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

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...

> 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

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.

"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."

for those who wondered like me!

I'm not sure if I would call the vanity project of one of the richest people on earth an "underdog".

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.

How does one even go about finding a root cause so exotic?

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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.

Eric Berger of Ars Technica:

> 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

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.

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)

> Blue origin was _just_ selected to be the first moon lander mission

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...

Or the Long March destroying an entire rural village which was covered up by the CCP.

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")

https://web.archive.org/web/20120503175355/https://www.nasa....

> 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.

I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself;

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.)

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I

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. 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...

You know what they say, nature abhors colossal tanks of high-explosive.

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.

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.

aerospace is operating at the absolute limit of what can be asked of known materials science

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

The mass produced rockets explode very infrequently

I'm more surprised that they work at all.

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.

> TNT equivalent is defined as 4.2 MJ/kg.

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 methane is not mixed with oxygen when it's still in the rocket tank, so it can't all explode - most of it will just burn off.

It's still a big boom, but not anywhere close to what world occur with optional mixing.

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.

> not clear what "full duration static fire" means

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.)

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.

The mushroom cloud from the New Glenn explosion was also substantial: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7uPVjsB5n453SJA7

the video is available, it's a large explosion, but nowhere near a trinity mushroom cloud

Achievements of SpaceX are enormous. But is US actually far ahead? Both China and EU have pretty much the same capabilities for space exploration.

Don't worry we've solved this problem. It's called a LES.

That was at the separate upper stage test stand. SpaceX built and mounted a temporary replacement on the main test and launch stand.

The major difference is that this is currently the only New Glenn launchpad, which is likely to cause major launch delays.

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.

Expectations are shifted with experience in all areas of human activities.

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.

Blue Origin is challenging SpaceX - they are not the incumbent. I'm not sure how you can say that SpaceX will increase dominance despite this.

it'll probably be a favorable event for SpaceX's IPO.

Technically I think this was a Rapid Tank Emptying. RUD implies launch.

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!

Blue’s TEL is part of the launch pad. You can see it retract in some of the explosion videos.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C87e9x0tLix/

It was a static fire, not a launch. Also means that payload was not lost as out wasn’t yet integrated

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ is a video of SpaceX's failure.

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.

Isn’t that the point of the test fire? To find out if there’s a problem that will make it go boom

I'd say on a scale of bad 1-10, 9 and 10 are reserved for incidents that cause loss of human life. YMMV.

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.

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.

I won't forget that a bold trio went out to the pad during the Artemis I countdown to tighten some bolts for the launch: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis-red-crew-team-h...

Air balloon

https://xcancel.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696...

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

Pad. And one of the lightning protection towers. And the transporter-erector.

B.O.N.G goes up in smoke.

As an aside, that acronym is something you would expect out of Musk and yet Blue Origin sort of accidentally got it themselves.

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.

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...

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.

> rein in? You don't like going to space? What do you have against progress?

SpaceX had to blow up plenty to get to where they are.

Might not be that bad for the environment but holy hell does it turn air quality to shit the next day.

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.

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".

There is always Starship.

That "Another angle" truly is spectacular.

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It's a zero sum game. It all comes from the earth

> There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel.

We would be doing it

Space elevators!

This is a fair question on its own. It comes across as pretty disrespectful within the context of the thread.

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.

The suggestion being that some software here was vibe coded??