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 incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.
If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause.
Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. 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 in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.
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 findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
> 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.
> 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 of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
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.
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 them.
> After ULA won an $11 billion block buy contract from the US Air Force to launch high-value military payloads into the early 2020s, Musk sued in April 2014.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
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.
> 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
Dealing with liquid oxygen is hard, but we've been dealing with it in rocket engines since the 1940s at least. It's not a mystery, but like anything in aerospace, as the saying goes, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.
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."
We formalized that as "if you didn't find a kernel bug yesterday, you didn't find one today either" (while implicitly glaring at the java developer who kept blaming everything but his own code.) The funny thing is that we actually had one guy who found two kernel bugs (spread over a couple of years, but still) while hunting down weird product issues - we didn't think the kernel was perfect, just that "you need to have exhausted the possibilities in your code before considering blaming the kernel" was well supported by evidence...
Using c++ templates wrong in the year 2000 exposed me to real compiler bugs in the Microsoft c++ compiler at the time, the kind that would make the compiler crash.
LLMs aren't nearly mature or deterministic enough to earn that distinction. I've had an agent tell me it read a link I gave it, when actually it lied. I don't see how you could possibly compare that to a compiler where thinking "maybe it's a compiler bug" means you've almost certainly missed something.
The history of rocket accidents involving problems handling liquid oxygen is long and considering a sniper as the reason was considered quite unique perspective for someone to propose.
Well, because it is very Elon. In Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger recounts how Elon was the only person on the planet who believed his sniper theory.
Elon is a true genius, up there with Euler and Feynman. So when things don't go perfectly with his initial idea surely it must be a conspiracy to get him down
I hear what you're saying but ... clearly SpaceX has made some broad technical decisions - I'm think of using metholox or making starship out of steel or falcon first stage re-usability - that seem to have been the correct choice.
I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.
Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.
The whole reason for this was because of SS's supposed strength under the heat of reentry. Yet they now need to cover the whole thing in thermal insulating tiles. So I wonder if a composite Starship would not have been a better decision?
Comparing Elon Musk, a rich kid that got lucky by investing his money in to "cool shit" with some of the most significant scientists and mathematicians of humankind is just wrong.
Irrelevant to his ability to run a company that makes good rockets at an efficient price, so... who cares? This is exactly the point of the person you're replying to.
The ad hominem destroys your ability to recognise how insanely good SpaceX and Elon are at this rocket ship thing.
Actual Nazis made a lot of stuff 75 years ago that you use and take advantage of on a daily basis. Nobody's judging you, dude. Appreciating and recognising a good scientist or businessman doesn't necessitate that you align with them ideologically.
But "running the company" also involved claiming a sniper agent may have been to blame.
I think it's apropos then to consider that this is the same guy who called someone who rescued children stuck in a cave a "pedo". This is a guy who has made some unfortunate public statements.
The real concern was Russia, given SpaceX has always been a MIC project, now publicly manifest as "Golden Dome" .. a program which undermines M.A.D. and obviously greatly incentives sabotage. There just happened to be a ULA building nearby that was in range and investigated as a possible vector of attack.
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 rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.
[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.
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 something nearby than to explode at the pad.
> 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.
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.
If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one...
Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
Until recently, SpaceX only acquired new pads because they needed a completely new launch site (SLC-4 in Vandenberg) or needed to launch a vehicle that their existing pad(s) didn't support (Falcon Heavy for LC-39A, Starship for Pad A in Boca Chica/Starbase). Currently, Blue Origin's only orbital launch vehicle is New Glenn, and their Vandenberg pad is still under construction.
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.
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).
> if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere.
This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.
Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.
That's not how TDD works. You test the whole chain and all the components with tests and you can move from top to bottom with TDD, it's actually how you should do it.
There's a disconnect between TDD using all sorts of tests (unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, in-field, etc.) and TDD using unit tests only. Unit tests provide the least value/line of test code of all types of tests. They're important, since they can catch bugs earlier than other sorts of tests that can't be caught by a type system, but not sufficient to catch most bugs.
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.
Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right?
I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
Information theory. If you are doing lots of small, incremental tests, burning through a lot of hardware doing all sorts of characterization and qualifying tests, learning a little bit from each one, you can make steady progress, finding your mistakes as you go.
If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.
Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.
> 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.
This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.
For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?
> Maybe an incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.
The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.
Always hope for the stupid mistake. It’s embarrassing but so much better than having the same problem caused by a complex and difficult-to-root-cause issue.
After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
Sort of - if it's determined that somebody bypassed a safety control they can just make the control firmer and fire that person and move onto other things. If it's some fundamental flaw in the engine design that could set them back months/years.
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.
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.
"United Launch Alliance (ULA) is an American launch service provider formed in December 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security."
"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?
I'd bet lots of telemetry, comprehensive design and change documentation, along with engineers tacit knowledge.
Something like:
telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
Engineering cameras all over the bottom of the pad will probably be what they use. I'm sure they have high speed cameras looking directly up at the bottom of the engines like SpaceX has. They'll watch frame by frame and then confirm with sensor data or the other way around. Maybe a manufacturing defect caused a turbopump housing to rupture? The energy densities are so crazy in rocket engines that would probably be like 3 sticks of TNT going off. The propulsion engineers are intimately familiar with the engines they probably already have a good idea.
The doubt is supposed to stay with you! You need to make sure there aren't other causes or contributing factors hiding behind 'the obvious'. There have been notorious cases in spaceflight where the issue was 'identified' and 'fixed', only for the same thing issue to happen in the next mission.
Nothing of the level of rocket failure, but I've tracked down issues where you are never sure of the cause. You keep the doubt and let it drive you. You aren't as much sure of a theory, as you have the theory you most want to disprove and keep failing to do so. The more you fail to disprove a given theory while other people with their own personal 'targets' do end up disproving them, the more you can report that the theory is the reasonable conclusion. But you never given up the idea of looking to disprove it. Eventually others join you and work to disprove your theory. As the group continues to fail to disprove it, it becomes the officially stated cause unless someone can provide evidence otherwise.
Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
Nah, there'll be a lot of people who think they know what happened and there'll be one person someone at BO who really knows what happened they just don't know they know it yet. In the course of the analysis that person will hear a couple of known facts and there will be feeling in the pit of your stomach when all doubt goes away. Worst case scenario is that it's something they signed off on.
Imagine is a good word to use. Before offering a solution, understand the problem first - is "debugging speed" a problem that needs solving, in this case?
Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase
if an LLM is capable enough to be used this way it would be used to generate scenarios for the people who would otherwise have to be the ones to generate them. those people would then evaluate the scnearios. those people would then be in a position to decide if the LLM saves them time.
I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.
The knee-jerk reaction to pointing out any failure modes of AI with, "but meatbags bad!" is a tiring strawman to deal with. It immediately turns the discussion into something else.
So, your message is "Unspecified AI models with or without additional training aren't ready to do aerospace fault analysis and they can lead experienced engineers astray." OK, it might or mightn't be true depending on the free parameters in your statement.
I used the word "likely" meaning there is a chance, your re-phrasing of what I said into a certainty ... and then refuting that certainty, is another textbook strawman argument, you made the same logical fallacy again.
Also I said "intermediate and junior" engineers - meaning INexperienced engineers, not experienced ones, so you quoted me wrong in that part too.
The video angle published by the BBC is better, it appears to show one side of the rocket disintegrating and sliding down non-explosively before the large explosion really kicked in. Would hate for this all to be described by a few missing bolts
edit: the failure appears to start at the bottom, this seems to have damaged the structure enough to cause the sliding to start, then the huge fireball seems to begin with a small flash closer to the top of the rocket
What you're seeing is not a 'side' of the rocket sliding down, it's the rocket itself. The other part on the right is the erector stand it was mounted to. Looks like the bottom of the rocket blows out first and begins to collapse. The rocket begins to slide vertically before it all becomes one large fireball. The erector stand didn't survive the explosion either in the end.
That makes a lot more sense, and sibling comment's higher res clip makes it a lot clearer. I knew I was posting a crappy analysis in the hopes someone who understands this stuff would post something more interesting, there is a dearth of technical speculation from googling around
No worries, it's going to be fascinating to hear what the investigation uncovers. Did the sensor data stream send back anything useful in the milliseconds before those sensors ceased to exist? I would assume there were no warning signs or they would have done a stand down on the test itself. So many questions!
Ouch, losing the rocket is unfortunate, but the damage to the launch infrastructure is going to easily mean over a year of repairs. I hope they're going to take this as an opportunity to update the infrastructure from lessons learned from the flights so far, and to be able to support some of their future ambitions (e.g. Jarvis).
> I'm hearing that it is possible that Blue Origin decides to go directly to the larger 9x4 variant of New Glenn after this failure. Obviously no decisions like that will be made without more data review.
This is their only New Glenn launch pad, but the pad for the 9x4 is already under construction. Depending on the damage sustained to the pad that might be a factor in the decision
It makes some sense. If they're not going to be able to launch for a year because the pad is being rebuilt anyway, projects that were going to take a year may as well go to the front burner.
