Blue Origin’s next New Glenn rocket explodes during static fire test on the launchpad
During a static fire test of the first stage tonight in preparation for the next launch scheduled for June 4), Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded just as the test began, destroying the first stage and much of the only launchpad the company has to launch this rocket.
The link above is cued to just before the explosion, shown in a screen capture to the right. BtB’s stringer Jay just sent me a link to a different video view, from farther away but is in some ways as spectacular. According to Blue Origin’s statement, all workers are accounted for, so fortunately there were no fatalities.
The rocket was to launch 48 Amazon Leo satellites. As those satellites were not on the rocket during this test, they are safe and can be launched elsewhere.
The failure will likely prevent any further New Glenn launches by Blue Origin for at least three to six months. Not only does the company have to determine and fix the cause of the failure, it will need to rebuild the launchpad. At best I expect the company will at best manage one test launch before the end of the year.
As for Amazon, this puts it in a big bind. It has only 302 satellites in orbit, but is required to have launched 1,616 by July, according to its FCC license. It has requested a waiver but the FCC has not yet responded. At the moment of the four companies it has hired to launch the satellites, two are now grounded:
- ULA’s Vulcan rocket: 39 launches [GROUNDED]
- Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket: 24 launches (reduced from 27) [GROUNDED]
- Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket: 18 launches (2 completed)
- SpaceX’s Falcon-9: 13 launches (3 completed)
- ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket: 8 launches (6 completed)
There is no timeline for when Vulcan and New Glenn will fly again. Arianespace hopes to do four to six more launches in ’26, but only one is an Amazon Leo launch, in June. ULA has six additional Atlas-5 rockets in stock, purchased by Boeing to launch its Starliner capsule to ISS. It is very possible a deal could be arranged with Boeing to switch some of those flights to Leo, since at present there are no plans to launch Starliner in the near future.
All in all, Amazon’s only remaining option is SpaceX. Of the ten unflown launches in the SpaceX contract, none are as yet scheduled. It is now likely Amazon will negotiate a deal with SpaceX to accelerate that schedule. While SpaceX’s own launch manifest is quite crowded (launching its own Starlink constellation), making such a deal difficult, the company has also demonstrated its willingness to help competitors. It launched OneWeb satellites when that company’s deal with the Russians fell through. And it quickly launched those first three Leo missions, faster than anyone else.
This also will impact NASA’s just announced unmanned lunar lander program. One mission planned for this year, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark-1 unmanned lander, was scheduled to launch on a New Glenn. In addition, a second New Glenn was set to launch NASA’s Viper rover next year. Neither will happen as scheduled.
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Man, what a mess. I had big hopes for Blue, and unless they’re uncommonly fast, it’ll be many months before we see another launch from them. Tomorrow is going to be an extremely rough day for the entire workforce.
3 to 6 months is highly optimistic. It took SpaceX over a year to rebuild LC 40 after the Amos explosion, and that wasn’t remotely on this scale.
Blue is in the process of bringing another pad online. They will surely end up concentrating their efforts on one or the other, so not only are they going to face a period with no pads at all, but the point at which they have a second online is surely also going to be pushed back.
There was already more demand for New Glenn than it reasonably had any hope of meeting, and this just makes it worse. Highly unfortunate.
David Eastman: As you must know by now, I am an optimist. I appreciate your dose of reality.
Wow!! That’s an impressive fireball!
As for return to flight? They’re not flying again this year. Maybe next year.
The hydrolox powered space shuttle had 1 launch failure out of 135.
Grok says: LH2 + LOX mixtures are less prone to violent condensed-phase detonations when they mix accidentally.
In comparison:
But LOX and liquid methane are highly miscible — they mix together very readily. If a tank or line breach occurs, the mixture can form a detonable “condensed phase” explosive with higher overpressures and blast yields than hydrolox or kerolox failures.
This is where Blue gets to show what it’s made of. But, let’s face it, Fate has tackled Blue in its own end zone. This will be neither quick nor easy to come back from. I hope Blue can recoup and regroup fast enough to launch another New Glenn this year, but I think the odds of that happening are no better than one in three. Among other knock-on effects of this mishap is some unknown degree of damage to Blue’s potential for participating in Artemis 3.
About the only good that might come from this “observation” is that we have now had a ground-level explosion of a large methalox booster with a known quantity of propellant aboard. This should provide some data useful for establishing realistic, as opposed to theoretical, safety zone radii for methalox rockets generally. Noting the distances to which bits of wreckage of given masses were thrown will be particularly useful.
This could be big trouble for the ULA Vulcan too if the root cause traces back to the BE4. From watching the video it appears that something let loose at the base of the rocket first (a single optical halo of a very intense pressure wave appears centered there and looks much more substantial than flame trench type pressure waves), flames shot up the side of the rocket, and then the entire tankage let go starting at the top of the booster (perhaps because at that point the hydrostatic shock blew the top open?).
I wonder if Blue was re-using even a single previously flown BE4 on this mission to get some initial data on that challenge?
In any event this was sad to see. I too had high hopes for Blue to get in the game as competition is what drives improvement., but this will be a substantial setback. The only silver lining is that SpaceX doesn’t seem to need much competition to motivate innovation and improvement. Elon has bred that into the entire company culture and consistently sets lofty but practical goals to keep moving forward even in the face of setbacks.
Bezos has discovered that selling books is a lot easier than launching rockets.
The damage to Blue Origin infrastructure could be even worse than we thought. NSF regular Woods170 says his contacts report extensive damage to the integration facility, including the other remaining New Glenn core:
“Just got word back from a Blue source. Internal cameras showed substantial damage happening to the interior of the integration facility, when the shockwave hit the building. And that includes damage to the other New Glenn booster that was in there.”
