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

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.

SilverElfin2• 2 months ago

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

thot_experiment• 2 months ago

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.

panick21_9• 2 months ago

That New Glenn is more economical then Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy is a huge assumption and I will only believe it when I see it.

New Glenn is an incredibly large incredibly complex rocket with very, very complex and expensive engines. And both things are produced at rates much, much lower then Falcon Heavy.

Not to mention how optimized they are for reused and the fixed cost being split between launches.

d_silin2• 2 months ago

Very unfortunate, but strategically this changes nothing for US spaceflight. If anything, SpaceX will continue to increase its dominance.

ezfe5• 2 months ago

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.

d_silin2• 2 months ago

SpaceX will increase the lead from all potential competitors even further.

Rover2229• 2 months ago

Please look at total mass launched to space by SpaceX vs the rest of the world combined. They are the most incumbent launcher in history.

Unless you're talking about moon landers specifically.

Anyway, competition is good and this is a bummer.

nickvec• 2 months ago

One can be the dominant player in a field and still increase dominance.

testing223214• 2 months ago

Blue Origin are challenging SpaceX about as much as I’m challenging Michael Jordan.

Sure we’re playing the same game, but the divide is enormous

0xffff23• 2 months ago

Unless the comment was edited, the person you replied to never said anything about "despite"?

senectus12• 2 months ago

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

7e2• 2 months ago

Surely not as favorable for the IPO as SpaceX’s own recent explosion and multiple engine failures?

RattlesnakeJake• 2 months ago

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.

MPSimmons2• 2 months ago

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.

m4rtink8• 2 months ago

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.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

NSF live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA

boredatoms• 2 months ago

Thats a very impressive bang

jleyank• 2 months ago

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…

ebiederm• 2 months ago

Hooray! A static test fire caught a problem.

Crap! There was a serious latent problem for the test fire to find.

7e2• 2 months ago

IPO must be in the works!

generuso6• 2 months ago

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.

Rover2229• 2 months ago

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

pantalaimon• 2 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

The side of the rocket failing appears to have allowed a lot of that mixing to occur after the initial fire.

gjrq2• 2 months ago

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.

debatem1• 2 months ago

how did you compute that?

_moof4• 2 months ago

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.

generuso6• 2 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

A test campaign that’s about to get a large amount of real world data.

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

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.)

generuso6• 2 months ago

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.

kadoban• 2 months ago

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.

_moof4• 2 months ago

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).

Cthulhu_3• 2 months ago

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)

generuso6• 2 months ago

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

kortilla3• 2 months ago

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.

mattas• 2 months ago

Would be really curious to learn more about how rocket scientists are using (or not using) LLMs.

khazhoux• 2 months ago

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

decimalenough2• 2 months ago

That's how rocket science works right? Just vibe code the control systems over the weekend and YOLO the launches.

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

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

riffic• 2 months ago

no one died, relax

OP, one must show respect to the scattered remnants of rocket debris.

0xffff23• 2 months ago

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.

hparadiz9• 2 months ago

As long as the thorough reviews are done that is 100% reasonable.

arjie4• 2 months ago

Tragic. But spaceflight isn't easy. Easy to have your expectations shifted as a watching fan after so many successful launches in recent times.

avmich3• 2 months ago

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

busymom0• 2 months ago

Looks even crazier in this angle:

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2060174287563116696/video...

lorenzohess3• 2 months ago

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

decimalenough2• 2 months ago

On the upside (or maybe that's tightly bolted down side), at least the rocket stayed static, unlike this one in China:

https://youtu.be/IlQkeKa4IKg?si=nu-0D73-7hNg6jW3

dylan604• 2 months ago

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")

866-RON-0-FEZ2• 2 months ago

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

mrcwinn• 2 months ago

That rocket appears to have crashed into an open plain. It was a village?

dgrin91• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

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...

hgoel13• 2 months ago

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.

_moof4• 2 months ago

They blew up LC-36.

NitpickLawyer2• 2 months ago

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...

Polizeiposaune4• 2 months ago

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.

imtringued• 2 months ago

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.

hgoel13• 2 months ago

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).

frakkingcylons• 2 months ago

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

justinhj• 2 months ago

https://x.com/sawyermerritt/status/2060174287563116696?s=46&...

bombcar2• 2 months ago

I know it's not, but darned if that doesn't sound like "it exploded real big, so build a bigger one!"

wongarsu4• 2 months ago

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

HerbManic6• 2 months ago

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.

hgoel13• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

the winners will merely be those

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

jillesvangurp3• 2 months ago

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.

hgoel13• 2 months ago

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.

mongol• 2 months ago

What were the high profile failures in the Apollo program that proves your point?

watwut• 2 months ago

Boeing issue was that they in fact took the risks so that they move faster and cheaper.