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 big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the best things to happen to the rocket industry in decades. So, yes Blue Origin had a RUD with New Glenn. They should, learn and adapt and launch the next one. It would be good for SpaceX to have credible competition. And New Glenn seems like it could become that.
But if they only get their lessons every few years, they'll be competing against a fully reusable Starship rather than Falcon 9 & Falcon heavy by the time this thing becomes a serious launch vehicle. The goal posts are moving.
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.
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.
Depends on your point of view. But I imagine some people in the US would not be happy to lose that race. The reason it was a race in the sixties is because they definitely didn't want the Russians to get there first.
So purely so that China doesn't get the bragging rights? I guess I don't see the big deal but I'm sure it's more important than it seems on the surface.
Some of that, and also because it’s a benchmark of program maturity. Think of it as not wanting China to be able to do things the US can’t, with some overtones of military capability, American exceptionalism, the symbolism of China not even being in the race that the US won 56 years ago, etc.
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.
Sure. It’s not easy to do. I think odds favor China right now, but it’s far from a done deal. Anything from geopolitics to internal politics to technical hurdles could interfere (ditto with the US and everyone else of course).
Not to mention there being a lot of launch failures pre and during the Apollo era, including pad explosions (there are nice compilations on youtube). But that was not really that much of an issue, as this was expected and there were dozens of pads built for these launches, so the testing cadence was not affected.
There was no fatal launch failure for Apollo & pad explosion would be a problem with just 2 pads available.
There were a couple Saturn V stage explosions during testing but again - those damaged test stands, not the pad.
That is a very fair point. While I have no skin in the game, it is fascinating to see if the Us with Artemus or China with Chang'e will be the first to make it back to the Moon manned.
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.
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 Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
> when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
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.
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.
You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
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.
Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
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.
I will give you that. I will be more than happy to see both reach there in mutual success. I do fear the blow back of the more tribalistic folks that will see it as a threat rather than success.
Yes, in that sense SpaceX has really benefited from having the Starbase site. My understanding is that one of the reasons pad rebuilds take so long at the Cape is that they have to work around everyone else's schedule.
I think that if companies want to scale up rocket launches (and let's disregard the cost / environmental impact / etc for now), they also need to scale up launch sites, at the moment they seem like single points of failure.
I have only armchair amateur half a world away knowledge of this, but I want to believe all they need is an exhaust diffuser thingy and refueling capabilities; the former can probably be built cheap enough anywhere, the latter can be made portable.
(of course then you also have the challenge of assembling and loading a rocket, lmao. But a hub-and-spokes setup with VAB(s) and launch sites spread out around it like an airport could work. Bonus evil villain points if the launch sites are underground to contain explosions in case of failure.
(this post is just imagination / castles in the sky)
Any large rocket needs a water deluge system to prevent damage to the launch pad and reduce sound volume so echoes don’t damage the rocket. The amount of fuel required for these large rockets can’t really be portable. A Starship launch uses hundreds of methane truck tankers worth of fuel.
But it is cadence that drives SpaceX to have multiple launchpads plus specialized capabilities and orbital dynamics for F9.
I would guess this puts a big dent in NASA's moon plans. I think Blue origin was _just_ selected to be the first moon lander mission. Now they are going to be grounded _again_. They just got off grounded status last week! And this is not even going to mention the significant ground equipment damage they have to deal with.
Very unfortunate all around. I hope BO finds a way to keep the timelines.
>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 a less risky critical path. The rocket was already orbital, fewer refueling flights were needed, the engines weren't pushing the limits of materials technology, no reusable heat shield to worry about.
Though, ultimately it's worth keeping in mind that the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell.
> Blue's option was being seen as the faster option due to having a less risky critical path
Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.)
> the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell
The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction. (Hell, even without HLS you can ship nuclear power stations and solar panels and rovers.)
It seems to point to rising costs on SpaceX's end, and in my reading, is very critical of them compared to BO.
>The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction
I believe that suits are still important because you can't really do much with a crew there without them. There aren't even new EVA suits available. And, of course politically, it's going to be seen very poorly if they can't do a "One small step for a man..." moment.
As mentioned, Apollo suits are neither safe, nor in working condition now. Even the EVA suits on the ISS (which are only usable for space walks) are decades old and just barely being kept going.
The US simply hasn't been able to bring new spacesuits into use for a long time, every single time, the costs and timelines have spiraled. Probably because a lot of the knowledge has been lost to old age, and the new guys need some time to relearn those lessons and improve on them.
No. One, they don’t exist in working condition. Two, the tolerances and materials were unacceptable by modern standards. (And for modern purposes. We’re going there to do shit. Not be Boy Scouts.)
They also change every time a Congressional staffer sneezes. If the space suits don’t work, a pivot would be easier than having the space suits with no rocket to put them on.
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.
Falcon Heavy has a much smaller max payload diameter (~4.6m) compared the New Glenn (7m), I doubt the landers (MK2 especially) can be retooled to fit without essentially starting from scratch.
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.
> Does Blue Origin not have another pad? (Did they blow up a pad or a test stand?)
The explosion happened at their only completed pad.
They reportedly have a second pad under construction (for the larger "9x4" variant of New Glenn) but I've not seen a lot of detail about how far along it is.
Would not be surprised to see them accelerating construction of the new pad.
> But pretty much everyone thinks Artemis is Starship HLS or bust.
Right now it seems like it's Axiom or bust, with their suits. The suits have missed a lot of milestones, and there's not much point in going to the Moon without suits. Latest NASA OIG report put them somewhere in the 2030s at best...
Heh, I don't think so. The ISS suits have their own problems, are custom made for the ISS, are bulky AF, and "modified for the moon" might take longer than expected.
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 after that it's basically like walking on compacted soil so it won't be loose.
And if you're wondering why they might use water for this well... water will be abundant and basically every habitat will have a municipal water hookup. A moon base might quickly find itself with several hectares of water and no where to put it. Might even end up injecting it into the ground where the water will be able to maintain it's liquid state (moon crust quickly reaches room temperature only a few dozens of meters underground).
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.
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 unattractive. If SpaceX wants to compete they will need to build a dedicated cislunar vehicle.
I might have seen the explosion light up some clouds in Orlando. I was driving East when I saw a patch of clouds glow orange for a few seconds and then go dark. I wondered what that was... then found out this happened at the same time I was driving!
Wow, that certainly gives context to why modern range safety is so strict about automatically or manually blowing the rocket up once it deviates too far from the planned path
It’s not the only time the CCP has reported an unbelievably low number of casualties in a large catastrophe. Seems like the number of dead is always around 6-7 (sorry) no matter how big the incident is. Like the flooding of that tunnel a few years ago where the authorities tried to hide how many flowers were put up by the tunnel
Yes, but at a significantly higher level of magnitude. Their official count is 122,398; the US reported 1,238,123. Both are undercounts, but China's is probably much more of an undercount.
The Chinese government say very few were killed. But personally, my position is that the guys who routinely publish their embarrassing-seeming failures are quite believable (the US publishes that their planes fall off their carriers) and those who say they're perfect are probably lying. So I don't believe their numbers.
I think my mom could have taken better footage of that, and I swear she was the worst. I realize that the person holding the camera was looking at the thing directly and getting lost in the moment rather than looking at the camera, but for someone whose job it's been to operate a camera that is incredibly irritating to watch. It's right up there with the Artemis II launch (okay that's a bit harsh, but they were meant to be "pros")
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, and the rest in the blast and radiation.
Depending on how full the rocket tank actually was, the fireball from the rocket explosion was in the same ballpark, or possibly even larger in the size and duration of afterglow compared to that from the Trinity nuclear test.
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.
The TNT is relevant, because the atomic bomb energy output was defined in terms of TNT equivalent. Not the energy of the blast, but the total output. For Trinity this was 20 kt, or 20*4.2 TJ.
This serves as a basis of comparison for this deflagration. If we are considering specifically the appearance of the late fireball, the heat output is the relevant figure of merit.
Assuming about 10-15% of the total bomb energy remained in the heat of the late fireball (with the rest spent on the blast wave, peak thermal radiation and neutron/gamma radiation), the fireball of this rocket deflagration could have exceeded the late fireball from the bomb. But this assumes the tanks were fully filled, which we do not know yet.
Counting frames on YouTube, I get about 0.3s for the blast front to reach the top of the 600ft towers. That gives an estimate of around 600 tons TNT so definitely nowhere near all the fuel exploding.
Sedov-Taylor-Rayleigh blast equation, though this video isn't high enough frame rate to more than ballpark it I think. Tower is ~180m high, so 0.2 sec would be a bit over 1 kiloton instead? But definitely not remotely 13 kt. Still serious of course, when SpaceX suffered launch complex damage during some of its incidents it took a solid 6-12 months to fix.
Everyone can be glad though that no hypergolics are involved at least!
You are talking about the energy of the blast. In my comment I was talking about the heat output. From the followup comments it seems I have not made it sufficiently clear.
The energy of the detonation wave in rocket explosions is typically 1-2% of the energy in the fuel, at least that is the ballpark of what people use for estimating the effects of mishaps.
We also do not know if the tanks were fully filled -- it the past, rocket companies have called 10 second static fire tests a "full duration static fire test." We will probably find out later what it actually was meant to be.