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63382.160#new
Aerial shots from at least one news helicopter does seem to show serious damage to the integration building.
Blue Origin have a lot of work ahead of them.
“This could be big trouble for the ULA Vulcan too if the root cause traces back to the BE4.”
Yeah, I had that thought, too. Both ULA and the FAA will need to be reassured by the investigation that the engines were not the cause of the explosion, before they try even a booster-less Vulcan launch.
Richard M,
Yes, a lot of work. Three shifts 24/7/365 for months at the very least.
From Dick Eagleson ” Noting the distances to which bits of wreckage of given masses were thrown will be particularly useful.”
I was amazed at the one piece of whatever it was flying off to the right in the second view. It was large enough to see from the camera vantagepoint so I suspect it was fairly large.
Second Item: Musk comment is I think appropriate: “Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly, Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard.”
And “Ad astra per aspera” through hardships to the stars
“Long Stick Goes Boom” – Krokus
In sports, no competitor enjoys circumstantial failure affecting a rival. It could happen to you. But, business is not sports. Market share is where it’s at. Engineering is not sports. It’s a controllable variable. Even so, there is more satisfaction in besting a rival according to the Friday Royal Navy toast: “To A Willing Foe and Sea Room!”
And now Jared should admit he was wrong in dismantling SLS infrastructure since neither member of the trillionaire boys club look capable of fielding landers any time soon.
No lander has been built for SLS. I don’t think one has even been designed.
“I was amazed at the one piece of whatever it was flying off to the right in the second view. It was large enough to see from the camera vantagepoint so I suspect it was fairly large.”
Common speculation is that this was probably a COPV. It looks like there was more than one of those visible, kinetically released by the explosion.
But I’m sure that in the coming weeks they’ll have crews covering the ground and the sea off shore for several miles around to identify rocket fragments like that in order to fully inform that coming estimate of safety zones for methane heavy lift rockets that Mr Eagleson was talking about up above.
Speaking of which . . . Given that there are five OTHER methalox medium and heavy lift American launch vehicles in advanced development (Starship, Nova, Terran R, Neutron) or coming into operation (Vulcan), one hopes that the full details of the accident investigation will be shared in the industry if it turns out that this event was caused in any way by a new failure mode involving methane propellant.
Richard M,
The COPV speculation is probably correct. That would also explain their speed and distance as a COPV contains high-pressure gas and is propelled by more than just the explosion.
You are correct that more rocket companies than just Blue may ultimately profit from whatever is learned during investigation of this explosion. Lots of questions. Let’s hope we get at least some preliminary answers fairly soon.
Jeff Wright,
No version of SLS was ever going to have any role in transporting a lander so I entirely fail to see the point of your remark.
“And now Jared should admit he was wrong in dismantling SLS infrastructure since neither member of the trillionaire boys club look capable of fielding landers any time soon.”
I hate to be the one to tell you this, Jeff, but SLS cannot land on the Moon, either.
My guess is that the next Blue Origin launch will be in the first half of 2028. Noting that SpaceX needed over a full year to rebuild SLC-40, and noting that SpaceX routinely commits to working 24 hour days and working individuals at 70 to 100 hours per week, I don’t see BO working at SpaceX’s pace. An additional consideration is that BO uses hydrolox for the second stage, so it will need to rebuild two separate fueling systems, and hydrogen is very tricky to deal with. There will also be temptations to “fix” their design, rather than rebuilding the launch pad as it existed before. And all of this will have to be tested before committing to a launch date. I don’t see them getting this done in time for 2027.
This needs to be looked at again:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324600856_Fly_Me_To_The_Moon_On_An_SLS_Block_II
While it took 15 months to rebuild SLC-40 after the Falcon 9 failure Sept 2016, it only took 3-4 months to rebuild Massey’s after the Ship 36 failure Jun 2025. You do it often enough, you get better at it. In this way, NewSpace is starting to emulate the aviation world, which is a positive sign.
Don’t discount Blue’s ability to learn from previous failures, and not just theirs. If they are working on another pad, there is also the possibility of a workaround like SpaceX figured out for Ship 37. Balancing that is they tend to move a lot slower than SpaceX.
Heck of a way to manufacture aluminum paperweights, though. Cheers –
Pictures of the damaged launch complex are beginning to show up, and wow! That’s an impressive level of destruction. As Richard M. says above, even the integration building and the booster inside were damaged.
Sadly, Blue Origin is going to be out of action for quite a while.
Some wag on a certain Canadian website suggested that Bezos now has rocket facilities identical to those owned by Maritime Launch Services in Nova Scotia.
Seriously, though, I was born before Sputnik, so I grew up watching rocketry activities on TV or reading about them. During the early days, mishaps like this often occurred. What happened last night reminds us that spaceflight is still a tough business.
Eric Berger, a few minutes ago: “Hearing that Blue Origin’s other New Glenn first stage booster, Never Tell Me The Odds, has been damaged. It was inside the nearby HIF facility.”
This doesn’t tell us what the damage is, or how easy it will be to fix, or if the booster will be a write-off. But it does underline what a long road Blue Origin has to travel to get back in business.
I’m keeping my hopes modest: There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but based on what I have seen and heard, I am keeping a little bit of hope alive that New Glenn can launch again in autumn of 2027. The tank farm looks mostly unscathed, after all.