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.

rhubarbtree2• 2 months ago

Is there any reason to doubt that the Chinese will get (back) there first?

Hugsbox4• 2 months ago

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?

Rover2229• 2 months ago

Nah, failures that destroy the launch pad are just bad, any way you try to slice it.

harimau777• 2 months ago

That's easy to say if you aren't the one getting space junk dumped on you when a rocket explodes.

Voultapher• 2 months ago

Based on operating experience and outlook, Rocketlab shouldn't be forgotten on that list. Launch cadence is the driving factor for revenue and profit for these companies' launch division.

Cthulhu_3• 2 months ago

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)

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

Did they blow up a pad? Or just a test stand?

EDIT: Oh crap, they took out a launch complex.

SAI_Peregrinus3• 2 months ago

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

brcmthrowaway2• 2 months ago

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

GolfPopper• 2 months ago

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...

perilunar3• 2 months ago

Big magnets. [8]

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

lorenzohess3• 2 months ago

https://xcancel.com/nasaspaceflight/status/20601649284728548...

lorenzohess3• 2 months ago

Video: https://xcancel.com/nasaspaceflight/status/20601649284728548...

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

jdnier• 2 months ago

That "Another angle" truly is spectacular.

thrdbndndn• 2 months ago

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?

JumpCrisscross15• 2 months ago

Have we confirmed nobody was hurt?

EDIT: Everyone is fine [1]. Go ahead and make jokes.

[1] https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2060172114796204539?s=20

rdtsc3• 2 months ago

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.

weare138• 2 months ago

Blew Origin

HerbManic6• 2 months ago

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.

heohk• 2 months ago

Static fire more like dynamic fire

a1371• 2 months ago

It looks like the explosion starts from the second stage

hathym• 2 months ago

Air balloon

Markoff6• 2 months ago

I will remember this when someone tells me how my little fireworks once a year is bad for environment.

onionisafruit• 2 months ago

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.

Markoff6• 2 months ago

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!

bamboozled• 2 months ago

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".

Markoff6• 2 months ago

and wait till you see US national defense budget :-))

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

russdill2• 2 months ago

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

Markoff6• 2 months ago

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.

anotherevan• 2 months ago

Also known as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly in engineer speak.

bombcar2• 2 months ago

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

avmich3• 2 months ago

I don't think RUD implies launch. It can happen with an engine alone, without rocket.

brcmthrowaway2• 2 months ago

There's got to be better way than burning a shittonne of fuel. Anyone else know?

esseph2• 2 months ago

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

We would be doing it

jeffrallen2• 2 months ago

Space elevators!

gosub100• 2 months ago

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

mholt• 2 months ago

Is it normal to load ALL the propellant when doing a static fire? (I presume that's the case, anyway, given the sheer magnitude of the kaboom.)

I know a WDR typically would, but I don't think they perform an ignition for those.

trollbridge• 2 months ago

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

hvb22• 2 months ago

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.

mandevil• 2 months ago

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.

appplication• 2 months ago

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.

Polizeiposaune4• 2 months ago

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."

https://web.archive.org/web/20170216160231/http://www.spacex...

overfeed• 2 months ago

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.

Edit: yes it was https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...

Buttons840• 2 months ago

How do they determine the cause of failure in a things like this?

oconnor6635• 2 months ago

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.

angled• 2 months ago

Why use fuel, though? Is there something about its specific density and weight distribution that rules out using other types of ballast?

HarHarVeryFunny3• 2 months ago

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.

Polizeiposaune4• 2 months ago

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.

kqr2• 2 months ago

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.

m4rtink8• 2 months ago

It is also more realistic to do it fully loaded - very different forces are acting on a rocket based on how much propellant is loaded.

HardCodedBias• 2 months ago

There are massive machines filled with reactants under high pressure and cryogenic temperatures.

It is amazing that this doesn't happen more often.

anonymars• 2 months ago

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...

alexissantos• 2 months ago

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!

userbinator2• 2 months ago

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg

xeonmc• 2 months ago

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

HerbManic6• 2 months ago

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.

bolangi• 2 months ago

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.

l1tany11• 2 months ago

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.

gorgoiler2• 2 months ago

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.

pfdietz3• 2 months ago

I believe the safety factors in Falcon 9 are 1.4. NASA credited SpaceX with using safety factors larger than normal for aerospace.

hvb22• 2 months ago

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

mmustapic• 2 months ago

BE-4, this rocket’s engine, is not a full flow engine.

sobellian• 2 months ago

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

oconnor6635• 2 months ago

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.

rramadass• 2 months ago

Nice and to the point.