Maybe it was a bit too colloquial. I am not sure if this is very important. A formal term would have been "full propellant load." The phrase "fill level" is also used in NASA documents.
The question was whether during this test the stage was loaded with the same amount of fuel as for an actual flight, or only a small fraction of that.
I think the point is that that phrasing has been used by rocket companies to mean a whole range of different amounts of fuel load, it's not very precise wording in practice.
From the industry: I would expect to hear "mission duty cycle" in that case. "Full duration" doesn't have a consistent meaning (a fact which is sometimes used to the marketing team's advantage).
Flight computer tells engine to go. Full go, launch sequence. Engine goes. To me, anything but that isn’t a full-duration anything.
If clamped down, it’s a full-duration static fire. If clamps release, it goes to space. Basically, if the engine can’t tell (apart from atmosphere, which is a big apart) it isn’t going to space, it’s a FDSF. It’s a whole-engine show. If you’re running parts through a full duty cycle, that can be done in a lab (or on a stand).
The problem is that there is no standard meaning for the "full duration" in this context.
Some reports say that this means "running all seven BE-4 engines at full thrust for up to 38 seconds".
In flight the engines fire for 190 seconds.
So what the full duration means, and whether they fill the tanks with just enough fuel for the firing, or with a larger amount to help the clamps to hold the stage down, all this we will probably only find out from the investigation, if the results are ever published.
I think it's amazing they can basically hold a rocket down and let it launch like that without things exploding or shearing apart from the forces. Are those the same bolts as the exploding ones they would use for a normal launch?
(on that note it's also amazing that these exploding bolts are so reliable, I can imagine even a single one not releasing would cause... Issues)
Correction: The first stage of New Glenn carries only about 260 tons of methane. The 1150 tons is the full propellent load, liquid oxygen and liquid methane combined.
The heat from combustion of this amount would be about 3.4 kt, which is roughly the same as the heat in the late fireball of the Trinity test.
Reminds me words, attributed to one of first soviets astronauts: "You're sitting on top of 9 story building, completely filled with fuel and they say to you: don't worry, we calculated everything".
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?
Probably yes. Humans can survive a lot of Gs for a short time. John Stapp survived up to 38 Gs with liveable injuries and some ejector seats are around 32 g [0]. They could fairly easily get 500m away within 3-4 seconds.
This has happened before on the Soyuz in 1983[1], hitting up to 17 Gs, and everyone was fine, modulo some bruising.
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.
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.
It almost definitely cannot. It already has a far lower thrust-to-weight ratio than real launch escape systems (1.x at best versus 6-10+)[1][2], and it would only be able to light its three sea-level engines since the vacuum-optimized engines would be unstable and likely rip themselves apart at 1 ATM.*
*correction: Vac raptors can run at sea level in a test stand. Still doubtful that its safe/reliable and in either case it would still be far too slow.
[1] Note that the first G of acceleration is combating gravity, so Starship at e.g. 1.25Gs would accelerate away from the explosion at 1/20th the rate of Dragon v2.
Not sure why you were downvoted. That’s the first thing I thought of, too. They got all the people out of the area, standard procedure but still, this was a huge boom.
Does 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?
> The percent propellant has huge implications on the ease of fabrication and robustness in achieving the engineering design (and cost). If a vehicle is less than 10% propellant, it is typically made from billets of steel. Changes to its structure are readily done without engineering analysis; you simple weld on another hunk of steel to reinforce the frame according to what your intuition might say. I can easily overload my ¾ ton pickup by a factor of two. It might be moving slowly but it is hauling the load.
> Once the vehicles become airborne, the engineering becomes more serious. Light weight structures made of aluminum, magnesium, titanium, epoxy-graphite composites are the norm. To alter the structure takes significant engineering; one does not simply weld on another chunk to your airframe if you want to live (or drill a hole through some convenient section). These vehicles cannot operate far from their designed limits; overloading an airplane by a factor of two results in disaster. Even though these vehicles are 30 to 40% propellant (60 to 70% structure and payload), there is room for engineering to comfortably operate thus there is a robust, safe, and cost effective aviation industry.
> Rockets at 85% propellant and 15% structure and payload are on the extreme edge of our engineering ability to even fabricate (and to pay for!). They require constant engineering to keep flying. The seemingly smallest modifications require monumental analysis and testing of prototypes in vacuum chambers, shaker tables, and sometimes test launches in desert regions. Typical margins in structural design are 40%. Often, testing and analysis are only taken to 10% above the designed limit. For a Space Shuttle launch, 3 g’s are the designed limit of acceleration. The stack has been certified (meaning tested to the point that we know it will keep working) to 3.3 g’s. This operation has a 10% envelope for error. Imagine driving your car at 60 mph and then drifting to 66 mph, only to have your car self-destruct. This is life riding rockets, compliments of the rocket equation.
Interesting post. I'd never thought of it that way. Not consciously anyway.
Might that make an air-launched system more reliable? Even if it's less efficient, the TCO would be lower using a winged system for the initial phases of launch.
Several air launch systems have been tried, with limited but non-zero commercial success. The altitude and speed you get from the plane is very small compared to the total work the rocket needs to do, so the benefit in terms of "the rocket can be smaller" is minimal. The main benefit in practice has been launching from ~wherever you like, since regular fixed launch sites usually have strict limits about the direction you have to fly to avoid people. But the economics of reusability are pushing rockets to get bigger, and no air launch system can fly anything nearly as big as a Falcon 9, much less a Starship + Super Heavy. Other scattered problems:
- Hanging under-wing is a totally different set of forces than standing vertically, especially for a big rocket with thin walls. You're more like a bridge than a tower, or rather like a bridge one moment and then a tower the next. You need reinforcement for that, which makes the vehicle heavier.
- Modern reusable rockets do quick "load and go" filling to keep their propellant as cold and dense as possible. You can't do that if you need to fuel on the ground and then hang off an airplane for ~an hour while it climbs.
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.
Main advantage of air launch is that you can better match your target inclination or perhaps even orbit timing - just drop the rocket at the right time in the right direction over the ocean. With a fixed launch site you always need to adjust for some difference of your point of origin versus the orbit you want to achieve.
It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.
You've just got the problem of building a fixed wing aircraft which can carry your rocket full of explosive propellant, successfully release it pointing in the right direction and then get the hell out of the way....
That isn’t very helpful considering rocket launches only spend a few seconds in atmosphere mostly going vertically to get above the majority as quickly as possible .
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)
There are some companies working on that and / or there have been some experiments with it, but there's two factors there; the one is of course how much weight an aircraft can carry. The other one is the altitude and / or angle; a big plane goes to about 10 kilometers (maybe more, idk), but that's a 'flat' flight, ideally you launch while angled upwards and that's a bit more involved.
But that's how a lot of the X projects were / are done.
There’s actually been commercial launch services using air launch - Virgin Orbit, which went bankrupt, and Northrop Grumman’s (acquired as part of Orbital ATK) Pegasus, which hasn’t launched since 2021 and has one launch planned in 2026.
To add to this excellent explanation:
Rockets have a fundamental problem. They need to go absurdly fast. If you have a rocket that can reach speed X, to go faster than X you need to reach X but also have fuel left over. However to get that fuel to speed X, you need even more fuel. This is the tyranny of the rocket equation.
Roughly put, the rocket equation is: change in speed = (engine efficiency) * log(mass of the rocket with fuel / mass of the rocket without fuel). So there's limited parameters to play with:
- The speed you need to reach is fixed.
- You can change the weight of the payload. Payload (eg, satellite) designers try to make things as light as possible, rocket designers try to give as much capacity as possible, and everyone prays they can meet in the middle.
- You want as little propellant as possible for cost and practicality, but mostly the other parameters fix how much you need. If the other parameters aren't good enough, you can easily get results like needing a rocket the size of Central Park. [1]
- You can make the engine more efficient. This means running it hotter with higher pressure, pushing the limits of material science. [2]
- You can make the non-payload static parts of the rocket lighter. This means removing structural integrity. It also means making the lightest parts to complete hard tasks like being a valve for cryogenically cooled, literally the smallest element, hydrogen.
Both the engine and non-payload static mass are essentially asking the question "How far can I push this without it breaking". Get your answer to that question even slightly wrong on any of the thousands parts in a rocket, and suddenly all of the fuel that you're using to go in one direction fast decide that you should instead go in every direction fast.
[2] Or not using chemical propulsion. However things like ion engines don't have enough thrust to get through the atmosphere and into orbit, and things like nuclear propulsion spew fallout everywhere.
Nuclear rockets aren't suitable to get orbit, they are too heavy. Also, nuclear rockets can separate the reactor and the propellant, called close cycle. I think the solid core reactors that are feasible send propellant through reactor but all of the fuel is encased.
It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
I will let John Young explain it his way;
> ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’
As an aside, if you've never heard of John Young, I recommend learning a bit about him. He was an incredible person. And that statement is very funny in his voice; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KezwDfFcFhU
He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4
(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.
> Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison
We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.
The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
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 rocket safety.
> hey are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity
They are not. It is at best marketing speech.
The access to space is at best cheaper but will never be commodity.