Hello Jeff,
That’s swell, but all that paper does is make a fair argument that if you had a bazillion dollars lying around, you could rework SLS into a six engine booster that could co-manifest a small 10,000 kg lunar lander. But the lander doesn’t exist. And that’s where the problem is. If you cancel both of the HLS landers you dislike, you’ve got to come up with some other way to land men on the Moon. And, uh, find a way to pay for it.
SpaceX is a place of true believers, and Elon has been a political target for not long.
Blue is a slower pace, yet they lost an upper stage, a roof, and now this. There are those in labor who long hated Bezos…even before Elon became more outright political.
When something bad happens at SpaceX, it seems to be in isolation.
I suspect “economic civil disobedience.”
The Boeing EELV data theft was low-key, and ULA and BO tied at the hip.
SMH, Jeff.
Richard M, sounds like Eric is walking back that damage report.
”…even the integration building and the booster inside were damaged.”
In the interest of correcting my own record, Eric Berger is now reporting that this information appears to be false, meaning that the booster inside is not damaged.
What Blue Origin will do with it is a big question. They were in the process of switching over to the 9×4 variant, which uses vertical launch vehicle integration. Whether they rebuild LC-36A for the 7×2 variant or go straight to 9×4 remains to be seen.
“Blue is a slower pace, yet they lost an upper stage, a roof, and now this. There are those in labor who long hated Bezos…even before Elon became more outright political.”
I dislike Bezos, and I have concerns about his his rocket company is run, but I still hope for their success in all their endeavors. They’re the only other ones operating in some of these trade spaces.
I have the sense that others here share that outlook.
Richard M: I am of like mind about Blue Origin. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said both on the air and written here at Behind the Black my skepticism about the company’s pace of operations and lack of transparency. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve simultaneously said both on the air and written here at Behind the Black that I want them to succeed, and even top SpaceX at some point.
We need competition and many players. Blue Origjn has always been well placed to match SpaceX. That it hasn’t done so yet is frustratingly disappointing.
Robert wrote:
“”We need competition and many players. Blue Origjn has always been well placed to match SpaceX. That it hasn’t done so yet is frustratingly disappointing.””
I’m beginning to wonder if the real competition with SpaceX will come from SpaceX spinoffs, and/or former SpaceX staff that go off on their own.
When we see the thousands of SpaceX staff cheering together, I feel confident about the future. Many young people finding out about not just space, but how the private sector functions. Some will remain at SpaceX. Others will branch out.
Ronaldus Magnus: What you suggest is already happening. And it does bode well for the future.
My problem is that this “future” has not yet happened, even though I was promised it when I was a little tyke in the 1950s.
Jeff Wright,
It’s impractical and too expensive to be worth it. The barriers to using SLS as you wish are insuperable.
Richard M,
Yes. Effective American competiton to SpaceX is a good thing.
Maybe NASA can require/encourage/enable American rocket companies to share engineering knowledge, review each others designs? In this case, would a few SpaceX engineers, spending some time in the equivalent of a code review, been able to spot shortcomings in New Glenn which they have learned to avoid and mitigate?
As it is, Blue Origin will investigate, find the cause of the failure, spread the word to other engineers on their team and they never make that mistake again. What if that design/material knowledge is unknown to engineers working for other American rocket companies? Very wasteful from an American public policy perspective that other rockets will explode because lessons learned from this BE4 explosion are not shared with other American engineers.
Steve Richter wrote, “Maybe NASA can require/encourage/enable American rocket companies to share engineering knowledge, review each others designs?”
Steve, there is something called 5th amendment in the Bill of Rights that outright forbids this. This act by NASA would be taking, without due compensation. The knowledge each company develops is privately owned. They spent their money learning it. No one has the right to force them to share it with others — unless you happen to be a Chinese pseudo-company that the communists decided is valuable and confiscate for their own benefit.
Each company is responsible for itself, just as we each are. If they do a good job, the profits will flow to them because people will buy their product. If not, others will show up to grab their market share.
That’s how capitalism, free enterprise, and freedom works. By even suggesting the government “require” companies to share their proprietary data implies you don’t really believe in it.
I am reminded of Charles Lindbergh’s autobio of his flight. He was behind most of the other contenders. But over time the others either crashed or, when it looked light the flight from the other direction was going to succeed….. just disappeared (Nungesser and Coli). Lindbergh steadily kept at it. And finally was the first to succeed.
History may repeat itself here, to a small degree, in that other companies much further behind have a chance.
I’m not saying the analogy is perfect (SpaceX is way ahead), but we might see some other company move up.
Throwing my 2 cents into the part of the “wishin’ the past had been different” discussion.
I regret that the SLS Senate mafia hadn’t crushed all alternatives.
Falcon Heavy first flew in February 2018. It was tut tuted away by the usual group of legacy space proponents. Musk had not yet completely abandoned his Gray Dragon dreams (sigh).
Reusable FH is about $100 m to buy a mission. Expendable FH is about $150 m.
Here is my “Wishin’ the past had been different” part:
I really wish some consortium of billionaire space fanatics would have worked a 4 to 5 FH launch, EOR assembled/ integrated, Gray Dragon concept from 2018 to 2026. I think we’d be ready to go (or have already been) to the moon. This would not have prevented Musk and Bezos from pursuing their big rocket dreams.
I will admit that a little seasoning of courageous determination would have helped in this alternative universe. This seasoning would have overcome the insanity of not having a space suit to walk on the moon.
I will wait for the inevitable “SLS is the ONLY way” replies.
Only New Glenn is anywhere near a peer competitor to Starship. All the others—Neutron, Stoke, etc.—are Falcon 9 competitors. It would take any of them years to develop a super heavy LV.