Thanks for the link.

kitd• 2 months ago

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.

Laremere2• 2 months ago

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.

[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.

freetime2• 2 months ago

I'm more surprised that they work at all.

areoform3• 2 months ago

I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / 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.)

stringfood2• 2 months ago

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

userbinator2• 2 months ago

and the forces involved here are genuinely new

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.

worldsavior• 2 months ago

"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?

makerofthings• 2 months ago

We might well be the most advanced species in the universe. Seems unlikely, but we really don’t have anything else to measure against at the moment.

Sharlin• 2 months ago

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.

cameldrv• 2 months ago

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.

esseph2• 2 months ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 months ago

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.

atmavatar• 2 months ago

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...

petesergeant• 2 months ago

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.

roer• 2 months ago

The mass produced rockets explode very infrequently

AdamN3• 2 months ago

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.

SyzygyRhythm• 2 months ago

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.

rhubarbtree2• 2 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

Plenty have thought about it - the physics doesn’t close.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 2 months ago

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

pfdietz3• 2 months ago

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.

mr_toad6• 2 months ago

Airports see more traffic every day than spaceports have seen ever, in all of history. So it’s partly just down to constant repetition and experience.

mrguyorama• 2 months ago

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.

GMoromisato5• 2 months ago

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

I feel for the engineers. They have been the underdogs for so long, but with the recent successful recovery of the New Glenn booster, it finally seemed like they had some bragging rights. Now they're looking at a year minimum before they get back to a regular launch rhythm.

The question now is: What went wrong? If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake. Maybe an 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.

domlebo702• 2 months ago

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

elzbardico• 2 months ago

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.

hackeraccount2• 2 months ago

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.

wahern• 2 months ago

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.

jeffrallen2• 2 months ago

Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.

locknitpicker2• 2 months ago

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?

lunar_mycroft4• 2 months ago

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).

bob1029• 2 months ago

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.

brookst5• 2 months ago

Risk aversion is very risky.

deepsun• 2 months ago

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.

steve19775• 2 months ago

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.

AdamN3• 2 months ago

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.

imglorp• 2 months ago

BO was founded in 2000 and has about 2 orbital launches with a partly reusable system. They build rockets.

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.

brookst5• 2 months ago

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…)

Rover2229• 2 months ago

Calling Blue Origin a vanity project is so ridiculous.

xethos2• 2 months ago

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

infinitewars• 2 months ago

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.

coarise• 2 months ago

feels very Elon

why

christophilus• 2 months ago

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.”

pwillia7• 2 months ago

Relevant WKUK sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpC_hO15IoA

ClarityJones• 2 months ago

We hear about how dealing with liquid oxygen is hard. I don't know that we hear about industrial sabotage.

energy123• 2 months ago

You're assuming "before" when it's probably "investigate 100 possible causes in parallel".

SoftTalker• 2 months ago

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.

aubanel• 2 months ago

"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!

MPSimmons2• 2 months ago

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...

Jackson__• 2 months ago

No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...

giancarlostoro3• 2 months ago

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.

Rebelgecko2• 2 months ago

It happened so fast that there were only a few bits of telemetry between "everything normal" and "no signal".

SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)

GMoromisato5• 2 months ago

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

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

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

chasd002• 2 months ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaR6yEE-Myo&t=128s

hulitu• 2 months ago

This is a crushing setback for Blue Origin.

For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s

GMoromisato5• 2 months ago

The difference is the 'U' in Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Blue Origin just had an "unscheduled" disassembly, whereas the latest Starship explosion in the Indian Ocean was "scheduled"--it was meant to happen that way and no one was surprised.

galkk• 2 months ago

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".

The exploded one was about 15-story building.

AustinDev3• 2 months ago

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

protocolture2• 2 months ago

So uh those Artemis commitments huh.

AustinDev3• 2 months ago

There is always Starship.

protocolture2• 2 months ago

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.

baq2• 2 months ago

On the scale of bad 1-10 where 10 is the absolutely worst case this is a 12 easily.

(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.)

perlgeek• 2 months ago

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

AustinDev3• 2 months ago

Loss of human life in a static fire is criminal. Why would anyone be that close?