The parent post is right on point: Rockets todays are still fundamentally the same giant bomb filled at 85% with explosive that we were making in the 60s. And this is unlikely to change and unlikely to ever be safe.
There is very valid reasons to that: we still did not find anything better than chemical propulsion to go in the last 80 years. It is the only 'working' solution in term of the energy density required to bring us there:
- Ion thrusters have amazing Isp but nowhere the Thrust/Weight ratio required to launch from Earth.
- Nuclear propulsion is good on paper but controversial in practice for pretty obvious reasons.
So we are still stuck.
Stuck with burning 1'000t of highly inflammable Ergols in few minutes to just push any blob in orbit. With very thin engineering margins, way thiner than in airplane manufacturing or currently pretty any other domain.
And that make it unlikely to ever be really "safe" and accessible to the mass.
At least, not before we find a better solution to the problem.
> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago
One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.
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.
Still, you ideally just want to launch people and some complex machinery from Earth & produce about everything for in space use from local resources. That makes it possible to heavily optimize Earth to LEO craft for safety and reliability, alleviating most of these concerns.
This is fair but I'm not sure the low hanging fruit is going to be developing technology that can reach earth escape velocity without being extremely sensitive to how well built and prepared the system applying the enormous amount force required is. Even the hypothetical stuff like Spin Launch and space elevators is going to have catastrophic failure modes....
Personally, I'm impressed with just how unimpressed I am. Or rather, rocket launches feel like they really are becoming more and more commoditized. To the point that routine trips to the moon doesn't feel like a crazy future.
Our species is pretty young, around ~2 million years old, give or take a few million / hundred thousand years depending on whom you're talking to.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
The contrast in my opinion comes more from the fact that 50 years prior to the space age people rode horses as a standard mean of transportation (more or less). It’s underwhelming to not see the line going from horse to rocket continue on the same path 50 years later.
We went to the moon in the late 60s as a massively expensive cold-war propaganda campaign, after the Soviet Union humiliating America for years when it came to firsts in space. It was a question of honor and showing that capitalism is better than communism.
Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two
"very primitive" - primitive in relation to who? As a species we control the planet, we rule every other species currently known to humans, how is that primitive?
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.
There are a number of ways of looking at this, which others have answered, but here's another:
The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen propellant is only about 11 MJ.
Alternately, perfectly combusted methane-oxygen propellant has an exit velocity of around 3500 m/s. But you need about 7800 m/s to get into orbit.
Chemical energy is just very weak compared to the energy of things in orbit. It's really shocking that we can do it at all.
The result of this is that your vehicle is going to be almost entirely propellant. You simply can't just build a big, beefy rocket that's, say, only half propellant, with lots of extra safety margin for things that go wrong. Cars and bridges and things have immense margins. Airplanes, a bit less so, but still more than rockets. Rockets live right on the edge of what's possible, and as long as we use chemical thrust it'll always be that way.
Which isn't to say that rockets won't get more reliable. The Falcon 9 has had hundreds of flights since the last failure, and it isn't as optimized as it could be. But there will be a lot more failures before we get there.
Simplest explanation comes from Tory Bruno: they design with a factor of safety just above 1. 1.1 to 1.25. This is one of the reasons they wait for good weather to launch… they are trying to maximize payload. Also until recently, it’s been sort of a vicious cycle: rocket is very exquisite and expensive, so spacecraft needs to last longer and thus gets more exquisite and expensive, etc.
Have you seen how many issues race cars have? Same shit. It goes on and on.
One might make the same observations about software “bugginess” and complexity. The pace of improvement is such that everyone is riding the bleeding edge and, as such, the carpet inevitably gets a few spots of blood on it.
I have come to think that the reason why people are prepared to accept AI slop is because the software industry was so blase about quality. They already had slop, now they get it cheaper.
You're giving the system too much credit. The users and the SWEs don't get a choice in this, they eat whatever the thought leaders and PMs spec out. They are the ones who make the decisions, you can either get on board or look for a new job.
There isn't an actual diverse ecosystem of most consumer software, just a monoculture of largely undifferentiated clones.
> Does 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?
Not really. Rocketry is hard.
You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.
Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.
This feels like more a matter of scale than anything else? We’re able as a species to do some absolutely insane wizard shit elsewhere (chip fab?), we just haven’t launched enough rockets yet to get there.
Less than perfect chips are printed every day but the consequences of a less than optimal chip is ending up in a cheaper laptop vs. causing a big boom. I think we are doing wizard shit in rocketry, mistakes are just very loud.
Definitely unexpected from BO, knowing that everyone is okay, I feel for their engineers right now.
Flagship chip yields are generally less than 50%. Over half the chips coming out are dead on arrival, and never leave the fab. Imagine if rockets had that sort of failure rate.
Well, rockets are more than a millennium old, but sure, solid fuel rockets tend to be less volatile by definition.
Honestly we’re really good at not prematurely combining tens to hundreds of tons of high-energy fuel and oxidizer put right next to each other and then combining them at several tons per second in a highly controlled way using a very complex system of plumbing and turbopumps powered by the same reagents.
Something like a bridge is easily possible with the gravity of our planet. If gravity were twice as strong, we would still have bridges. Orbital rockets are only barely possible (with practical, known chemical propellants). If gravity were twice as strong, we either wouldn’t have them or we would have to use very different methods of propulsion.
Given that it’s just barely possible, you can’t just make things twice as strong as you think you’d need to, just in case something unexpected happens. Anyhow when something moderately unexpected happens, that means you may get a giant fireball like we saw today.
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.
Starting/igniting a liquid fueled rocket engine is an inherently complex process - everything has to be sequenced just right to get engines chilled, turbo pumps up to speed, any gaseous fuel vented and harmlessly ignited before it builds up, ignition of fuel, etc.
Here's a 1hr video from the Everyday Astronaut explaining the process and everything that can go wrong.
Rockets are hard for sure but also almost nobody notices if there's a minor bug in your delivery app that causes it to crash every once in a while - but it can matter alot if there's a microscopic crack in a rocket engine that makes it blow up. Defect rate might be the same but the (literal) blast radius is much higher.
And an unexpected transient load or heat flux can easily exceed material limits, or materials can have flaws. The ability to qualify the materials, components and processes for aerospace use is an achievement in itself.
Exactly this. It is relatively easy to make something mechanical more safe provided you have have a significant material buffer. Rocket abhors additional material weight so everything has to run with a limited buffer space for safety.
The engines are seeing significant development. These engines are the most complex of their kind, they inject the fuel and oxidizer as hot gases. Google full flow staged combustion cycle
What you refer to as the rocket, meaning the tube itself isn't failing. It's just that a big explosion will treat it apart
I think more you’re just at the absolute margins of engineering to get to escape velocity. Those constraints haven’t changed, so until some major material or fuel advance happens things will continue to go wrong.
Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.
> Does 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?
Not really. The performance metrics on rocket engines are utterly insane.
The jet kinetic power of a Merlin 1D engine at sea level is 1.3 GW. The work output of a nuclear power plant in a device weighing half a ton and costing maybe $400K.
Rockets are bombs. Rockets are big bombs. For a rocket to work correctly, you want it to explode a little more gently, and in one direction. The subtleties of making it explode a little more gently are where all of these failures are found.
> Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements?
Until very recently they were basically all custom with extreme tolerance requirements and absolute specifications. Nobody could have an "off day" on a single bolt, hose, nut, screw, wiring harness, etc.
The explosion was seen even by some in Orlando (mainly East Orlando) in such a way, that a coworker noted their son saw it while on the highway and thought the worst (a giant mushroom cloud is kind of horrifying) at first.
NSF is also reporting that it took out one of the lightning rod towers. It'll be interesting to see how much damage the pad and ground equipment sustained.
It was very likely the largest explosion in Florida spaceflight history. Considerably larger than when SpaceX blew up AMOS-6 in 2016, and that required a full rebuild of the pad infrastructure over 18 months.
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 vaporize, possibly resulting in a different damage pattern on the pad.
Blowing up on the launch pad is like a rite of passage for every serious rocket program. The engineering margins are thin out of necessity, and lots of things conspire to eat through them.
Rocket science is hard, and rocket physics are unforgiving. If the planet was just a little bit heavier, we would not be able to leave it with chemical rockets at all.
Blowing up on the pad is incredibly worse from a design data collection perspective, a risk to life perspective, and a downstream impact to future launches perspective (nobody can use that site for a couple of months).
To be fair the last Starship to blowup on launchpad/ground was less than a year ago. It is a set back but it appears nobody has avoided this issue yet.
The weight of the propellant helps hold the rocket on the pad during the test fire, reducing how much force the hold-downs need to exert to keep the rocket on the pad, and stressing the rocket's structure in the same way it will be stressed at launch.
Test fires with a near-empty rocket would put considerably more force on the pad's hold-downs and the corresponding parts of the rocket's structure.
Blue also had a fuelled 2nd stage on top of the booster for the static fire, which is not out of the ordinary.
SpaceX has a "cap" that is held down with cables that it uses when it needs to test-fire a first stage by itself at its McGregor test site; static fires at launch sites are usually done with the 2nd stage on top.
