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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

#521

Post by shigawire »

mr_toad wrote: post #468
hparadiz wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 landin…

> you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. Makes me wonder if you could accelerate to orbital velocity using something like a maglev train and not have to worry about rockets at all.

That is the idea behind "mass drivers" on the moon I believe. Maybe that search term helps.

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

#522

Post by NetMageSCW »

somenameforme wrote: post #464
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launch pads are not something you just buy on a whim to keep around just in case you need them. They're very expensive pieces of infrastructure that you only acquire when you have an actual, known need. That's how every launch provider that I know of behaves, including SpaceX.

I don't disagree at all, but I'm quite curious where the cost actually comes from. Even including all the harnessing and other hardware, it doesn't seem like something that should be a bank-breaker when we're casually talking about vehicles worth tens of millions of dollars blowing up, if not being discarded after a single launch.

If you’re NASA, the cost comes from a cost+ contract with an incompetent vendor.

If your Blue Origin, the cost comes from each launch complex being essentially bespoke and built on-site.

If you’re SpaceX, you plan ahead to use lego construction, mass produce the pieces, the tanks, etc in a factory setting, and assemble the pieces on-site for much less and much faster.

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

#523

Post by NetMageSCW »

j1mc wrote: post #474
GMoromisato wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project. The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.

I disagree. The poet Gary Snyder thought space travel was unimaginative - that living life as things are on earth was more interesting and challenging. Owning the Washington Post gives him control over a high visibility U.S. news operation. Nothing vanity about that.

Apparently Gary Snyder was an idiot.

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

#524

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

oconnor663 wrote: post #120
mholt wrote: post #89

Is it normal to load ALL the propellant when doing a static fire? (I presume that's the case, anyway, given the sheer magnitude of the kaboom.) I know a WDR typically would, but I don't think they perform an ignition for those.

I don't know anything about this particular launch, but one reason static fires sometimes load more fuel than you'd think is that the hold-down clamps aren't rated for the total thrust of the vehicle. Launch thrust is usually 1.2-1.6x the launch weight (if it's <1x you will not go to space today), so after subtracting gravity you've got 0.2-0.6x the weight acting upwards on the clamps. But rockets are mostly fuel by…

I don't know if it'd be a factor for BO, but doesn't the ignition sequence sometimes use gravity feed to begin with, before the turbo pumps kick in, with the height of the fuel tanks meaning that full tanks add a few atm of pressure. Therefore, a test without full tanks isn't exactly replicating the normal ignition sequencing conditions.

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

#525

Post by adev_ »

hgoel wrote: post #511
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…

Really not convincing that you know what you're talking about if you're taking the DCX prototypes flying up to 3km as meaning that we had landing orbital class boosters sorted out in 1991. That was a hopper vehicle comparable to the original SpaceX Grasshopper prototype.

> that we had landing orbital class boosters sorted out in 1991

SpaceX first stage boosters are not orbital class.

They reach around Mach 6 (Up to my knowledge) at top course and around Mach 3 on descend before the landing burn.

Valid criticism however would be that the DC-X was intended for a return head first with a belly flip. Not tail first like SpaceX boosters.

As such, it is much more similar to Starship spacecraft.

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

#526

Post by lunar_mycroft »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #520
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launch pads are not something you just buy on a whim to keep around just in case you need them. They're very expensive pieces of infrastructure that you only acquire when you have an actual, known need. That's how every launch provider that I know of behaves, including SpaceX.

Actually SpaceX is in the process of building multiple Starship launch pads in multiple locations with only an expected theoretical need.

SpaceX is "in the process" of a lot of things, not all of which pan out. So far the cases that have actually started serious construction are in Cape Canaveral, and will absolutely be necessary assuming Starship becomes operational (because the number of launches SpaceX is allowed to do from Starbase is limited).

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

#527

Post by NetMageSCW »

hgoel wrote: post #508
ceejayoz wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s all pretty heavy assumptions considering all we have is public knowledge. Given that SpaceX already has some launch contracts that can be switched from Falcon to Starship I am sure they have plans and probably development for non-starlink payloads going on.

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

#528

Post by deepsun »

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…

Not true. In early rocket days, soviets tried to use "move fast and break things" approach. They even put artillery generals in charge, who very much liked the approach.

The problem became apparent with several failed launches of moon lander, when rockets blew up or failed to deploy payload. So engineers spent month of assembling a lander that just got burnt. And when it reached its destination, it failed to perform, because they didn't test it separately extensively.

Then they realized it is faster to spend a lot of time testing each part on the ground instead of launching it all together when any bug would prevent even testing the rest.

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

#529

Post by GMoromisato »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #403
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…

>It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

This is a good article about Amos-6: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...

"Investigators scoured more than 3,000 channels of video and telemetry data covering a very brief timeline of events – there were just 93 milliseconds from the first sign of anomalous data to the loss of the second stage, followed by loss of the vehicle."

I haven't seen anything about latency--are you sure that's a problem in the telemetry stack?

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

#530

Post by bell-cot »

mapt wrote: post #516
BurningFrog wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move th…

In simpler terms: A bullet-hardened rocket would be about as usable as a lead balloon.
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