Earlier quoted context omitted.
How big a trebuchet would be needed to chuck a cubesat directly into LEO?
100 or 200 km tall at point of release ought to do it.
The tip would still have to be doing 7 km/s.
Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
531–540 of 588 posts
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#532Earlier 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?
Lookup SpinLaunch.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere. Does he want to expand human civilization for the benefit of human civilization or does he want to be the man who made that expansion possible? I can absolutely see real ambitions behind them, I just think these ambitions are driven by vanity (and other "vices")
Why can't it be both?
Because basic desires usually drive more complex ambitions, not the other way round.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#534Earlier 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.
Then when the inevitable war for independence takes place, you have the option to throw rocks at Earth. ;)
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#535Does 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? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg
Airports see more traffic every day than spaceports have seen ever, in all of history. So it’s partly just down to constant repetition and experience.
Kinetic energy of an airplane: 40 kilojoules per kilogram at high cruising speed
Kinetic energy of a rocket: 30 megajoules per kilogram at low earth orbit
It's the difference between one C sized alkaline battery, and slightly under one kilogram of gasoline perfectly mixed with oxygen and ignited in an explosion.
That order of magnitude difference in energy is the difficulty. Fundamentally, an airliner is a dramatically easier engineering task than an orbital capable rocket.
The universe's entire shtick is being very very unwelcoming to high energies, and has a strong tendency to take anything that is a high concentration of energy and turn it into a very spread out glob of much lower energy, or even into an entirely new form of something that "has" less energy but is way less useful to us.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#536Earlier 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…
Falcon 9 is as reliable and safe as an airliner flight - what more do you want?
Not even close by 3 order of magnitude.
Falcon has an accident rate of 2/640.
Airlines are about ~1.3 / 10^6
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.
Talk to me about the Mars rover that was unable to digna small hole to sample.
“There was that time that a robot failed, therefore robots cannot succeed” isn’t the slam dunk that you seem to think it is.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).
This was an issue already in the Soviet times, with a couple cases of early rocket explosions destroying the pad and causing long delays, including one spectacular N1 explosion leveling its pad and needing lengthy expensive rebuild. As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into someth…
> As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight.
I was pondering this very thing. Was there a way to learn the same info as this static fire that didn't risk all the pad infrastructure? I get that the tower, fueling systems, deluge, etc all have to work together in a real launch but given the immense schedule and dollar cost of losing the pad, how much less valid would bifurcated tests be? Like each sub-system is tested in-place on the pad without firing the rocket and then static firing itself is done on a more expendable test pad? Maybe even a test pad that's only designed to only survive long enough to get the necessary data before melting and losing the rocket.
Or alternatively, as you mentioned, when it's time to test full fuel load, skip the "static" part and do everything possible to get the rocket up and away ASAP.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was an issue already in the Soviet times, with a couple cases of early rocket explosions destroying the pad and causing long delays, including one spectacular N1 explosion leveling its pad and needing lengthy expensive rebuild. As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into someth…
> As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. I was pondering this very thing. Was there a way to learn the same info as this static fire that didn't risk all the pad infrastructure? I get that the tower, fueling systems, deluge, etc all have to work together in a real launch but given the immense schedule and doll…
The alternative is you don't find out about a problem until it destroys a customer payload. That's better than losing the launch pad, but it depends on the actual probability of each event happening.
What if a static fire reduces your chance of losing a customer payload from 20% to 0.2%, but increases your chance of losing the pad from 1% to 2%?
And note: If they had skipped a static fire and gone straight for a launch, they would have lost the pad anyway, since the explosion happened at ignition.
Re: Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test
#540I asked Claude Opus 4.8 to estimate the size of the explosion in kilotons of TNT, and it estimated the explosion at 0.18 kilotons of TNT (with an ~0.13–0.26 error range). For comparison, the N-1 rocket explosion was around 0.5 kilotons of TNT.
From the video, about 1kT is estimated.
Impossible. The N1 rocket was far larger than New Glenn, and when it exploded, the explosion yield was below 1kT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear...
If you want to see an actual 1kT explosion, look at the 2020 Beirut disaster. That explosion was approximately 1.1kT and the damage / shockwave is clearly far greater than the New Glenn explosion.