Right. The forces these things produce are massive. I only know the specifics for the Space Shuttle, but when it is at full liftoff thrust (liquid and solid boosters) there's just no way to keep it leashed to Earth. It's going up whether you want to or not.
The space shuttle stack has a net thrust (thrust minus weight) of about 9 MN at lauch [1]. High carbon steel has a yield strength of 700 MPa [2]. So you need a piece of steel with a cross section of 0.013 square meter to hold it down. That's a rod 6.5 cm / 2.5 inches in diameter. Hardly impossible. Your nearest road suspension bridge probably has cables bigger than this.
If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].
The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.
In September 2016 almost exactly the same thing happened to a Falcon 9 at the Cape, also on a static fire. New Glenn is bigger, so bigger bang, but pretty much exactly the same thing.
Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is only apparent when everything is pressurized correctly, which means tanks have to be full. The goal of the test is that you detect that sort of failure before it goes boom and then can fix it.
Wasn't a bad weld; it was a bad interaction between liquid or solid oxygen and what were previously thought to be inconsequential defects in the composite-overwrapped pressure vessel the helium was loaded into.
Quoting from one of the press releases:
"The recovered COPVs showed buckles in their liners. Although buckles were not shown to burst a COPV on their own, investigators concluded that super chilled LOX can pool in these buckles under the overwrap. When pressurized, oxygen pooled in this buckle can become trapped; in turn, breaking fibers or friction can ignite the oxygen in the overwrap, causing the COPV to fail. In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition.
"The investigation team identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX in buckles under the overwrap."
Was that when a SpaceX engineer demanded immediate "roof" access to ULA's pad because they suspected someone at ULA had used a sniper rifle to shoot at the Falcon? Crazy times.
>Externally, they sent the site director for their Florida operations, Ricky Lim, to inquire whether he might visit the roof of the United Launch Alliance building... ULA told SpaceX’s Ricky Lim to get lost when he wanted to see the roof of their building in Florida.
> 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 of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
Man, the signs were always there, right? I think I only fully realized it in 2018 during the cave "incident".
I think this makes sense, but then what’s the learning - dont make bad welds? I imagine they were already trying to do as best they could. Or perhaps “however stringent you think your checks are, they need to be more stringent”. And then learning that repeatedly is somewhat spectacular.
There's another comment that it wasn't the weld but even if it was the welders would build to spec and "better" (if it's known what better is) only if it's straightforward. There are certainly scenarios where a fabricator could design a better jig or use a more precise process but if the spec doesn't call for it then it's probably not going to happen because there are also the dimensions of time and money that matter as well.
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 weight, so if you static fire it nearly empty, then that gravity term goes to ~zero, and the clamps have to hold the full 1.2-1.6x. You could overbuild them to handle that -- which isn't the end of the world, because they don't need to fly -- but it can be easier to just add extra fuel and detank it afterwards.
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.
You've got two large tanks making up the bulk of the stage's structure - one for oxidizer, one for fuel. They have large diameter pipes that feed propellant to the engines. You can't mix the ballast with either the oxidizer or fuel, and you can't feed the engines from anywhere but the propellant tanks...
If you are writing an integration test for some new and potentially bug-ridden code then you might opt to mock, say, the database connection.
Doing so risks having to write so much database logic — with all the potential for getting that code buggy as well — that it’s often better to avoid the mock and test the entire system, end-to-end.
The vehicle is designed to hold all that fuel, plus whatever payload it carries on top, but it's not designed to have heavy loads attached to it in any other way. Rockets are so intensely optimized for weight that sometimes they're barely strong enough to stand upright if you fuel them the wrong way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkdz63agHY.
That's a great video! Thank you for sharing it. A rocket is more like a soda can than a building but it's hard to relate when you see such a massive object!
You can see a similar effect after the explosion at the end of last week's Starship test flight. If you look at where the flames are coming out after the first fireball clears, it kind of pancakes under its own weight there: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zi2SU98BAD8?t=5735s
Oh huh. You really can. I didn't pick up on that the first few hundred times I watched it. That's really cool. It kind of splats down into a 2-d rectangle.
It's been said that the most amazing engineering of the whole Shuttle program was the external fuel tank (and there is one with the static display of Endeavour here at the California Science Center in LA).
You don't need to fill it all the way up for that. If in flight your engines burn for 2 minutes, but your static fire is only a few seconds you can see why.
This shows the importance of choosing the correct jargon and terminology, and then employing clear and unambiguous communication. They asked engineers for a static fire test. Got one hell of a fire, so that’s good, but it wasn’t very static…
- Test commences prematurely when people are still around
- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back
- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are
These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.
No one should ever be that close, but it's a worst case scenario within the realm of possibility (people do get themselves into danger sometimes, for example by wandering onto a railroad track when there's a train approaching). I don't think it's unreasonable to reserve the 10 on the 1-10 scale for 'loss of human life'.
I mean, there was that one static fire recently where the rocket broken loose and started flying. This was not for from a populated area. Ok, maybe that was pretty criminally negligent.
SpaceX had a very similar failure during a static fire test in 2016 that destroyed the rocket, payload, and a few key parts of SLC-40 that took them over a year to repair and return to service (September 2016 -> December 2017). The concrete flume trenches were literally melted.
That was a full size rocket on a real mission with the $200M payload on board during the static fire, which is ostensibly worse. The payload was not integrated yet in Blue Origin’s case.
It looks to me like the initial explosion was at the upper part of the rocket. Reminded the Starship explosion https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1935548909805601020 where on 0.25 speed also visible what the start of the catastrophe was at the upper part.
Interesting that just 2 days ago NASA picked Blue Origin instead of SpaceX for this year Moon flights.
On a sidenote, one can wonder how much, giving coming SpaceX IPO, it costs for Bezos to hire a Starship engineer :)
Analysis video by Scott Manley notes that other comparable tests did not have visible fire at all, so it seems it started lower on the rocket and that the upper fire ball was either a secondary explosion or something coming up the transporter stand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo
Man they spent a huge amount on the launch infrastructure and it was ready long before the rocket. It was waiting for a long time. And now it reversed.
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 rockets.
Does anyone know what the fuel level was for the static test fire vs the upcoming mission profile? I want to know how big the explosion for new Glenn would be fully loaded.
Starship already holds the other half of those commitments. I saw some speculation that they couldnt suddenly double their number of Artemis launches. The timelines blasted either way.
In the video, some debris seemed to fly away from the explosion in a wavy path (top left). I thought things only moved like that in video games. What causes that kind of movement?
Rein in their margins is probably a better term. I’m a spacex fan but I’m reminded of what happens to every darling leader that crushes competition. It gets complacent, uses shitty tricks to cut out competitors, and raises prices.
I saw this at Google and it’s what will happen to SpaceX (already starting with Starlink pricing) if there isn’t someone to keep the competitive pressure on.
I have a lot against its owner, who has been enabling a corrupt administration and boosting outright supremacists on social media. Not to the corrupt action of the fast track listing and the voting structure of SpaceX. And the fraudulent acquisition of xai and x that is basically taking from SpaceX to pay off other investors
Only their most recent explosions have been planned. Anyone who followed early Starship, and even before then, remembers how much unexpected exploding, bursting and burning it, and previous SpaceX projects, have done to get to their current level of reliability.
I agree with the sentiment, but while New Glenn is likely a more economical rocket, it doesn't even have the same payload capacity that Falcon Heavy had eight years ago. They are nowhere near a meaningful competitor yet, and if Starship actually gets up and running the mass to LEO gap between the two systems is like 5x+ with Starship aiming for full reusability while NG expends the second stage. Ofc even whimpy competition is still competition, and BO does have deep pockets.
I am not sure whether you talk about those fireworks for few minutes/hours or these quite common rocket explosions + EV fires...
Personally I don't even own a car, so don't go on me with some carbon emissions and polluting enviroment, 95% of year I use public transport (most of the time electric trams), only 1-2 a year a ride a car when visiting mother/father.
sweep up after yourself and we’re good, but if you leave your firework trash out for a week we have problems. You’ll have to watch me passive aggressively clean up after you.
I always clean up after myself, often even just to be sure water it, I became fan of fireworks just recently after Czech gov basically banned them because "think of the animals", yeah, big cities are natural animal habitat as everyone knows, especially dogs barking and shitting everywhere every single day 365 days a year, but God forbid we have once a year firework, think of the poor dogs.
Now they came up with maps where fireworks are allowed and apparently 90% of Prague is covered with beehives (you can't have firework within like 250m from beehive), it doesn't matter bees don't really care about them at all in freezing 1st January, but let's protect them and ruin fun for everyone!
You need to understand that this money is well spent, rather than going to feeding starving children or buying medicine to help solve the Ebola crisis in Africa, this is actually "better for mankind".
It makes me happy though -- to see a tax-evader adolescent Ersatz-toy fall into pieces, hopefully will delay the big ongoing tech-bro op to convert narcissism and tax dues into CO2.
There does seem to be a certain amount of failure that is necessary to be able to get it right. One would expect that number to decrease over time with each new rocket company but I don’t believe it decreases as much as each company would like to believe.