“… By even suggesting the government “require” companies to share their proprietary data implies you don’t really believe in it. …”
Any engineering knowledge sharing requirements would be part of NASA contract requirements. Which I am sure would be legal since SpaceX is not required to bid on a NASA contract.
I know how successful the open source movement has been in accelerating improvements in commercial software. Which has created many $trillions in wealth in the last 2 years alone. In the same way, if rocket companies were voluntarily sharing their engineering knowledge they could all benefit exponentially.
And in a very practical way, the first massive explosion in earth orbit, caused by any one operator, is going to ruin the party for everyone.
If yer gonna go, go big
This “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is exactly what Elon Musk didn’t want to happen during the Starship flight test one. Instead, he ended up with a different kind of pad damage.
I haven’t said it in a while: The darndest things happen with space hardware. With three launches under its belt, this was an unexpected occurrence for New Glenn.
We often call them learning experiences or say that they build character and that we are glad that they happened, but we really aren’t. We would be so much happier if these things didn’t happen to us.
_____________
Jeff Wright,
You wrote: “This needs to be looked at again:”
Huh. Look at that. The paper shows that SLS needs a huge redesign and development of additional hardware in order to do a minimal version of an Apollo lunar landing. That ought to show the world that NASA can set up a sustainable lunar base at the South Pole region! As if a member of the trillionaire governments club is likely to do this before Blue Origin rebuilds itself or before Starship lands on the Moon without SLS. How long did it take NASA to build a much simpler Orion capsule?
“When something bad happens at SpaceX, it seems to be in isolation.”
Are you kidding? Whenever something bad happens at SpaceX, it is all over the news, including this news blog.
_________
Steve Richter,
You wrote, “Maybe NASA can require/encourage/enable American rocket companies to share engineering knowledge, review each others designs?”
Don’t worry, Steve. Engineers talk to each other, and this kind of information gets around. Not so much how to do it right, which is proprietary information — trade secrets — but what went wrong. We may never find out much detail, because the engineers talk amongst themselves, not the press.
“Any engineering knowledge sharing requirements would be part of NASA contract requirements.”
NewSpace companies are finding NASA less necessary, these days, and giving up proprietary information — trade secrets — is a big price to pay for a little cash in hand. If NASA wants to use commercial systems, they are going to have to let their vendors keep their secrets. Even a company wholly dependent upon NASA could find itself out of business by giving away its advantages over the competition. Not a good trade for the company, its employees, and its owners, who lose it all.
_________
Saville,
“Lindbergh steadily kept at it. And finally was the first to succeed.”
Sleep almost overcame him, and he got nasty icing on his wings. He almost disappeared himself. We were learning hard lessons then and are still learning, occasionally, that even aviation is harder than it looks.
__________
Doubting Thomas,
If we’re going to fall into the “wishin’ the past had been different” trap: I regret the von Braun — Disney dreams of the 1950s didn’t come true in the 1960s. The world would have been a different place if government had allowed private commercial space companies to operate in the 1960s, or the 1970s, or the 1980s, or …
Doubting Thomas,
That’s already happening here, on X, and on other sites. I haven’t encountered any of them yet who care about how much pressure that would put on NASA’s budget, how long it would delay returning to the lunar surface, and how limited it would be.
Steve Richter,
There are a few problems here: software is easy to replicate, distribution is similarly easy, and bugs are often small and can be worked on by single contributors. Hardware, especially space hardware, is expensive; knowledge is just as often tied up in manufacturing processes or organizational experience, and many lessons simply aren’t transferable because companies are using different approaches. ‘Benefit exponentially’ isn’t something easily adduced from the evidence. Plus, your point is undermined by the huge quantities of closed-source code and computing out there that companies use to derive a competitive edge.
There have already been explosions in space-multiple Briz-M upper stages, a Pegasus HAPS stage, and numerous collisions spreading debris, and yet we operate more spacecraft than ever. An explosion, depending on how it occurs, will increase risk but it won’t automatically be catastrophic. I saw an analysis the other day that said we could operate around 100,000 satellites in LEO without using active debris removal, and up to three million when we do. This claim of yours is a bit too hyperbolic.
mkent ‘The first reports from the battlefield are wrong’
Early last century, GE and Westinghouse cross-licensed each other to use the other’s patents, then brought the rest of the electrical industry in to form a consortium .Imagine if we had competing electrical systems.
The Pennsylvania Railroad had a Test Department that issued periodic bulletins that greatly influenced North American railroad practice .It had the only dynamometer in the Western Hemisphere where a full size locomotive could be run at full power (max recorded was roughly 6500 bhp). It was used to even test competitors’ locomotives. Again, test results were published
It was said that when the Altoona Test Plant was running, nobody in town got any sleep due to the thunderous exhaust all day and all night.
Just to be safe, I would like to see some ground penetrating radar check any lines below ground.
When the Demon Core knife/screwdriver event took place, you could get away with concentric circles and such…to gauge radiation exposure.
Explosions and seismic events (no tremors detected?) are more capricious, with damage seen farther away than one would initially suspect, and things closer in (seemingly) undamaged.
COL Beausaber,
We do, in a sense: both AC and DC are still in widespread use. We routinely convert between the two depending on what is more useful. That said, we can’t generalize so easy: there just aren’t the same set of standards in space as there is in electricity, and in small markets, such as what space presently is, it’s more likely proprietary edges that keep a business solvent.
