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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

#571

Post by stringfood »

areoform wrote: post #219
stringfood wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why did you preface this with how many times you've made your point to deaf ears in the past? Am I supposed to follow your opinions across the site?

It used to be a thing that people did when repeating a comment. I've used HN for a very long time. It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.

well in that case I apologize for being part of the group that tears rhetoric like yours down as inefficient and unnecessary

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

#573

Post by ben_w »

hparadiz wrote: post #96
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the winners will merely be those The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.

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.

Mega city?

It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve.

While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city".

* https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28circumference+of+...

** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts

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

#574

Post by fastball »

hgoel wrote: post #394
Hugsbox wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance, but why would China being the next on the moon be such a bad thing? Aren't moon missions mostly just "look what I can do!" sorts of things?

For decades, Americans have been propagandized into the position that they alone are exceptional. Thus, anyone that challenges that belief becomes the enemy. It's gotten so bad, that "China might get there first" is the only way to get American politicians to actually stick to a target for more than 4 years.

Americans wanted to beat the Soviets to the moon the first time around, and I don't think it was because they'd "been propagandized into the position that they alone are exceptional".

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

#575

Post by fastball »

Matl wrote: post #489
pphysch wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't looking at it just for bragging rights, but as a step towards the first moon base. Some see it as a race for the frontier and territorial claims.

Are you saying that Americans, who have close to 1,000 known and many unknown bases in every corner of the globe are worried someone else might set up a base somewhere before them? I guess I am just not that bothered, because I don't assume American intentions are inherently better.

Would you really be surprised to discover that Americans in general might be more inclined to assume that American intentions are better?

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

#576

Post by ben_w »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #566
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades One of those strides has been in characterising just how magnificent the human eye, mind and hand are at picking weird shit out of a background.

Have you seen what you can do with just openCV? The world changed fast quite recently.

The better question is not what you can do with computer vision, but what you can't do.

That said, I see a lot of synergy opportunities for humanoid robots on the surface controlled remotely by humans wearing VR gear.

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

#577

Post by ben_w »

hparadiz wrote: post #547
taneq wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There was that time that a robot failed, therefore robots cannot succeed” isn’t the slam dunk that you seem to think it is.

Wanna explain to me why a robot never took this photo? https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/fd02_for-pao/

That exact photo is a beauty shot, for PR value rather than any scientific value.

Here's a long list of photos of Earth, a few were taken by humans, most were taken by robotic probes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Ea...

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

#578

Post by m4rtink »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #477
m4rtink wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering about how it compares to AMOS-6. New glen is bigger than Falcon 9 & uses fully cryogenic propellant, so there would be definitively more energy involved. On the other hand a lot of the damage on the Falcon pad was IIRC due to burning kerosene getting everywhere on the pad & melting everything. In this case I would expect all the liquid oxygen and methane to either be involved in the explosion or quickly…

I don’t believe they were using cryogenic propellant in the first stage yet. They were preparing for it just before this.

You might be confusing cryogenic with subcooling - it is still cryogenic (or it would not fit into the tanks at any reasonable pressure), just colder and more dense (you can fit it a bit more than if its at a higher, still cryogenic temperature).

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

#579

Post by Sparyjerry »

steve1977 wrote: post #486
Rover222 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you know, probably his clearly stated intentions of driving industry off-earth and into orbit. Is SpaceX also a vanity project? No, Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere. Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they're full of shit. In fact, in both of their cases, it means they're extremely driven by... real ambitions. So obvious.

> 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")

There is clear evidence Musk's original goal with SpaceX was just to encourage more investment into NASA. Remember it was started before Tesla existed and before Musk was a billionaire.

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

#580

Post by panick21_ »

angry_octet wrote: post #548
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...

Is Elon inside SpaceX? I don't think he's had any role at the company other than owner.

Consider reading a book about SpaceX maybe.
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