Move fast and blow things up early rather than slowly. The minimum number of explosions must be met!
> SpaceX uses the central spine of the transporter erector as a strongback, restraining the rocket, providing stability until the tanks are pressurized with fuels, and contain the fluid hoses along with power and telemetry cables. Consequently, it remains at the launch pad through the launch and is typically tilted away 1.5° from the rocket just a few minutes prior to launch and 45° away from the rocket at the moment of liftoff.
Honestly, why? I can't speak for BO, but at NASA, we're all learning what the technology can and can't do just like everyone else. You can bet your ass that no one is vibe-coding any part of the rocket without thorough review of every line of code and thorough testing at multiple levels though.
I think it can be hard for anyone who hasn't done safety-critical software before to understand just how much testing goes into it. Even for non-human spaceflight, the stakes are so high, we have all of the testing you would expect as far as unit tests, system integration tests, end to end testing, but then we also have full human in the loop software sims, full hardware in the loop sims both at multiple levels of integration, and on and on. For every line of code I've written for a spacecraft, I'm 100% confident that if that line is responsible for a bug in flight, there are at least 10 other people who would share the blame with me.
I 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.
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.
The fact that the US has multiple extremely active commercial ventures plus a vibrant government programs with launches every few days just highlights har far ahead the US has become in this area of tech. Many people have never seen a rocket launch ever and yet for a big part of the US looking up in the sky and watching the amazing sight of a rocket going through staging is just a normal Tuesday evening.
That sort of expertise and base of scientists and engineers is not something other countries can just quickly replicate. For a while it looked like the US had put space on the back burner but now it’s back and bigger than ever before.
The occasional test going boom is just part of the fun in the end.
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 incorrect procedure while loading fuel, or maybe a manufacturing error got past QC.
If they are unlucky, the cause will be a mystery, and it will take them months to nail down the root cause.
Early in Falcon 9's history, the Amos 6 satellite was stacked on the rocket during a routine static fire and the whole thing blew up. It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal". For a brief moment SpaceX suspected sabotage by rival ULA. 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 in the carbon composite pressure vessels. Friction ignited it, and the entire second stage blew up, destroying the rocket.
The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
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.
> 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 of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
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.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
> 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
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."
why
hubris
Musk is a competent manager, amazing bser, but he is not a genius.
edit: Competent manager is not a slight. There are very few competent managers these days.
I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.
Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.
The whole reason for this was because of SS's supposed strength under the heat of reentry. Yet they now need to cover the whole thing in thermal insulating tiles. So I wonder if a composite Starship would not have been a better decision?
Bandwagon-ers who parrot media/youtube/socialmedia.
Waiting to be told who to hate next.
The ad hominem destroys your ability to recognise how insanely good SpaceX and Elon are at this rocket ship thing.
Actual Nazis made a lot of stuff 75 years ago that you use and take advantage of on a daily basis. Nobody's judging you, dude. Appreciating and recognising a good scientist or businessman doesn't necessitate that you align with them ideologically.
I think it's apropos then to consider that this is the same guy who called someone who rescued children stuck in a cave a "pedo". This is a guy who has made some unfortunate public statements.
The only way to not be biased is to unthinkingly accept everything he says as truth
"Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
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 rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.
[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.
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 something nearby than to explode at the pad.
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.
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.
Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
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.
This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.
Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.
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.
I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.
Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.
This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.
For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?
I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?
Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.
The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s
Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting.
If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories.
BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.
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.
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")
for those who wondered like me!
SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)
"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?
Something like:
telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
In software development this is your average weekday.
Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s
That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first.
It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
"Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.
Also I said "intermediate and junior" engineers - meaning INexperienced engineers, not experienced ones, so you quoted me wrong in that part too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cvgz0pdg32mo
edit: the failure appears to start at the bottom, this seems to have damaged the structure enough to cause the sliding to start, then the huge fireball seems to begin with a small flash closer to the top of the rocket
Then the spacecraft structure starts falling and tilting.
Then the explosion ripples up through the core and pops out the top.
Then the massive explosion occurs due to the complete loss of fuel integrity.
It looks like the bottom fell out, and then caused the pressure to ripple up through the structure causing complete structural failure. Wild.
> I'm hearing that it is possible that Blue Origin decides to go directly to the larger 9x4 variant of New Glenn after this failure. Obviously no decisions like that will be made without more data review.
https://xcancel.com/SciGuySpace/status/2060190522539401631#m
To me it sounds like "alright, it's silly to waste time and energy on duplicate effort. Let's focus on getting this one right instead."
Boeing is pretty much out of the race at this point. Just too busy navel gazing and lobbying. There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the best things to happen to the rocket industry in decades. So, yes Blue Origin had a RUD with New Glenn. They should, learn and adapt and launch the next one. It would be good for SpaceX to have credible competition. And New Glenn seems like it could become that.
But if they only get their lessons every few years, they'll be competing against a fully reusable Starship rather than Falcon 9 & Falcon heavy by the time this thing becomes a serious launch vehicle. The goal posts are moving.
This was routine pre-launch testing, not a launch attempt.
In terms of application its the same amount of energy going into the rocket in either case.
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.
I guess I am just not that bothered, because I don't assume American intentions are inherently better.
Any human space exploration is good. If it's a usa or a China rocket, landing on the moon, with humans in it, and safely returning, it's good.
The successful manned moon landings so far:
1. United States of America
2. United States of America
3. United States of America
4. United States of America
5. United States of America
6. United States of America
Now we're watching a riveting race for 7th place.
The Moon landing race was a new race.
Now the Back to the Moon race is a different one altogether.
> There's a big risk that the next person on the moon might be from China.
China seems to be focused more on pragmatic things and less on super expensive vanity projects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
There was no fatal launch failure for Apollo & pad explosion would be a problem with just 2 pads available.
There were a couple Saturn V stage explosions during testing but again - those damaged test stands, not the pad.
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.
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 Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/space/china-space...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/05/china/china-shenzhou-20-a...
Why are landing strips the big unlock? Blast effects? Tiny landing legs?
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
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.
Rough estimates? Mass drivers make sense. I haven’t seen the numbers for just compressing and leveling regolith.
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.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
I have only armchair amateur half a world away knowledge of this, but I want to believe all they need is an exhaust diffuser thingy and refueling capabilities; the former can probably be built cheap enough anywhere, the latter can be made portable.
(of course then you also have the challenge of assembling and loading a rocket, lmao. But a hub-and-spokes setup with VAB(s) and launch sites spread out around it like an airport could work. Bonus evil villain points if the launch sites are underground to contain explosions in case of failure.
(this post is just imagination / castles in the sky)
But it is cadence that drives SpaceX to have multiple launchpads plus specialized capabilities and orbital dynamics for F9.
Very unfortunate all around. I hope BO finds a way to keep the timelines.
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...
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 a less risky critical path. The rocket was already orbital, fewer refueling flights were needed, the engines weren't pushing the limits of materials technology, no reusable heat shield to worry about.
Though, ultimately it's worth keeping in mind that the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell.
Source? (Not doubting, and it sounds vaguely familiar.)
> the landers aren't actually the current bottleneck in the program. The space suits are in total development hell
The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction. (Hell, even without HLS you can ship nuclear power stations and solar panels and rovers.)
It seems to point to rising costs on SpaceX's end, and in my reading, is very critical of them compared to BO.
>The neat thing about Artemis is it’s pushing so many boundaries that it’s reasonable to debate the actual bottlenecks. I still think launch is it, since even without spacesuits you can do robotic construction
I believe that suits are still important because you can't really do much with a crew there without them. There aren't even new EVA suits available. And, of course politically, it's going to be seen very poorly if they can't do a "One small step for a man..." moment.
The US simply hasn't been able to bring new spacesuits into use for a long time, every single time, the costs and timelines have spiraled. Probably because a lot of the knowledge has been lost to old age, and the new guys need some time to relearn those lessons and improve on them.
The plans for Artemis are public, and they don't include any robotic construction before a manned landing.
Neveemind that the idea of a moon base is fanciful, I think it's very unlikely to happen in anything resembling current world climate.
They also change every time a Congressional staffer sneezes. If the space suits don’t work, a pivot would be easier than having the space suits with no rocket to put them on.
I really don't think there's anything particularly derisked about NG + Blue Moon 2 compared to Starship HLS.
The explosion happened at their only completed pad.
They reportedly have a second pad under construction (for the larger "9x4" variant of New Glenn) but I've not seen a lot of detail about how far along it is.
Would not be surprised to see them accelerating construction of the new pad.
Right now it seems like it's Axiom or bust, with their suits. The suits have missed a lot of milestones, and there's not much point in going to the Moon without suits. Latest NASA OIG report put them somewhere in the 2030s at best...
Also the ISS suits themselves are being replaced, by Axiom, because they are failing in near-fatal ways periodically.
And if you're wondering why they might use water for this well... water will be abundant and basically every habitat will have a municipal water hookup. A moon base might quickly find itself with several hectares of water and no where to put it. Might even end up injecting it into the ground where the water will be able to maintain it's liquid state (moon crust quickly reaches room temperature only a few dozens of meters underground).
https://techport.nasa.gov/projects/118526
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 unattractive. If SpaceX wants to compete they will need to build a dedicated cislunar vehicle.
https://youtu.be/IlQkeKa4IKg?si=nu-0D73-7hNg6jW3
The village is pretty much gone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTFgZ9zl74
There is some VHS footage on YouTube surreptitiously shot by Americans on-site supporting the payload which became a guerrilla documentary.