What is more akin here is ephemeris data; you know whose spacecraft will be where at what time, and instead of having fragmented systems, everyone shares one (SpaceX explicitly tracks huge numbers of objects and shares it–it’s called Stargaze–for this purpose). Also navigation methods, communications frequencies, docking standards, and in the future, refueling interfaces. Or, to a degree, SpaceX’s Plug and Plaser communications hardware. But space has numerous restrictions on it that trains and the electrical industry do not–chief among them security and classification controls imposed by the federal government. That also limits how much sharing can be done.
Edward – “Von Braun — Disney dreams of the 1950s”
That is some heavy duty wishing there my friend. Maybe if we could get 10 or 15 readers on this site to do some heavy duty series wishing. It would be an entirely different world.
Maybe then I could have taken possession of my acre of land in Celestial Acres in the Sea of Tranquility. I still have the deed that I bought at Kennedy Space Center Visitors Center in 1964.
To Edward,
I know that SpaceX failures are all over the news
When I say SpaceX failures are in isolation, I mean that Elon’s setbacks seem to be one at a time, not all at once as seems to be the case with Blue Origin.
We saw the Falcon explosion, we saw one at a test stand–but not within a few days.
Ariane blew up because someone left a rag in the rocket.
If I were to do that…I’d have two rags…one to leave behind, and pull out the other…just to show cameras “look! I still have the rag.
In No Country for Old Men, we saw one transponder hidden in One dollar bill stacks…the bigger bills only at the top (cause of the shoot-out?)
For all we know, a second transponder could have been left behind. Guy finds one easily, then lets his guard down thinking he had the bug removed, only for a second, better hidden bug to give his position away.
Richard M and Robert Zimmerman,
Add me to the list of those who wish Blue had been more aggressive historically and wants to see them come back from its latest reverses soon and in good order. I have my doubts that Blue will ever be a serious competitor to SpaceX, but having it around is definitely preferable to not having it around.
Steve Richter,
In addition to ITAR considerations there are all sorts of other reasons “peer review” of rocket engineering is not terribly practical. Not least of these are the wide variety of propellant-oxidizer combos represented across the industry and the even larger numbers of engine cycles represented. If someone working intimately with a given type of rocket engine manages to overlook what turns out to be a serious issue, how likely is it that some other engineer who has been working on engines using a different basic cycle and/or propellant combo would be likely to catch the oversight?
Then, of course, there are the numerous practical considerations such as the wide geographical distribution of companies doing rocket work – engineers in WA and TX can’t exactly stop by one another’s places of employment quickly or conveniently. And if rocket engineers are spending significant time in “peer review” meetings and concomitant report-writing, etc., that all takes away from getting actual rocket engineering done.
Your suggested cure is worse than the disease. Development of high-energy mechanical systems carries inherent risks. As the late, great Robert A. Heinlein entitled one of his stories, ‘Blow-ups Happen.’
COL Beausabre,
Good point about electricity standards. But even those are hardly universal. North America runs on 110-120V 60 Hz AC. Much of the rest of the world runs on 220-240 V 50 Hz AC. There isn’t any universal railroad track gauge either – there’s Russian standard and Rest of the World standard. And all high-speed railroads use special trackbeds because the “standard” ones can’t withstand the high speed.
Hello Colonel B,
This “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is exactly what Elon Musk didn’t want to happen during the Starship flight test one. Instead, he ended up with a different kind of pad damage.
I haven’t said it in a while: The darndest things happen with space hardware. With three launches under its belt, this was an unexpected occurrence for New Glenn.
We often call them learning experiences or say that they build character and that we are glad that they happened, but we really aren’t. We would be so much happier if these things didn’t happen to us.
There are a lot of thoughtful comments in this thread, but I think this one hits the hardest. At least for me.
Losing a rocket is always, in some basic sense, *bad*, no matter how much you learn from its failure; losing a rocket that’s moving into operational status is worse. Losing a rocket in such a way that you also lose a very expensive launch pad is . . . well, that’s super bad. Elon has inadvertently blown up a whole lot of hardware over the years, but he is certainly thankful that it has cost him only SLC-40 (its first, low budget iteration) and one static fire stand. Those were bad enough as it was.
Blue Origin and New Glenn will be better for this, but I can’t think there’s a man or woman there that would not have preferred to learn the lessons they are in the process of learning right now in a much less expensive and time-consuming way.
In case y’all didn’t hear about it, Jared Isaacman and some senior NASA engineers went down to SLC-36 yesterday to look at the damage and talk to the BO leadership, followed by a pep talk to Blue Origin staff. “We go where we need to be, and today that was @NASAKennedy. … There is a lot of work to do, but this is exactly why people choose careers in aerospace, whether at NASA, Blue Origin, or across the industry. The talent in this field thrives under pressure and performs at its best when solving the toughest problems.”
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2060523381699612973
I thought that was a good thing, and I’m struggling to imagine many previous NASA administrators doing anything like that, let alone doing it as effectively. The notion that Isaacman is a supine Elon Musk Mini-Me is fading fast everywhere but the most deranged online fever swamps.
Hello Patrick,
Richard M, sounds like Eric is walking back that damage report.
Yeah, I saw that last night. I do not think Eric made that up – whatever his flaws, that is not one of them – but just relied on what an apparently over-excited source at Blue Origin was telling him, probably just based on some fuzzy interior camera footage. Whoever it was ought to have waited until teams could do a closer inspection of the booster!
Didn’t keep him from getting beat up in the replies, or in the usual precincts at Reddit. But that is par for the course.
Anyway, this is a rare bit of good news for Blue Origin, if true. It’s not like this rocket (“Never Tell Me The Odds”) is gonna fly as-is anyway, since whatever redesigns of the BE-4 and/or its propulsion plumbing they come up with to deal with the flaw this RUD revealed will require re-working this booster, too. Still, at worst, it can serve as an intact test article as they work through this problem, if nothing else, and that’s better than a giant pile of scrap metal. They have enough of that to go around as it is.