There was no loss of life in this static fire failure.

logicallee• 2 months ago

yeah if you want to put it in the best light in terms of 9/11's this is zero 9/11's of casualties. Not how I'd judge it.

dlcarrier• 2 months ago

The Plainly Difficult channel on YouTube reserves 1 and 2 for incidents that don't cause loss of human life.

contactlight11• 2 months ago

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.

panick21_9• 2 months ago

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.

raverbashing• 2 months ago

And if anyone is curious what is N1?

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.

adrian_b• 2 months ago

The failed competitor for Saturn V:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

mahirsaid• 2 months ago

excessive fuel delivery failure probable IMO. The direction and source of explosion seemed localized at first.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

SpaceX Starship also exploded during a static fire test on June 18, 2025.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-starship-upper-stage-exp...

infotainment• 2 months ago

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

Throwawayhahzoh• 2 months ago

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

trhway• 2 months ago

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 :)

Laremere2• 2 months ago

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

WalterBright2• 2 months ago

A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair.

My first thought is why wasn't the t-e moved away before launch?

regnerba• 2 months ago

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

gregoriol• 2 months ago

Katy Perry was not lost, the world can go on

ceejayoz8• 2 months ago

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/

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

I don’t see how it can do much transporting if it is part of launchpad.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

From the video, about 1kT is estimated.

tristanj3• 2 months ago

Impossible. The N1 rocket was far larger than New Glenn, and when it exploded, the explosion yield was below 1kT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear...

If you want to see an actual 1kT explosion, look at the 2020 Beirut disaster. That explosion was approximately 1.1kT and the damage / shockwave is clearly far greater than the New Glenn explosion.

RivieraKid• 2 months ago

Blue Origin's tortoise slow-and-steady approach to development ia increasingly looking stupid.

Aboutplants• 2 months ago

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!

panick21_9• 2 months ago

It has been stupid from the beginning. They literally have been getting billion of $ in free no strings attached money without any market reality to back it up. Their 'approach' is basically only even possible because they literally have a basically infinite money glitch.

That they make a big deal out of this is just embarrassing, they act like they are competing, but they really don't. They are hobby project for the richest man on the planet and they don't compete for investment $ with other companies like RocketLab.

No sane investor would put their money into Blue Origin and their 'slow and steady' approach.

formvoltron• 2 months ago

The timing of this so close to SpaceX IPO is seriously sus.

100ms2• 2 months ago

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

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

teraflop2• 2 months ago

That clip is fairly low-res (at least for me). Here's the higher-quality source from Spaceflight Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc

krunck• 2 months ago

The fish loved it: 0:29

superxpro122• 2 months ago

the clip is wild. There's definitely anomalies originating from the bottom.

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.

51Cards2• 2 months ago

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.

100ms2• 2 months ago

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

K0balt• 2 months ago

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.

cmiles82• 2 months ago

An unfortunate setback but rockets are hard.

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.

ponector2• 2 months ago

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

philipwhiuk2• 2 months ago

Both China and EU have pretty much the same capabilities for space exploration.

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.

cmiles82• 2 months ago

China is behind and making progress, but still hasn’t hit key milestone the US hit decades ago. The EU isn’t even close.

panick21_9• 1 month ago

This is incorrect. If you look at the total size of Space sector, US dominates. Total amount of launches and sats, the US dominates. Total size of spend on civilian research, NASA dominates. Total spent by DoD, US dominates.

Amount of starups and new company formation in space, US dominates.

SpaceX alone dominates so completely that almost everything else is noise. And if you remove SpaceX, the US still ahead in most categories.

javiramos• 2 months ago

Space launch is hard

Yizahi• 2 months ago

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?

ceejayoz8• 2 months ago

Neither Starship nor New Glenn has such a system, nor plans to add one.

NetMageSCW23• 2 months ago

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.

mr_toad6• 2 months ago

If New Glenn ever launched people they’d build the escape system into the crew module, much as SpaceX does with Crew Dragon.

redfloatplane• 2 months ago

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.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No.16L

eggplantemoji69• 2 months ago

Roman Roy looking at phone meme but Bezos face instead

giancarlostoro3• 2 months ago

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.

drob518• 2 months ago

Omelets and eggs and all that.

stevefan1999• 2 months ago

Let me quote a portion of lyrics from Still Alive:

But there's no sense crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake

dmccarty2829• 2 months ago

They sent me a rejection notice for my application on the same day. I'm sure that was the reason.

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

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