The village was annihilated but the official number from the CCP was 6 dead.
6.
The Chinese government say very few were killed. But personally, my position is that the guys who routinely publish their embarrassing-seeming failures are quite believable (the US publishes that their planes fall off their carriers) and those who say they're perfect are probably lying. So I don't believe their numbers.
The first atomic bomb had yield of 20 kt TNT, of which about half was in heat, and the rest in the blast and radiation.
Depending on how full the rocket tank actually was, the fireball from the rocket explosion was in the same ballpark, or possibly even larger in the size and duration of afterglow compared to that from the Trinity nuclear test.
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.
This serves as a basis of comparison for this deflagration. If we are considering specifically the appearance of the late fireball, the heat output is the relevant figure of merit.
Assuming about 10-15% of the total bomb energy remained in the heat of the late fireball (with the rest spent on the blast wave, peak thermal radiation and neutron/gamma radiation), the fireball of this rocket deflagration could have exceeded the late fireball from the bomb. But this assumes the tanks were fully filled, which we do not know yet.
It's still a big boom, but not anywhere close to what world occur with optional mixing.
Everyone can be glad though that no hypergolics are involved at least!
Well, only a little bit - they do use hypergolic ignition.
The energy of the detonation wave in rocket explosions is typically 1-2% of the energy in the fuel, at least that is the ballpark of what people use for estimating the effects of mishaps.
We also do not know if the tanks were fully filled -- it the past, rocket companies have called 10 second static fire tests a "full duration static fire test." We will probably find out later what it actually was meant to be.
The question was whether during this test the stage was loaded with the same amount of fuel as for an actual flight, or only a small fraction of that.
You fire the rocket as if it’s going to space, but you keep it on the pad. (From the engine’s perspective, it did a full launch.)
If clamped down, it’s a full-duration static fire. If clamps release, it goes to space. Basically, if the engine can’t tell (apart from atmosphere, which is a big apart) it isn’t going to space, it’s a FDSF. It’s a whole-engine show. If you’re running parts through a full duty cycle, that can be done in a lab (or on a stand).
Some reports say that this means "running all seven BE-4 engines at full thrust for up to 38 seconds".
In flight the engines fire for 190 seconds.
So what the full duration means, and whether they fill the tanks with just enough fuel for the firing, or with a larger amount to help the clamps to hold the stage down, all this we will probably only find out from the investigation, if the results are ever published.
(on that note it's also amazing that these exploding bolts are so reliable, I can imagine even a single one not releasing would cause... Issues)
The heat from combustion of this amount would be about 3.4 kt, which is roughly the same as the heat in the late fireball of the Trinity test.
The mushroom cloud from the New Glenn explosion was also substantial: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7uPVjsB5n453SJA7
The exploded one was about 15-story building.
This has happened before on the Soyuz in 1983[1], hitting up to 17 Gs, and everyone was fine, modulo some bruising.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No.16L
*correction: Vac raptors can run at sea level in a test stand. Still doubtful that its safe/reliable and in either case it would still be far too slow.
[1] Note that the first G of acceleration is combating gravity, so Starship at e.g. 1.25Gs would accelerate away from the explosion at 1/20th the rate of Dragon v2.
[2]https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/how-do-the-g-...
EDIT: Everyone is fine [1]. Go ahead and make jokes.
[1] https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2060172114796204539?s=20
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-starship-upper-stage-exp...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg
> The percent propellant has huge implications on the ease of fabrication and robustness in achieving the engineering design (and cost). If a vehicle is less than 10% propellant, it is typically made from billets of steel. Changes to its structure are readily done without engineering analysis; you simple weld on another hunk of steel to reinforce the frame according to what your intuition might say. I can easily overload my ¾ ton pickup by a factor of two. It might be moving slowly but it is hauling the load.
> Once the vehicles become airborne, the engineering becomes more serious. Light weight structures made of aluminum, magnesium, titanium, epoxy-graphite composites are the norm. To alter the structure takes significant engineering; one does not simply weld on another chunk to your airframe if you want to live (or drill a hole through some convenient section). These vehicles cannot operate far from their designed limits; overloading an airplane by a factor of two results in disaster. Even though these vehicles are 30 to 40% propellant (60 to 70% structure and payload), there is room for engineering to comfortably operate thus there is a robust, safe, and cost effective aviation industry.
> Rockets at 85% propellant and 15% structure and payload are on the extreme edge of our engineering ability to even fabricate (and to pay for!). They require constant engineering to keep flying. The seemingly smallest modifications require monumental analysis and testing of prototypes in vacuum chambers, shaker tables, and sometimes test launches in desert regions. Typical margins in structural design are 40%. Often, testing and analysis are only taken to 10% above the designed limit. For a Space Shuttle launch, 3 g’s are the designed limit of acceleration. The stack has been certified (meaning tested to the point that we know it will keep working) to 3.3 g’s. This operation has a 10% envelope for error. Imagine driving your car at 60 mph and then drifting to 66 mph, only to have your car self-destruct. This is life riding rockets, compliments of the rocket equation.
Might that make an air-launched system more reliable? Even if it's less efficient, the TCO would be lower using a winged system for the initial phases of launch.
- Hanging under-wing is a totally different set of forces than standing vertically, especially for a big rocket with thin walls. You're more like a bridge than a tower, or rather like a bridge one moment and then a tower the next. You need reinforcement for that, which makes the vehicle heavier.
- Modern reusable rockets do quick "load and go" filling to keep their propellant as cold and dense as possible. You can't do that if you need to fuel on the ground and then hang off an airplane for ~an hour while it climbs.
There's no future in this idea outside of small sat, and probably not even there.
But that's how a lot of the X projects were / are done.
Thanks for the link.
Roughly put, the rocket equation is: change in speed = (engine efficiency) * log(mass of the rocket with fuel / mass of the rocket without fuel). So there's limited parameters to play with:
- The speed you need to reach is fixed.
- You can change the weight of the payload. Payload (eg, satellite) designers try to make things as light as possible, rocket designers try to give as much capacity as possible, and everyone prays they can meet in the middle.
- You want as little propellant as possible for cost and practicality, but mostly the other parameters fix how much you need. If the other parameters aren't good enough, you can easily get results like needing a rocket the size of Central Park. [1]
- You can make the engine more efficient. This means running it hotter with higher pressure, pushing the limits of material science. [2]
- You can make the non-payload static parts of the rocket lighter. This means removing structural integrity. It also means making the lightest parts to complete hard tasks like being a valve for cryogenically cooled, literally the smallest element, hydrogen.
Both the engine and non-payload static mass are essentially asking the question "How far can I push this without it breaking". Get your answer to that question even slightly wrong on any of the thousands parts in a rocket, and suddenly all of the fuel that you're using to go in one direction fast decide that you should instead go in every direction fast.
[1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/24/
[2] Or not using chemical propulsion. However things like ion engines don't have enough thrust to get through the atmosphere and into orbit, and things like nuclear propulsion spew fallout everywhere.
It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
I will let John Young explain it his way;
As an aside, if you've never heard of John Young, I recommend learning a bit about him. He was an incredible person. And that statement is very funny in his voice; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KezwDfFcFhUHe test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4
(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.
We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.
The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
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 rocket safety.
> hey are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity
They are not. It is at best marketing speech. The access to space is at best cheaper but will never be commodity.
The parent post is right on point: Rockets todays are still fundamentally the same giant bomb filled at 85% with explosive that we were making in the 60s. And this is unlikely to change and unlikely to ever be safe.
There is very valid reasons to that: we still did not find anything better than chemical propulsion to go in the last 80 years. It is the only 'working' solution in term of the energy density required to bring us there:
- Ion thrusters have amazing Isp but nowhere the Thrust/Weight ratio required to launch from Earth.
- Nuclear propulsion is good on paper but controversial in practice for pretty obvious reasons.
So we are still stuck. Stuck with burning 1'000t of highly inflammable Ergols in few minutes to just push any blob in orbit. With very thin engineering margins, way thiner than in airplane manufacturing or currently pretty any other domain.
And that make it unlikely to ever be really "safe" and accessible to the mass.
At least, not before we find a better solution to the problem.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBar3FyI_cA
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP6k18DVdg
> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago
One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.
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.
Falcon has an accident rate of 2/640.
Airlines are about ~1.3 / 10^6
Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world is going right now.
Physics research, and generally speaking fundamental research, is publicly funded.
Meaning, most of the time, under funded.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two
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.
The kinetic and potential energy of a 1 kg mass in orbit is around 33 MJ. The chemical energy of 1 kg of methane+oxygen propellant is only about 11 MJ.
Alternately, perfectly combusted methane-oxygen propellant has an exit velocity of around 3500 m/s. But you need about 7800 m/s to get into orbit.
Chemical energy is just very weak compared to the energy of things in orbit. It's really shocking that we can do it at all.