Steve R suggests NASA force the commercial companies to share engineering information.
Responses in opposition are predictable and correct.
There may be another, even more important reason: In this type of development, the most important knowledge is the knowledge that a new approach works, something you see during the test. Difficult to hide. Sharing engineering data only ensures everyone travels the same path, which is not what we want to do, I think. Cheers –
“… Responses in opposition are predictable and correct. …”
The responses may be predictable, but I do not think they are correct. Yeah, competition is pushing progress and investment. But judging from this failure of Blue Origin, after many years of effort, it is not producing the intended results. Falcon 9 has been operational for 16 years. Still no credible competitor. Now with Starship scheduled to be refueling in orbit by the end of the year, the SpaceX advantage gap will be exponentially greater.
Steve,
It’s not enough to just look at a gap, but we also need to consider why the gap exists. The incumbents—ULA, Mitsubishi, Arianespace, Roscosmos—either dismissed reuse, didn’t have the money for it anyway, or simply didn’t care. I think it’s a bit early to say that New Glenn isn’t producing the intended results; by its tenth flight we’ll have a much better idea. Falcon 1 suffered three failures in a row before it successfully flew. Other rockets—Electron, Ariane 5, the Soviets’ N-1–suffered failures in the early flights, and there are also rockets that flew dozens of times and then experienced failure, including Falcon 9.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin, but especially SpaceX, have trained a new generation of engineers that have gone on to start their own companies. Stoke, Relativity, Firefly, and Sagittarius Logistics were all founded in whole or in part by former employees of those two firms, and they’re designing reusable vehicles. None of them have the resources of SpaceX or Blue, but we should see roughly half a dozen credible competitors by 2030. That sounds about right in terms of one company proving an approach works versus competitors emerging, when I think about historical examples (Microsoft, Google, and Intel, to name three).
Can you name specific ways in which SpaceX could help Blue Origin that haven’t already been answered by other posters above?
It sounds therefore like you are suggesting that because SpaceX is so far ahead, we should confiscate its designs and proprietary hardware and distribute it others.
Competition and freedom will solve this problem. Your solution will only make it worse. As has now been proven over and over and over and over and over again in the past 250 years.
The effect that this has on the Artemis project demonstrates how important it is that we have a much stronger space industry.
We are no longer dependent upon the OldSpace companies. They became too dependent upon the cost-plus procurement process. Rapid development and high efficiency is discouraged under this process, and they have learned the wrong lessons, these past many decades. Unlike Apollo, the OldSpace companies are not getting Artemis contracts, and Boeing has become so incompetent that NASA won’t even take bids or proposals from them. I keep wondering whether the problems with Dream Chaser — whatever they may be — are due to Sierra Space’s design or due to Lockheed Martin’s manufacturing.
NewSpace has its problems with its space innovations, but we are also watching OldSpace having problems, too. Northrup Grumman can’t figure out how to make a reliable solid rocket booster and Boeing cannot make a functional manned spacecraft. Come to think of it, neither of those is particularly innovative.
There are not yet many strong NewSpace companies, performing business like America did so successfully before WWII. SpaceX is clearly the strongest. Rocket Lab is also strong. We had once counted upon Bigelow to supply space stations (habitats), but they disappeared with the advent of the Wuhan flu (although the delay in commercial manned space may have had more to do with the demise than the shutdown of America’s “non-essential” businesses). We are now counting upon Blue Origin to be a major part of returning to the Moon, which Blue emphasized as a goal, a decade ago, with the announcement of their proposed lunar lander.
Space is hard. It always has been. Because it is hard, fifteen years ago NewSpace had been dismissed as unable to handle it. Kistler being unable to meet the first COTS milestone — find outside investors — was seen as evidence of this, but the milestone was practically a self fulfilling prophecy, few investors were willing to invest in an industry that so many were dismissing as unqualified, and had little to do with space being hard.
________
Steve Richter wrote: “I know how successful the open source movement has been in accelerating improvements in commercial software. Which has created many $trillions in wealth in the last 2 years alone. In the same way, if rocket companies were voluntarily sharing their engineering knowledge they could all benefit exponentially”
Sharing hardware, like sharing software, reduces innovations, as agimarc said. In addition, there are many different circumstances to overcome in space, and we have many different solutions; we need those different solutions in order to address specific situations. It is why there are so many fuel/oxidizer combinations, different engine types (including liquid, solid, and hybrid), and cetera. And that is just the propulsion side.
________
COL Beausabre wrote: “‘The first reports from the battlefield are wrong’”
Eric Berger’s early report of damage to the other New Glenn booster has had to be retracted, but not before others used that report to say that it had been destroyed.
________
Nate P wrote: “… we can’t generalize so easy: there just aren’t the same set of standards in space as there is in electricity, and in small markets, such as what space presently is, it’s more likely proprietary edges that keep a business solvent.”
Indeed, Commercial manned space is not yet regulated — by law — so that the commercial companies can figure out best practices so that regulation makes sense. Right now, even the government has no idea how to do things “right.” All they know is how it is done now, and that lack of knowledge has killed many astronauts.
From a 2011 video, as the Shuttle was being decommissioned:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXbdJ3kyVyU (The Deal, 7 minutes)
3:38: “The reason that we have cheap, affordable, and safe air transportation today and no space transportation whatsoever is simply because we were serious about air travel, serious enough to pay the price in blood and money, and we’re not serious about space. My friend and noted space expert Rand Sinberg summed it up perfectly when he said ‘we’ll know we’re serious about space travel when we have entire cemeteries full of dead astronauts who lost their lives showing us how to do it right,’ just like Gann’s generation did. Because that’s the deal. That’s what it costs.”
