrog »

bell-cot wrote: post #390
Jackson__ wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From that article - > The “sniper” theory > The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer o…

Also, if your billion dollar rocket can be destroyed by a $2 bullet, maybe you need to look at hardening your design.
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