The result of this is that your vehicle is going to be almost entirely propellant. You simply can't just build a big, beefy rocket that's, say, only half propellant, with lots of extra safety margin for things that go wrong. Cars and bridges and things have immense margins. Airplanes, a bit less so, but still more than rockets. Rockets live right on the edge of what's possible, and as long as we use chemical thrust it'll always be that way.
Which isn't to say that rockets won't get more reliable. The Falcon 9 has had hundreds of flights since the last failure, and it isn't as optimized as it could be. But there will be a lot more failures before we get there.
Have you seen how many issues race cars have? Same shit. It goes on and on.
Which is often fine, but sometimes isn't.
AI is the fentanyl to JavaScript bootcamp heroin.
There isn't an actual diverse ecosystem of most consumer software, just a monoculture of largely undifferentiated clones.
Not really. Rocketry is hard.
You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.
Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
Which is tough with rockets.
Definitely unexpected from BO, knowing that everyone is okay, I feel for their engineers right now.
Honestly we’re really good at not prematurely combining tens to hundreds of tons of high-energy fuel and oxidizer put right next to each other and then combining them at several tons per second in a highly controlled way using a very complex system of plumbing and turbopumps powered by the same reagents.
Given that it’s just barely possible, you can’t just make things twice as strong as you think you’d need to, just in case something unexpected happens. Anyhow when something moderately unexpected happens, that means you may get a giant fireball like we saw today.
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.
Here's a 1hr video from the Everyday Astronaut explaining the process and everything that can go wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I
What you refer to as the rocket, meaning the tube itself isn't failing. It's just that a big explosion will treat it apart
Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.
Not really. The performance metrics on rocket engines are utterly insane.
The jet kinetic power of a Merlin 1D engine at sea level is 1.3 GW. The work output of a nuclear power plant in a device weighing half a ton and costing maybe $400K.
Until very recently they were basically all custom with extreme tolerance requirements and absolute specifications. Nobody could have an "off day" on a single bolt, hose, nut, screw, wiring harness, etc.
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 vaporize, possibly resulting in a different damage pattern on the pad.
Rocket science is hard, and rocket physics are unforgiving. If the planet was just a little bit heavier, we would not be able to leave it with chemical rockets at all.
Unless you're talking about moon landers specifically.
Anyway, competition is good and this is a bummer.
Sure we’re playing the same game, but the divide is enormous
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/spacexs-...
Vastly different destroying each of those.
The fact they did it with pinpoint accuracy even with engine issues and an in tact heat shield is a monumental success for a test flight.
For BO it’s much better to have this now when there is no payload or people on board so they can correct whatever the issue is.
I know a WDR typically would, but I don't think they perform an ignition for those.
Test fires with a near-empty rocket would put considerably more force on the pad's hold-downs and the corresponding parts of the rocket's structure.
Blue also had a fuelled 2nd stage on top of the booster for the static fire, which is not out of the ordinary.
SpaceX has a "cap" that is held down with cables that it uses when it needs to test-fire a first stage by itself at its McGregor test site; static fires at launch sites are usually done with the 2nd stage on top.
If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].
The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
[2] https://www.unionfab.com/blog/2024/03/yield-strength-of-stee...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
[4] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xab20qa
Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is only apparent when everything is pressurized correctly, which means tanks have to be full. The goal of the test is that you detect that sort of failure before it goes boom and then can fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ is a video of SpaceX's failure.
Quoting from one of the press releases:
"The recovered COPVs showed buckles in their liners. Although buckles were not shown to burst a COPV on their own, investigators concluded that super chilled LOX can pool in these buckles under the overwrap. When pressurized, oxygen pooled in this buckle can become trapped; in turn, breaking fibers or friction can ignite the oxygen in the overwrap, causing the COPV to fail. In addition, investigators determined that the loading temperature of the helium was cold enough to create solid oxygen (SOX), which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen becoming trapped as well as the likelihood of friction ignition.
"The investigation team identified several credible causes for the COPV failure, all of which involve accumulation of super chilled LOX or SOX in buckles under the overwrap."
https://web.archive.org/web/20170216160231/http://www.spacex...
Edit: yes it was https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
>Externally, they sent the site director for their Florida operations, Ricky Lim, to inquire whether he might visit the roof of the United Launch Alliance building... ULA told SpaceX’s Ricky Lim to get lost when he wanted to see the roof of their building in Florida.
The FAA letter:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Space...
Man, the signs were always there, right? I think I only fully realized it in 2018 during the cave "incident".
There's another comment that it wasn't the weld but even if it was the welders would build to spec and "better" (if it's known what better is) only if it's straightforward. There are certainly scenarios where a fabricator could design a better jig or use a more precise process but if the spec doesn't call for it then it's probably not going to happen because there are also the dimensions of time and money that matter as well.
You've got two large tanks making up the bulk of the stage's structure - one for oxidizer, one for fuel. They have large diameter pipes that feed propellant to the engines. You can't mix the ballast with either the oxidizer or fuel, and you can't feed the engines from anywhere but the propellant tanks...
Doing so risks having to write so much database logic — with all the potential for getting that code buggy as well — that it’s often better to avoid the mock and test the entire system, end-to-end.
This was an end-to-end rocket test.
It is amazing that this doesn't happen more often.
https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...
(Elon’s strategy of blowing up smaller versions of their rockets more or less deliberately doesn’t sound so insane in the light of this.)
There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.
- Test commences prematurely when people are still around
- Test is aborted partway through but then spontaneously resumes when people have started coming back
- Error in design or failure of hold-down structure turns static fire into dynamic fire, moving fire to where people are
These are unlikely, of course, but they are the things we have to seriously think about and try to design out of the system in order to create safe systems.
True. And yet it is not without precedent.
Scaled Composites had an explosion while performing a cold flow test of SpaceShipTwo’s engine which killed 3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-27-me-explo...
https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/01/spacex-rocket-and-isra...
That was a full size rocket on a real mission with the $200M payload on board during the static fire, which is ostensibly worse. The payload was not integrated yet in Blue Origin’s case.
Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.
Interesting that just 2 days ago NASA picked Blue Origin instead of SpaceX for this year Moon flights.
On a sidenote, one can wonder how much, giving coming SpaceX IPO, it costs for Bezos to hire a Starship engineer :)
> It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.
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 rockets.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JP_Aerospace#Airship_to_Orbit_...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinLaunch
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
7. https://www.gassend.net/publications/FateOfABrokenSpaceEleva...
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
As an aside, that acronym is something you would expect out of Musk and yet Blue Origin sort of accidentally got it themselves.
Another angle: https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696...
I saw this at Google and it’s what will happen to SpaceX (already starting with Starlink pricing) if there isn’t someone to keep the competitive pressure on.
Was this an expected outcome? It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ve not really investigated it deeply.
Personally I don't even own a car, so don't go on me with some carbon emissions and polluting enviroment, 95% of year I use public transport (most of the time electric trams), only 1-2 a year a ride a car when visiting mother/father.
Now they came up with maps where fireworks are allowed and apparently 90% of Prague is covered with beehives (you can't have firework within like 250m from beehive), it doesn't matter bees don't really care about them at all in freezing 1st January, but let's protect them and ruin fun for everyone!
imagine if they stopped financing it for one year and used all those finances to finance for instance cancer research
or maybe for starters they could just stop supporting genocidal regimes killing thousands of children, that would be pretty cheap
We would be doing it
It makes me happy though -- to see a tax-evader adolescent Ersatz-toy fall into pieces, hopefully will delay the big ongoing tech-bro op to convert narcissism and tax dues into CO2.
Move fast and blow things up early rather than slowly. The minimum number of explosions must be met!
My first thought is why wasn't the t-e moved away before launch?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C87e9x0tLix/
You can see them disconnect in the video I linked.
SpaceX does similar; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_erector / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_erector_launcher
> SpaceX uses the central spine of the transporter erector as a strongback, restraining the rocket, providing stability until the tanks are pressurized with fuels, and contain the fluid hoses along with power and telemetry cables. Consequently, it remains at the launch pad through the launch and is typically tilted away 1.5° from the rocket just a few minutes prior to launch and 45° away from the rocket at the moment of liftoff.
The Shuttle's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_launcher_platform played a similar dual role.
OP, one must show respect to the scattered remnants of rocket debris.
Sorry, hadn’t seen that confirmed yet.
For comparison, the N-1 rocket explosion was around 0.5 kilotons of TNT.
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.
The fact that the US has multiple extremely active commercial ventures plus a vibrant government programs with launches every few days just highlights har far ahead the US has become in this area of tech. Many people have never seen a rocket launch ever and yet for a big part of the US looking up in the sky and watching the amazing sight of a rocket going through staging is just a normal Tuesday evening.
That sort of expertise and base of scientists and engineers is not something other countries can just quickly replicate. For a while it looked like the US had put space on the back burner but now it’s back and bigger than ever before.
The occasional test going boom is just part of the fun in the end.
China maybe soon, but the EU is not close.
Ariane 6 is in no way comparable to either SLS or Starship or New Glenn. It does 10t to low-earth orbit, 4t to lunar-transfer orbit.