4:17: “As with civil aviation, we learned from these events, that wishful thinking is a poor substitute for good engineering. So we went back and fixed the engineering, but we lost the stomach for it, because we didn’t go anywhere or do anything new. Part of the deal, you see, is that you pay in blood for progress. If there’s no progress, what’s the point?”
Fortunately, Blue Origin knew enough to keep everyone away from this test, so no one got hurt. We learned from other rocket explosions that a fueled rocket is dangerous, such as the Nedelin catastrophe. In 2003, Brazil learned that even solid rocket motors are dangerous. That was the deal.
It took the North American aviation industry a century to become very safe, and that may have been because the FAA took over safety too early, in the 1920s, shortly after barnstormers started taking on passengers, incrementally fixing problems instead of inventing a safe system — which is what the North American airlines did, starting around 1980.
Spaceflight is even harder than aviation. The rocket equation makes it more difficult to reach; it is far harder to descend to a landing if there is a problem; and it takes more time to reach the safety of earth.
__________
Robert Zimmerman,
When I tried to post this comment this morning, I got the message that Behind the Black was undergoing maintenance. Now that it has posted, the maintenance is complete. Congratulations. You were right that there aren’t dramatic changes, but I see some differences, such as the year – by – year archives as well as the thumbs up/down and reply buttons on each comment.
Edward: Comments are now “nested,” in that if you reply to a specific person’s comment, it forms a thread to that comment.
Also, there is now a like/not-like button for each post.
I see an advantage to nested comments. It is easier to keep one discussion or one topic together. The downside is that instead of going to the last comment I read the day(s) before, I have to search from the beginning of the comments thread for new comments. Painful for long discussion threads like this one, but maybe the advantage is greater than the disadvantage.
To violate the nesting paradigm on the first day: I’m not one to push the like or dislike buttons or pay attention to their counts, so this is not really an improvement I care about. On the other hand, it is nice that the dislikes are not disabled, as many sites did after Biden posts and videos got a lot of dislikes.
On the third hand, the gripping hand: like Biden, we might feel bad if our comments receive a lot of dislikes. Having violated the nesting paradigm, I guess I should expect dislikes for this reply. I haven’t hit the “Post Comment” button yet, and I’m already feeling bad.
I don’t think this can be emphasized enough. Should we race ahead blindly and make foolish mistakes that kill people, such as what happened with the Shuttle? No. But the intense fear of losing anyone for any reason is not healthy either. In far-better understood environments we’ve lost many more people than have been to space, but because we appreciate their value they aren’t crippling. A military aviator dies testing a new high-performance aircraft? That’s sad, yes: name a street after him and move on. It is not callous to say we have to let people die, because that includes letting them make their own decisions about how much risk they’re willing to accept. People (and companies, and countries) that can accept more risk often do better than those who move overly cautiously and lack the resilience to press forward.
Nice boom
Sorry it will obviously set them back quite a bit.
I just hope that they collected enough good data to fix this in the future. It would be a set back if they gained nothing from this.
Blast comparison
https://x.com/charlesboyer/status/2060364186119479685
No mention of Antares?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Orb-3
Seismic readings
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000spdd/executive
Of note
https://spacenews.com/agencies-studying-safety-issues-of-lox-methane-launch-vehicles/
Scuttlebutt as to the problem
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63382.msg2793726#msg2793726
Methalox can detonate, not just deflagrate.
“… It sounds therefore like you are suggesting that because SpaceX is so far ahead, we should confiscate its designs and proprietary hardware and distribute it others.
Competition and freedom will solve this problem. Your solution will only make it worse. As has now been proven over and over and over and over and over again in the past 250 years. …”
cut it out Bob. I said nothing about government confiscation.. Grok estimates it would cost another rocket company $10 Billion to commercially compete with Falcon 9. And $30B to develop a functioning Starship program. Which is not over the top unachievable in terms of funding. So there has to be something else that is preventing the competition from achieving parity.
Maybe the ITAR regulations need to be reworked? Consider that ITAR actually blocks SpaceX from setting up a full partnership with engineering programs of American universities. Leaving SpaceX out of it, because of ITAR, NASA itself would not be allowed to heavily fund cutting edge rocket engineering study in American universities. Where the students and professors would have the resources to build a Falcon 9 capable rocket, complete with launch facilities and fuel tank farms.
Steve Richter: Maybe I am over reacting, but this discussion began with this question by you:
So you did suggest government coercion, despite your denial. You might not have ever imagined it would go very far, but then, that’s how these things always go. I am simply eliminating the long slide to tyranny and noting the final result.
Your suggestion about ITAR however is very interesting. I don’t think that would help, because ITAR only places limits on work outside the U.S. It does nothing to block anyone from partnering whit American universities, as you state. You are, however, now working in a more useful direction.
New American companies face heavy costs due to the modern regulatory environment. It is certainly something that is holding many Americans back. The best (like SpaceX) can barrel through and succeed, but I think it does contribute in “preventing the competition from parity,” as you say.
Trump has done a good job of easing these issues somewhat, but after a century of adding regulations continuously, he has only touched the surface.
Steve,
Grok is wrong. SpaceX spent roughly $1.5-$2 billion to get Falcon 9 to a partially reusable state. Even if you assume that a competitor would have double the costs, that still less than half what the AI says. It’s a useful tool, but you shouldn’t rely on it so heavily and take what it says uncritically. Incidentally, Neutron is a competitor to Falcon 9, and has cost less than $500 million to develop to date. It will fly somewhere around the end of this year or early next. Competitors do not need perfect parity, they just need to offer reasonable costs that fit customer needs. Even Falcon 9 doesn’t have parity—New Glenn, despite costing more per flight, can be cheaper than Falcon 9 at scale because it has a larger volume and mass to orbit. Amazon Leo is a good example of this—Falcon 9 can carry 24 satellites per launch, while New Glenn can carry 48.
I noted to you elsewhere that multiple reusable rockets are coming online by 2030–surely that is sufficiently quick, no?
Steve,
“Grok estimates it would cost another rocket company $10 Billion to commercially compete with Falcon 9. And $30B to develop a functioning Starship program.”
What you suggest is for me to spend huge sums of money and time doing research and development for a new technology, but then my competitors get to use it for free. Worse, they can undercut my bids, because I have to recover the money spent — plus, I spent time on development that could have gone toward using someone else’s innovations and patents to undercut him.. Your suggestion is a lose, lose, lose proposition. I lose, because I go out of business and end up in debt. The government loses, because a mediocre, uncreative idiot gets a contract he is incapable of fulfilling, as he does not have the wherewithal to overcome a challenge. The populace loses, because no one is willing to put their time and money in innovating and developing the future, because they will be put out of business, too, by the know-nothings.
This isn’t like software, where someone puts in a couple of hours during his spare time, yet he earns his living at another software job, where the software that he writes is proprietary. This is mechanical and electrical engineering, which takes weeks or months to innovate. Years, when it comes to whole rockets and launch pads, as we have seen with Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan, Neutron, Nova, Electron, Falcon Heavy, SLS and its Orion spacecraft, and many others. Come to think of it, Dragon and Starliner both took years to develop, where Crew Dragon was derived from an existing capsule, and Starliner is little more than a larger version of Apollo. Space is hard. Software is easy.
But, no. You think everyone has to share their work in order for us to advance quicker.
I think this socialist/marxist way of doing things will work out almost as well as the Mayflower Compact in the Plymouth colony or the disaster they made out of Jamestown. Technological advancement would come to a screeching halt as the companies that put in all the work and spend all the research and development money realize that they are chumps who lose the contracts to those who freeload off their hard learned discoveries. It is why Communist China has to steal technology from everyone else; too few people there are willing to put much effort into innovation that does not reward them.
When we separate effort from reward, people stop putting in the effort. All because a few hobbyists each put a few hours into a group project and called it the way that things should be. The avocation does not translate into a vocation quite that well.
Even those group software projects, for minimal individual effort, give the contributors something that they can use themselves — high reward for little effort.
The Russian space industry is one conglomerate that shares knowledge, but it is collapsing under corruption, incompetence, and inferior quality. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union set up competitive space organizations in competition as to which one’s knowledge and technology would be used, and they did well for the decade that they did it that way. As they consolidated or closed competing groups, their space industry degraded into the mess that it is today.
“Which is not over the top unachievable in terms of funding. So there has to be something else that is preventing the competition from achieving parity.”
Yes, there is. For most of the past decade, most space organizations continued with the assumption that reusable boosters was a fool’s errand. It didn’t help that Rocket Lab discovered that reusable boosters for small rockets did not translate into better economics, so many assumed that SpaceX was losing money and hiding it well. I heard that here on Behind The Black just last year.
Lack of trying to reach parity is why no one has yet reached parity. Blue Origin spent a decade doing New Glenn slowly. ULA has yet to try. Rocket Lab has only been working on Neutron for half a decade. Stoke Space is also only half a decade into Nova development. Europe foolishly decided Ariane 6 should not be reusable. The Chinese are making good progress, also after half a decade, but they are using stolen technology. And India only recently thought about reusability.
Cost and funding were not the prevention. Attitude and the lack of will to do it prevented anyone from reaching parity, yet.
Edward: Agree with you except for one minor historical correction. While the Puritans did make the mistake initially to try a collectivist/socialist approach to ownership and farming, an effort that failed spectacularly, this decision was unrelated to the Mayflower Compact. The purpose of that compact was a moral contract between the colonists to behave properly to each other, not a contract imposing socialism. The socialist approach was forced on them due to the financial burdens imposed on them to pay for their transport. When it didn’t work, the improvised capitalism, and suddenly they could pay their bills.
I stand corrected.
The socialist approach in Plymouth was that everyone would work hard, and at the end of seven years all the goods and property would be divided evenly among the people. Steve Richter recommends a similar approach with intellectual property, except for the seven year wait.
The result was that some people didn’t work hard at all, because the reward was the same whether or not they contributed. Incentives disappeared. The hard workers complained (if I may ignore all the starvation and disease that resulted from not enough productivity), and Governor Bradford changed to a merit-based free-market system, where workers owned what they produced and could trade for other products. Suddenly, the lazy ones were industrious, and the colony prospered so much that they invited the neighboring Indians over for a three day feast.
This “selfish” way of doing things actually brings prosperity to all, and is a fundamental principle of the United States, bringing prosperity to the entire country.
This philosophy and method are why commercial space is kicking government space’s butt. Sharing may be caring, but it does not get the job done, because the recipient has to contribute, too. Marxism enhances the lazy nature of humanity, but the free market enhances the selfish nature. In order to selfishly prosper, you have to produce things that benefit others so that they will trade what they have and you don’t have for what you have and they don’t. Working smarter makes the smart worker more prosperous, and is why SpaceX is in the lead and why those who were not quick to work smart are only now catching up.